YMMV / Johnny Cash

• Adaptation Displacement: Trent Reznor recounts the feeling at hearing Cash's rendition of "Hurt" as being like losing a girlfriend, since the song now practically belongs to Johnny Cash.
• Archive Panic: 54 studio albums, plus thirteen collaborative albums, eleven gospel albums, nine live albums, four Christmas albums, two soundtrack albums and dozens of guest appearances on other songs. Want to take the easy way out and get a Greatest Hits Album? There are 104. Go on, pick one.
• Audience-Alienating Era: 1971–94, the period between the end of The Johnny Cash Show and American Recordings. Cash did release some grade A material during this period, but between various religious pursuits on one hand, and occasional relapses into substance abuse on the other, he wasn't always focused on music and the quality of his recordings became more erratic.
• Broken Base: While not a very vocal example as the song is beloved anyway, the question of whether or not the noticeable loss in audio quality at the end of "Hurt" is a good thing or bad thing pops up occasionally. One camp feels it adds to the song, others don't mind it, and some feel it ruins an otherwise excellent song. Not helped by the fact that nobody knows if it's a case of Cash's performance being too amazing for the recording equipment, just someone screwing up in post-production, or if it's because Cash's voice was becoming too weak for the mic to pick up as much.
• Complete Monster: "The Ballad of Annie Palmer": Annie Palmer is just as monstrous as she was in the original myth. The owner of Rose Hall Plantation, a sugarcane plantation where about 5,000 enslaved people worked, Palmer's slaves all lived in fear of her under the constant fear of whipping. Annie Palmer also murdered her three husbands and, despite having died hundreds of years ago, the narrator feels her presence at her house and hears her murdered lovers calling out in the night.
• Covered Up:
  • Believe it or not, Cash didn't write "Ring of Fire" or "A Boy Named Sue". The latter's true writer (and the first person to record it) may come as a shock to some—it was none other than Shel Silverstein. And the co-writer of Ring of Fire? His future wife, June Carter. In fact, it's often alleged that Carter wrote the song about her relationship with Cash, as both were married to other people at that point. Cash's version is, however, still a cover as June's sister Anita Carter was the first to record it.
  • Inverted with "Tennessee Flat Top Box". Cash's version went to #11 in the sixties, and his daughter, Rosanne, took a cover to #1 in 1988. Rosanne honestly didn't know that her father wrote the song at the time she recorded it. Not only did it become one of her signature songs, she performed it during a concert TV special paying tribute to her father after he died.
  • Of all people, Ray Stevens released "Sunday Morning Coming Down" before Johnny did.
  • His cover of the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt", is also usually more recognized than the original, to the point where many books have incorrectly attributed "Hurt" to Cash and believe his recording is far older than its 2002 release. Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor wrote the song and recorded it in 1994. The confusion is mostly created by wrongheaded journalists who can't believe that Cash would record a song by an industrial band, when such covers were one of the main features of his American Recordings albums.
    • Even Trent Reznor acknowledges that Cash's version was like "I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn't mine anymore..." after hearing it for the first time. Considering many consider "Hurt" (and its accompanying music video) to be one of Cash's masterworks and one of the best recordings of the 2000s decade, it's doubtful he has much reason to complain about this.
  • Johnny's cover of Sheryl Crow's "Redemption Day" seems to be the more popular version.
  • "I Hung My Head" was originally Sting, but few people have even heard of the original.
  • "Cocaine Blues" is a case of Covering Up a Covered Up song. The original was recorded in 1947 by W.A. Nichols' Rhythm Aces, then Roy Hogsed had a country hit with it one year later.
  • Cash recorded a number of other songs you would not normally associate with this style, ranging from the Ray Charles classics "I Got a Woman" and "What'd I Say" in the 1960s to, of all things, the Depeche Mode song "Personal Jesus" not long before his death.
  • During the 1969-1971 run of The Johnny Cash Show on TV, Cash performed duets with many of his guests. Perhaps one of the most unexpected was his linking up with Tony Joe White to perform a surprisingly good version of White's original version of "Polk Salad Annie" (a song that has since become associated with 1970s-era Elvis Presley).
  • "Streets of Laredo", recorded by Cash for one of his concept albums in the mid-1960s and a popular part of his TV show and live performances from the 1970s onward, is another example of a song that Cash made his own, despite it being a cover of a standard that had been recorded by many artists in the years before Cash did it, including his contemporary Marty Robbins.
