An Encore: Johnny Cash's Poems Set to Music

At the New York Times, Bill Friskics-Warren reports on a new project co-produced by Johnny Cash's son, John Carter Cash, setting the legendary performer's recently published poetry to music. "By turns flinty and tender, devotional and irreverent, haunted and enraptured, Cash’s poems — which date back to the 1940s — proved as multifaceted and emotionally far-reaching as the man himself," Friskics-Warren explains. Let's pick up there: 

“Johnny Cash: Forever Words,” due Friday from Sony Legacy, gives his verses even broader expression, enlisting a circle of kindred spirits, including John Mellencamp, T Bone Burnett, Kacey Musgraves and Cash’s daughter, Rosanne, to set a selection of them to music.

The arrangements vary, from ambient electronica and Appalachian Gothic to contemporary torch song and bluegrass gospel, with scarcely a hint of Cash’s trademark freight-train rhythms. Reverberating throughout the album’s 16 tracks, nevertheless, is the unmistakable voice of the Man in Black.

Cash’s son, John Carter Cash, served as one of the producers for the project, along with Steve Berkowitz, who works with Sony. For Mr. Cash, hearing his father’s words come alive to music written by others was tantamount to communicating and having the chance to collaborate with him again.

“When the book of poems came out I heard melodies,” said Mr. Cash, talking about the impetus for the project by phone from London while he was on a promotional tour there last month.

“My father wasn’t here to sing those melodies, but they were there. I heard his voice again — that, and I believed there were artists out there who loved him who could do his words justice.”

Read more at the New York Times.