Ring of Fire: The Legend of Johnny Cash

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Johnny Cash

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The recently released "Legend of Johnny Cash" compilation is the first single-disc collection to cover the legendary Man In Black's entire career. While it would take literally a half-dozen CDs or more to cover every important piece of music Cash has made, this compilation offers the basics and is an excellent overview of his most important and classic work. The legendary Sun records hits, "Cry Cry Cry", "Hey Porter", "I Walk The Line" and "Folsum Prison Blues" are included here as well as "A Boy Named Sue", "Ring Of Fire" and "Highwayman" (his collaboration with Country legends Kris Kristoferson, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson). Also included is Johnny's cameo appearance from U2's 1993 "Zooropa" album, "The Wanderer" and to close out the disc, there are several tracks from his American Records series with producer Rick Rubin including the final hit "Hurt" (originally by Nine Inch Nails).

With that said, "the Legend of Johnny Cash" is an essential collection and offers an excellent brief history lesson of his most acclaimed work. For the few who have never heard of Johnny Cash, this CD is an excllent introduction to his music. For everyone else, this is probably the best collection of Cash music to date.

I own some of Johnny Cash's older albums as well as the spectacular 2-CD The Essential Johnny Cash. But since I didn't have any of his American recordings he did with Rick Rubin, I got The Legend of Johnny Cash for the six songs representing those albums. It's rather obvious that this collection was aimed at young people who have heard and liked Cash's music but wouldn't otherwise be caught dead in the record store's country music section (and who am I kidding; that includes me).

In that sense, it's a good CD. It includes the biggest of Cash's big hits: "Cry, Cry, Cry," "I Walk the Line," "Ring of Fire," "Hurt," etc. But as a definitive greatest-hits collection, The Legend of Johnny Cash falls well short. "I Still Miss Someone," "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," "The Rebel- Johnny Yuma," "The One on the Right is on the Left," and (probably most bafflingly) "Daddy Sang Bass" are all absent from here. What's more, "Folsom Prison Blues" is the *studio* version- anyone at all can tell you that the definitive version is the live version recorded at Folsom Prison itself. This CD is only an hour long- that leaves plenty of time for more deserving cuts. The six American Recordings songs collected here are all great, and I think I'm going to spring for the albums themselves. "The Wanderer," featuring U2, also made it on here; I think that's one of Cash's best ever.

If you want a single-disc Johnny Cash collection, you could do worse. But I still think that The Essential Johnny Cash is a better bet. Even though there's no American Recordings material on there, it still includes every other song this collection does, plus many, many more great songs.