Johnny Cash- Johnny Cash Sings Hank Williams

Originally posted to Instagram, February 27, 2020

I had a totally different album post planned for today, but then I saw a post about it being Johnny Cash's birthday, and, well, I wasn't about to post somebody else's album on the Man in Black's birthday. So here's an interesting one- "Johnny Cash Sings Hank Williams".

Like the Skip James album I posted recently, this is another record that came from Record Store Day's "summer camp". It's a recent reissue of a Sun Records album from the 1960s, and the album title is a little bit misleading. If I remember correctly, the story with this record is that Johnny Cash was having a lot of success on Columbia Records, so his previous label, Sun Records, bundled the singles and unreleased tracks he made with them into a bunch of albums to quickly cash in on his Columbia success. So it's not so much that he made an album of Hank Williams covers, but more that Sun Records put the four Hank covers Johnny had recorded for them on an album together, along with "Folsom Prison Blues", "I Walk The Line", and a number of lesser-known Johnny Cash songs. It's a fun country/rockabilly album, but it's not the full album of Hank covers the title led me to expect.

That said, the Hank Williams covers are the definite highlight of the album. It's not that Johnny Cash's original songs aren't good, it's just that the best ones are also the ones I've heard a thousand times. But I'd never heard any of Johnny's Hank Williams covers until I listened to this album. It's fun and refreshing to hear the most classic songs in classic country in a voice that's familiar and iconic, but also completely different from the one usually associated with those particular songs. Happy birthday, Johnny. Thanks for giving me a reason to revisit these songs.