Although technically released to co-incide with the Twentieth Century Fox film "Walk The Line" starring Joaquin Phoenix, "Ring Of Fire: The Legend Of Johnny Cash" is still as good a crucial career overview/ single disc greatest hits of The Man In Black as you're liable to find.
Of course, 21 tracks is barely enough to even begin scratching the surface of JOHNNY CASH'S remarkable career, but as both a great introduction for the curious and a handy pocket compendium for the established fan, it does the job pretty well. It begins with Cash under the auspices of Sam Phillips in Sun's legendary Sun Studios in 1955 and ends merely months before death finally called time on one of the great maverick characters of all time late in 2003.
The earliest songs are of course the Sam Phillips-produced hits like "Cry! Cry! Cry!" and "Hey Porter." These songs - and the inevitable, country-tinged shuffle "I Walk The Line" - show Cash's sparse, 'boom chacka boom' rockabilly sound already in place and finds him delivering the songs with that familiar weatherbeaten baritone already perfected. Phillips' production is crackly, primitive and still as exciting as hell, though a little more sophistication is creeping in by the time Cowboy Jack Clement takes over to produce Cash a couple of years later. Clement would go on to produce Townes Van Zandt's debut album "For The Sake Of The Song" ten years down the line and he also inspires Cash and his Tennessee Three into fine performances on the lowdown, percussive and bluesy "Big River" and "Guess Things Happen That Way" (1958) where on the latter Cash and co attempt (very effectively) a kind of midwest forerunner of the Dion & The Belmonts doo-wop sound.
By the time the '60s rolled round, Cash was commercial hot property, and despite an addiction to pills which almost drove him to destruction, this would arguably prove to be his defining decade. "Ring Of Fire" (1963), of course, is so deeply entrenched in the public domain it's hard to imagine a world before it was there, but its' delicious, sultry Mariachi trumpets still sound box fresh, and Cash's duet with new wife June Carter on "Jackson" (1967) remains both playful and definitive. Nonetheless, it'll probably be Cash's prison concerts at the notorious San Quentin jail at the tail end of the 1960s that will always fuel his legacy the most, and from the resulting live album we get both "A Boy Named Sue" (a novelty, sure, but a darn good one) and the inevitable "San Quentin", and yes, the caged redneck atmosphere is as tangible as ever.
It was 1971's "Man In Black", of course, that defined Cash's outsider image and champion of the underdog and the song itself is still vivid and moving, not least when Cash sings "I wear the black for the poor and beaten down/ livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town". Sure it's self-mythologising as hell, but the fact Cash actually meant it still makes all the difference. By 1972's "A Thing Called Love", the arrangements (strings, larger group sound, backing vocals) were getting bigger, but the essence of the gritty Cash railroad sound remains, and - despite a difficult decade during the 1980s - '85s "Highwayman" found Cash joining forces with Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson and surviving the worst excesses of the decade's over-production war crimes.
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Most surviving artists from the 1950s were commercially spent long before the 1990s rolled around, but thanks to some strategic collaborations, the final quarter of Cash's career found him undergoing a remarkable critical and commercial reappraisal and the last seven tracks from "Ring Of Fire" are given over to these key years. At the time, 1993's "The Wanderer" with U2 sounded like an oddity, but with hindsight now makes perfect sense. The juddery electronic rockabilly backing suits Cash to a T, and while Bono's lyrics at times sound like they'd be better suited to Brett Anderson (e.g: "I went out walking under the atomic sky") the outlaw storyboard and Cash-friendly themes (religion, corruption, God, spirituality) are bang on and there's great little touches like The Edge's cute little Luther Perkins-style baritone guitar bit.
The remainder of the album is given to Cash's American Recordings years with producer Rick Rubin at the helm and again it's difficult to dispute the tracklisting, not least the seismic versions of Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage" and Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus." The former is Cash in downhome acoustic mode, but while the second half of the tune turns up the amps it never sounds remotely unnecessary. "Personal Jesus", meanwhile, is Cash re-inventing Martin Gore's electro-bottleneck suggestiveness into a redemptive, sidewinder blues all his own.
Staggering stuff, but arguably topped by Cash's farewell to this wicked world, his heartbreaking version of - all people - Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt." Already a wracked and tortured song dealing with heroin addiction, Cash's beyond-moving re-interpretation won him an award for the harrowing accompanying video and the sound of a man over seventy years singing the line "everyone I know goes away in the end" at around the time his wife June died shows just how pathetic the dear old NME'S ageist attitude towards cutting edge music really is.
So there you have it. Sure, "Ring Of Fire"s tracklisting will no doubt be the cause of debate in 'definitive' terms (and, yes, the likes of "Orange Blossom Special", "Wanted Man", the live version of "Folsom Prison Blues" etc. etc. are absent), but trying to boil the best part of 50 years down to a paltry 21 tracks is nigh-on impossible in anyone's language, so be content with what you have here.
Besides, everyone needs a stocking filler request around now and with that in mind "Ring Of Fire: The Legend Of Johnny Cash" should be at the top of the list.
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