Johnny Cash American V: A Hundred Highways CD

Personnel: Jonny Polonsky, Matt Sweeney, Mike Campbell , Pat McLaughlin, Randy Scruggs, Smokey Hormel (guitar); Benmont Tench (piano, harpsichord, organ).
Additional personnel: Mark Howard, Marty Stuart, Pete Wade.
Johnny Cash's final album, AMERICAN V: A HUNDRED HIGHWAYS, is a moving and fitting swan song for the legendary performer. Like Cash's other recordings with producer Rick Rubin, AMERICAN V is quiet, intense, and minimal; it creates a thrilling intimacy by keeping the focus on Cash's aging voice and increasingly soulful, nuanced phrasing.
The album was produced piecemeal, with Cash's vocal tracks recorded mere months before the artist's death in 2003, and the backing tracks added two years later. Yet the album coheres remarkably well, thanks in large part to the fine musicians on hand (including ace session guitarist Smokey Hormel). But this is Cash's show through and through. Whether on covers (Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind"), originals ("Like the 309," the last song Cash ever wrote), or spirituals ("I'm Free From the Chain Gang Now," the album's stirring, heartbreakingly appropriate closer), Cash sounds like no one but himself--weary, wise, and touched, perhaps, by an unseen hand
American V: A Hundred Highways is the long-awaited album of Johnny Cash's final recordings, the basic tracks for which (i.e., Cash's vocals) were recorded in 2002-2003, with overdubs added by producer Rick Rubin after his death on September 12, 2003, at age 71. Between 1994 and 2002, Cash and Rubin had succeeded in fashioning a third act for the veteran country singer's career, following his acclaimed 1950s work for Sun Records and his popular recordings for Columbia in the 1960s and '70s. In the '80s, Cash's star had faded, but Rubin reinvented him as a hip country-folk-rock elder at 62 with American Recordings (1994), his first new studio album to reach the pop charts in 18 years. Unchained (1996) and American III: Solitary Man (2000) continued the comeback, at least as far as the critics were concerned, though none of the albums was actually a big seller. But American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002), propelled by Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" and a powerful video, stayed in the pop charts longer than any Cash album since 1969's Johnny Cash at San Quentin. By 2002, however, Cash was in failing health, homebound and in a wheelchair, and he suffered a personal blow when his wife, June Carter Cash, died on May 15, 2003. The American series, which posited Cash as an aged sage and the repository for a bottomless American songbook, had already shown a predilection for gloom in the name of gravity; it's no surprise that the fifth and final volume would be even more concerned with, as three earlier Cash compilations had put it, God, Love, and Murder. The ailing septuagenarian certainly sounds like he's near the end of his life, but that said, he doesn't sound bad. Cash was never a great singer in a technical sense: he hadn't much range, his pitch often wobbled, and his lack of breath control sometimes found him grasping for sound at the end of lines. But he was a great singer in the sense of projecting a persona through his voice; his emotional range, which went from a Sinatra-like swagger to an almost embarrassingly intimate vulnerability, was as wide as the spread of notes he could hit confidently was narrow. Such a singer doesn't really lose that much with age; in fact, he gains even more interpretive depth. Listening to this album, one can't get around the knowledge that it is a posthumous collection made in Cash's last days, but even without that context, it would have much the same impact.
The album begins with two religious songs, Larry Gatlin's "Help Me," a plea to God, and the traditional "God's Gonna Cut You Down," which, in a sense, answers that plea. The finality of death thus established, Cash launches into what is billed as the last song he ever wrote, "Like the 309," which is about a train tRolling Stone (p.96) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "Rubin had an immaculate sense of how to frame Cash's voice -- these stark, mostly acoustic arrangements don't try to conceal the singer's ruined instrument but find authority in its quavers and crags."
Rolling Stone (p.103) - Ranked #14 in Rolling Stone's "The Top 50 Albums Of 2006" -- "[T]here is a deep strength and dignity in his performances..."
Spin (p.83) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "The arrangements -- acoustic guitars, piano, harpsichord, a modest church organ, a small string section -- frame him impeccably."
Entertainment Weekly (p.158) - "The man's spirituality...is everywhere....Completely representative of the faithful old man he had become, having long ago shed his outlaw image..." -- Grade: A-
Q (p.109) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "Full of humanity, declarations of eternal love and the prospect of heaven, it makes a dignified final addition to the American Recordings series."
Q (p.124) - Ranked #22 in Q Magazine's "100 Greatest Albums of 2006" -- "A fine swansong."
No Depression (p.104) - "The results are gorgeous, haunting. The moaning, tolling cellos that assist Cash down to his knees on the prayer 'Help Me', for example, transform this album opener into one of Cash's most moving performances ever."
Mojo (Publisher) (p.89) - 3 stars out of 5 -- "[T]he dignity and sharp poetic instincts on AMERICAN V are classic Cash."