Johnny Cash’s American Recordings series is unprecedented in pop music for giving listeners the music of a man dealing with his final years. Pop has been a young man’s (and woman’s) game for decades, and in most ways it still is. Cash’s albums with Rick Rubin seemed designed to codify the Cash persona as the Man in Black, the outlaw wrestling with spirituality, even though that stance was a simplification of the man his body of work presented. The albums are unquestionably powerful, and they gave Cash an audience for his declining years—two things Rick Rubin deserves credit for. His cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” from American IV: The Man Comes Around from 2002 seemed like a remarkable final statement, which it became when Cash died Sept. 12, 2003. He sounded like a man who’d fought to live on his own terms and finally realized that all he’d won was an empire of dirt.

 

But that wasn’t really Cash, or it wasn’t the whole story. As Personal File, which was released earlier this year, shows, Cash wasn’t a flinty or tortured Christian. He could sing story songs that teach lessons about the value of kindness and the importance of a mother’s love. That is the Cash that sings American V: A Hundred Highways. He’s not bartering with God; he’s acknowledging the lessons learned. There’s no cryptic or bohemian poetry here; he’s saying what he means. He’s facing the end not lonely and blasted but embracing his sources of comfort—his family, his friends and his spirituality.

 

There’s still some squaring up to do, though. His covers of If You Could Read My Mind” and “Four Strong Winds” by Canadians Gordon Lightfoot and Ian Tyson respectively are both fond goodbyes, and “A Legend in My Time” takes one more kick at his pride. And he’s not facing the end without some nervousness, as the language of “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” suggests.

 

The fragility of his voice makes these songs sound real and not like performances. So often, the human experience expressed in a song is muted by the process of expressing it in metrically exact, properly rhyming lines that are fitted to a melody that is sung by someone who hopes to sell a goodly number of albums. Here, Cash has no career to protect. It’s ending. He doesn’t have to emulate the baritone he’s known for to maintain brand consistency. More than returning Cash to the Man in Black, this has been Rick Rubin’s great accomplishment—to help an aging, complex man document his last days with his art, and helping that art speak in a way it rarely does.