Those lost songs have now become real with this 16-song tribute album, on which Cash family and friends (Rosanne Cash and Carlene Carter; Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson) as well as artists less closely associated with his legacy (Kacey Musgraves, Chris Cornell, John Mellencamp, Elvis Costello, T.Bone Burnett, The Jayhawks, Alison Krauss et al…) accept the challenge of putting music posthumously to the great ‘Man in Black’s’ poetry.
Nelson and Kristofferson, Cash’s surviving fellow Highwaymen, lead off the album with “Forever/I Still Miss Someone,” What unfolds is a kind of Great American Songbook approach to Johnny Cash, traversing the country and western, mountain bluegrass, blues, and Scotch Irish balladeer range of his own work. Musgraves does a misty, harmonizing duet with her husband, Ruston Kelly, working from a letter the singer wrote to wife June Carter Cash, who died four months before him. Elvis Costello’s swoony, string-laden rendition of “I’ll Still Love You” feels like that letter’s postscript, and Carlene Carter’s “June’s Sundown” completes the romantic trio.
**This is not new but flew under our radar….we’re ashamed to say!!
