Review: Johnny Cash- Personal File

Critics Choice
New CD's

By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com
Published: May 22, 2006

Johnny Cash"Personal File" (Columbia/Legacy) At various times from 1973 to 1982 Johnny Cash recorded favorite songs in his studio, singing alone with his guitar. A clutch of these, the earliest, were conceived as a proper record, but he couldn't find a label to release it.

They all surface now on "Personal File," a two-disc collection of unreleased material uncovered in 2004. The 49 tracks are sequenced more or less by theme, but the main division, is between religious (Disc 2) and secular (Disc 1).

We've had a taste of this kind of Cash performance before, from the material of his final years, produced by Rick Rubin, particularly on "American Recordings," on which he sang a minor-key religious song of his own called "Redemption," with impressive blood-and-fire imagery. This collection, by contrast, has an amiable dragginess. One wants his private stash to yield curious songs, performances that indicated the dimensions of his humanity, his vast, funky, unapologetic soul. Instead, most of these songs, even his religious originals, are plain and prim.

Here he sings favorites from his youth and young adulthood; they include old repertory like "The Engineer's Dying Child," recorded by Vernon Dalhart; the Irish song "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen" (played by Sons of the Pioneers on the soundtrack to John Ford's "Rio Grande"); and Bing Crosby's old hit "Far Away Places," which Cash describes as the first tune he ever sang in public to "a critical audience," at a talent show in Arkansas.

The songs are plainly recorded, except for a little useful reverb in a batch from 1980; many have introductions, some stagy, some more informal. Sometimes he tells where he heard the song he's about to sing, or why he wrote it. And sometimes he just spiels, like this before "What on Earth (Will You Do for Heaven's Sake)":

"I got a 400 power telescope in a place I got in Jamaica, and I look at the moon and I look at the stars, and one night I was looking at the stars, and I was thinking how big heaven was. And I wondered how big God was, you know? If the form of God covered the whole sphere of it all, and I'm sure it does — yet God cares for each and every one of us. I guess he's as small as we want him to be, or as big as we want him to be. Although we're earthbound, we can still be more like him if we can try."

Cash fans will be able to apply an after-the-fact gravity to the music: this album was from a time when he had escaped his past. As of 1973 he was free of drug addiction, free to start a new life.
"Sanctified" deals with this in religious terms, but "It Takes One to Know Me," a secular song written by his daughter Carlene Carter, which Cash here addresses to his wife, June, is far better.

"Sometimes I wish I was younger," he sings, "And could pick up the pieces and run/But then I look back on the matter of fact/And it's a race that I've already won."

-BEN RATLIFF