Divine or not, a seizure's a seizure.

Johnny Cash- Tennessee Flat-Top Box

This has turned out being my favorite song for those random moments of downtime this summer.  It’s just too easy to pick up a guitar and rip into it.  Playing that little Luther Perkins solo is downright addictive.

Rosanne Cash and Johnny Cash- September When It Comes

I’ve always liked Rosanne Cash a lot.  She has so much soul, which is maybe the result of being the daughter of an icon, for better or for worse.

Johnny Cash- Tiger Whitehead  

It’s not the sort of thing I’d play at a party, but Johnny Cash’s Personal File recordings are a genuine treasure.  For one thing, it’s a chance to hear Cash play solo acoustic in the early 70’s, with his voice at its peak.  However, I’m most enamored with having a chance to hear this side of a legend, and to find that in his private moments, Cash was very much like the man who played in public: insightful, earnest, sympathetic, and a lover of music.

Johnny Cash- Ghost Riders in the Sky

Here’s a ghost story for Halloween, told by the baddest man of them all.

Fun tip:  try to sing your school’s alma mater to this tune.  It always works.

Johnny Cash- Hard Times

This is one of my mini-rants.  Be forewarned.

I’m not really much of a dreamer, which is downright deadly if you’re in my profession and situation.  But flights of fancy are not my thing; on those occasions when I’ve deceived myself, the deception has been an honest mistake.

Therefore, I’m not sitting here pretending that the world (read: economy, politics, culture) is in a wonderful and beautiful place right now.  I am, however, sick to death of people obsessing over it, as if we, the human inhabitants of the Earth in the 21st century AD, somehow invented a new form of misery.

Yes, yes, I get it: the world is going to Hell, and it’s all because we’re lazy and greedy and socialists and uneducated and full of ourselves.  People can’t find jobs anymore, the Chinese are preparing to eat the West alive (perhaps literally), and (insert politician here) isn’t doing a damn thing about it.

I’m not the most stoic person you’ll probably never meet, but please, can we, as a species, get over this already?  Times like these come and go, and we keep going.  It’s happened before, and it will happen again. 

Exhibit number one, as heard above: Stephen Foster.  A lot is made of the bliss of simpler times, and of course it’s nonsense.  His songs tell about a country at once bound and torn apart by the extensive horizons within it.  People are always traveling great distances with optimism and regret in Foster’s music, and they both crave the future and fear the loss of the past.  And through it all, life’s small joys and daily hardships are wound into the narrative.

When you get rid of the obnoxious minstrel show sheen that was added to the songs, and strip them down to their core essence, you get the story of a place and a people forever distraught from the anxiety of changing times.  Even though it’s been a century and a half of changes since he wrote this song, that place and those people are still here, still living and dying as always, in a world that changes faster than we’d like.

Ray Charles- Ring of Fire

Johnny Cash- The First Time

Spun this yesterday for my best friend’s wedding, as it’s the song they chose for their first dance.  It struck me as a strangely intense choice at first, but in the end, I can’t imagine a better start.  Salud.

Johnny Cash- Wichita Lineman

This is a beautiful outtake from Cash’s Unearthed boxed set.  There’s a ton of amazing tracks in the set, which is compiled from studio takes from his American Recording sessions with Rick Rubin.  There are collaborations with Joe Strummer, the Chili Peppers, Fiona Apple, and lots of others.  This cover always stands out for me, though.  It was Glen Campbells’s hit, but so many have taken a shot at covering it.  Johnny’s take is as beautiful and heart-aching as any I’ve ever heard.