Johnny Cash, raw

This is exciting news:

In July 1973, Johnny Cash spent several days in the studio at his House of Cash offices in Hendersonville, Tennessee, recording songs and telling tales with just an acoustic guitar and his virile craggy baritone. He sang Tin Pan Alley hits, traditional folk and gospel tunes, new originals and favorite covers by the Louvin Brothers and Johnny Horton, among others. He recited poetry and reminisced about his teenage job as a water boy on a river-dredging crew and the hours he spent glued to the radio, loving and learning the very songs he sang in these sessions.

But Cash, who died in September 2003, never issued any of these intimate performances. The tapes were shelved at House of Cash, where they sat forgotten and undisturbed until 2004, when his son John Carter Cash asked Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of A&R at Legacy Recordings, Sony BMG’s reissue imprint, and producer Gregg Geller for help in cataloging the hundreds of reels stored at the Hendersonville office. “Periodically, I would come across a white tape box with the House of Cash label on it that said ‘Johnny Cash, Personal File,’” says Geller. “My sense is he had a concept album in mind, and these tapes were the beginning of that process.”

Cash’s dream finally comes true with the May release of the two-CD set Personal File, compiled by Geller and featuring forty-nine previously unissued solo Cash tracks, half from July ’73 and the rest from similar, later House of Cash demos made in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Personal File arrives at a peak of posthumous Cashmania, fueled by the success of the biopic Walk the Line. The single-CD compilation, The Legend of Johnny Cash, is selling more than 40,000 copies a week, according to SoundScan.

But Personal File delivers a Cash even his most devoted fans have never heard before: at the height of his career and vocal power, telling the story of his life in music, as if he were sitting across from you. “This is his ‘Basement Tapes,’” says Berkowitz, “as close as you can get to him singing on the porch.”

(via Thunderstruck)