A 75-Song, 3-Disc Overview of Johnny Cash’s Career

When country star Johnny Cash was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January, you had to buy three different CD compilations to get an overview of the hugely influential artist’s career.

Rhino Records’ 18-song “The Sun Years” was the best way to sample the country and rockabilly material that Cash recorded in the ‘50s for Sun, the Memphis label that also launched the careers of such rock legends as Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison.

To best monitor Cash’s work after leaving Sun in 1958, however, you had to turn to a 20-song retrospective on Columbia Records titled “Columbia Records 1958-1986” and to “Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison and San Quentin,” a dynamic live album taken from two late-’60s prison concerts.

But the recent release by Columbia Records of “The Essential Johnny Cash (1955-1983)” finally brings together material from all three of the above albums.

The 75-song, three-disc set contains 15 of the early Sun recordings, including “Folsom Prison Blues” and “Big River,” and four tracks from the live prison albums, including “Cocaine Blues” and “A Boy Named Sue.”

The rest of the set is devoted to the wide range of Columbia recordings, from the social commentary of “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” and “Man in Black” to the country novelty of “One Piece at a Time” on through gospel, honky-tonk and folk strains. Among the career cornerstones: “Busted,” “Ring of Fire,” “Orange Blossom Special,” “Jackson,” “Daddy Sang Bass” and “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”

By turning to material from such folk and rock artists as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Mick Jagger-Keith Richards as well as championing the works of such country newcomers as Kris Kristofferson and Rodney Crowell, Cash helped stretch the boundaries of country music, and there is a consistent sense of passion and commitment in his work that should be equally inspiring to fans of rock and other areas of pop.

In the liner notes in the booklet that is included in the set, Arthur Levy touches on Cash’s role as a leader and role model.

“In the process of using his distinctive bass voice to sing of coal miners and sharecroppers, assembly line workers and trainmen, families and lovers, convicts, cowboys and Native Americans, Cash has succeeded in establishing an autobiographical context for the great body of his work.

“Invariably, he comes back to the circumstances of his (rural Arkansas) childhood and young manhood for strength and inspiration, circumstances so damned interesting and so distinctly a part of 20th-Century Americana, that they bear retelling time and time again.”