  • "Delia's Gone" from the first American Recordings is the most famous version of the song today, covering up not only the long history of a ballad that stretches back almost a century with stops in the Southern United States and the Bahamas, but Cash's own 1962 version of the song.
  • The Kingston Trio first released "Jackson" in 1963, four years before the Johnny/June version.
  • "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" was written and first recorded by Peter LaFarge. Cash did some of LaFarge's other songs about the plight of Native Americans as well.
• Epic Riff:
  • He built his whole musical career around the famous "boom-chicka-boom" guitar riff of Luther Perkins.
  • The "Ring of Fire" trumpets may be the single greatest ear worm in the history of recorded music.
• Fan Nickname: He's often called "the Man in Black" due to his signature black clothing.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In "Katy Too", one of the many women Johnny is foolin' around with is... Sue!
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • "A Boy Named Sue", from At San Quentin: The father is a Gunslinger who abandoned his family after his son's birth, but not before giving his son the embarrassing name "Sue". Wanting Sue to grow up strong and smart in a rough world by beating up people who made fun of his name, along with having no father figure to look up to throughout most of his life and when finally encountered by an enraged Sue decades later, the father puts up a good, brutal fight. When Sue draws his gun on him, the father smiles, knowing he's made his son tough, even reconciling with his boy afterwards.
  • "Mean as Hell": The Devil, though chained for a thousand years, refuses to complain or bemoan his circumstances, instead focusing on creating his own Hell on Earth where he can torment the souls of men. Tricking the Lord, with whom he has a friendly rapport, into giving up a parcel of seemingly worthless land and even providing some water to make it more hospitable, the Devil set out "to make a good Hell, and he succeeded", changing the environment and wildlife to make the desert's already uninviting climate even more dangerous and trying. Proving himself as fair as he is cruel, the Devil nevertheless makes his Hell a place where people can survive, provided they can be "mean as hell" and prove themselves capable of enduring his torments.
• Memetic Mutation: The famous photo of Johnny flipping off◊ the camera.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Last Note Nightmare at the end of "The Man Comes Around."
  And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts,
  And I looked and behold, a pale horse:
  And his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.
  • It was the shift to a tinny, scratchy "old-timey record" sound that made it so creepy- especially when the speaking stops and the scratching gets louder...
  • "25 Minutes to Go", which puts the listener in the shoes of someone counting down the minutes before their execution.
• Questionable Casting: Can lead to Narm or Narm Charm for the more generously inclined. His Gospel Road Bible Times film can come off as this due to the apparently last-minute casting of the director as what some have joked as the whitest, blondest Jesus ever filmed. In recent decades, Biblical movies tend to try and have the actors "look right" for the time and place, and so to modern eyes this can undermine the sincere effort up to the location shooting in Israel itself.
• Signature Song:
  • Arguably it's "I Walk the Line" (to the point where it named his biopic), "Folsom Prison Blues," "Ring of Fire," or "Hurt."
  • "A Boy Named Sue" as well, along with "The Man Comes Around" and "God's Gonna Cut You Down" is on the fringe of being one.
  • Lest we forget; "Man in Black" (though it never really took as a signature song and wasn't performed very often by the time the 80s rolled around due in part to its dated lyrics referencing the Vietnam War).
  • When examining Cash's entire recorded output, the song he seemed to be most fond of was "I Still Miss Someone" as he recorded it in studio and on stage more frequently than any other song in his repertoire.
• Song Association: "God's Gonna Cut You Down" was featured during the intro of "Operation Swordbreaker" mission in Battlefield 3 and in "Zero Hero, the Bonebreaker" trailer for Wreckfest. A remixed version was used in the Gamescom trailer for Battlefield 1 as well.
  • "General Lee" showed up in Grand Theft Auto V via "Rebel Radio".
  • "Ring of Fire" was heard in Tony Hawk's Underground 2, Mafia III and Rock Band 3 via "The Best of Johnny Cash" Downloadable Content.
  • "Rusty Cages" was featured in Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Back 4 Blood.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Folsom Prison Blues" is largely a rewrite of "Crescent City Blues" by pop composer/bandleader Gordon Jenkins, changing the musical style and lyrical context. Cash reportedly wanted to give Jenkins a credit on the original 1956 release but Sun Records owner Sam Phillips told him not to worry about a lawsuit. Jenkins found out much later and did in fact sue, but it got settled out of court. The album the Jenkins song came from, 1954's Seven Dreams, featuring songs linked by narration and dialogue, seems to have been an influence on Cash's later Concept Album work.

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