Johnny Cash – Ring Of Fire: The Legend

I’ve never been into country music. I haven’t heard enough of it to form an active dislike: I’ve just never really gone near it, mainly because to an outsider – ie an English city dweller - a lot of it seems sentimental and conservative. But a couple of weeks ago I was in a record shop and I heard Johnny Cash’s “San Quentin”, recorded live at the prison, and I had to hear more.

This collection, released a few years ago around the time of the biopic “I Walk the Line”, crams the whole of Cash’s recording career, from the mid-Fifties to his death in 2003, into a single CD. It’s a heroic endeavour (at least four times as heroic as trying to fit 25 years of The Fall onto two disks) and as a basic introduction to Johnny Cash it succeeds enormously.

The hardest thing about listening to Cash’s music, at least the earlier material, is that it is deceptively easy. That is, it doesn’t seem difficult (which is why country music is – fairly or unfairly – bracketed with “easy listening” in the UK. So it’s easy to underestimate the depth of songs like “I Walk The Line”, which isn’t (as it first seems) just a about a bloke saying he is going to behave himself, but about the redemptive power of love.

The zenith of this collection is the amazing “San Quentin”. It has to be listened to rather than described, so I’m not going to try.

Some of the stuff that follows is a bit disappointing: the mawkish “Man In Black” verges on self-parody, and “The Highwayman” (with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson – Cash draws the short straw and gets the daft verse about the spaceman) is a mistake. After that I wasn’t expecting the dark late songs to be very good, but they were, especially the covers of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”.

If any country fans out there have got any suggestions for further listening I’ll be glad to consider them. Meanwhile, I’ll be buying or borrowing copies of the San Quentin and Folsom concert albums. Or stealing them...