Johnny Cash's American Recordings

(Paperback)

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Description

This title offers a superb investigation of what is arguably Johnny Cash's greatest album, focusing on his enduring mythology. When Johnny Cash signed to Rick Rubin's record label in 1993, he was a country music legend who, like his fellow Highwaymen Willie, Waylon and Kris, remained a fondly regarded yet completely marginalized Nashville figure, unheard on the radio and unseen on the charts. Cash's odyssey from oldies act to folk hero pivots on his first American Recordings album, a document of almost unbearable solitude and directness. It is a singular record, an instance in which a musical giant has been granted a kind of midnight reprieve, a chance to regain and renew his legend. Tony Tost illuminates the ways in which American Recordings is the crossroads where cultural, spiritual and mythic archetypes come together in the figure of The Man in Black. Ultimately, this is a guidebook to myth and mystery, a means of apprehending the stark beauty of Cash's greatest record, the sound of a man alone and fighting for his soul, one song at a time.

Reviews

It's a terrific, illuminating read that I'd recommend to anyone who loves Johnny Cash, and that record in particular. * No Depression Magazine *
Tost cores the Cash mythology with the reverence it deserves, and in so doing gets to the very logic of reckoning. * Miami Sun Post *
In a dynamically sequenced succession of short-burst essays, Tost matches driving, energized prose against the titanic scale of the image that Cash created through his public life and career. Writing about a man who contained multitudes, Tost is a poet in his own right. * Nashville City Paper *
Like the best work on Cash, it makes no attempt to disentangle myth from history or biography. Tost is an American mythologist in the vein of Greil Marcus, and there are numerous moments in the book where the reader is put in mind of Marcus writing on Dylan (or Cash for that matter). * Tiny Mix Tapes *
Tost is like a foster son of Greil Marcus, beating his own path into old, weird America through the life of the Man in Black. * Milwaukee Express *

Author Bio

Tony Tost is a scholar and poet who lives in Seattle, Washington. The author of two poetry collections, he was the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award in 2003. He is currently completing a dissertation on myth, technology and the poetic imagination at Duke University.