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"Like the 309" from Johnny Cash's "American V: A Hundred Highways"

In 1994, when heavy metal/rap producer Rick Rubin lowered his popular Def American label into the ground and launched his new American Recordings label with a stark album by a country has-been named Johnny Cash, no one predicted the impact the collaboration would have on both of their lives. Over the next eight years, through a string of iconic releases—American Recordings, Unchained, American III: Solitary Man and American IV: The Man Comes Around—the pair rediscovered the straightforward honesty that made Cash the authoritative voice of country music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in the process turned a whole new generation on to the Man in Black. Few artists make comebacks on the scale that Cash enjoyed during the American Recordings era, and the label will now posthumously release through Lost Highway American V: A Hundred Highways—a collection of previously unreleased material that includes “Like the 309,” the last song he ever wrote. As in “Hey Porter,” Cash's first single recorded almost a half century earlier, the setting is a train. But this isn’t the same train that took an antsy Southern boy back home across the Mason-Dixon line, nor is it the one that haunts the Folsom prisoner because it moves through the night and leaves him behind. This is a funeral train, like the one that carried Jimmie Rodgers—country music’s first real star—mournfully home to Alabama in 1933, as Depression-era crowds gathered by the tracks along its route to pay homage to the man who had simply and profoundly touched their lives. “Like the 309” is a song written and sung by a man envisioning his own final demise, strong in the faith that the train will deliver him to his destination, higher than a Georgia pine. This candid album is as powerful as anything Johnny Cash ever recorded. Made in a state of extreme physical and emotional pain as he struggled with a slew of health problems, including asthma, autonomic neuropathy associated with diabetes, heart trouble and crushing grief over the loss of his wife June Carter, his famous baritone is at times just a dusty whisper. But for every bleak moment on the record there are quiet references to faith and the transcendent strength and courage acquired by calling upon a power greater than one’s self—a Cash trademark. “Help Me,” written by Larry Gatlin, is a quiet appeal to above. “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” is a cautionary, stern spiritual. One of the most moving tracks is his cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s mesmerizing “If You Could Read My Mind,” sung this time to a love who has traveled beyond the grave. “On the Evening Train” is another funeral train song—written by Hank and Audrey Williams, the volatile Nashville couple who here paint a picture of a deceased mother beseeching the father to be strong…for the children. This material is overtly maudlin, and yet the story is so perfectly matched to the singer's predicament that only the coldest of hearts will fail to find it moving on a deep level. There are other sweet moments too, like his delivery of Rod McKuen’s sentimental “Love’s Been Good to Me," “Rose of My Heart” by Hugh Moffatt, Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds” and his self-effacing take on “A Legend in My Time,” written by Don Gibson. It’s funny to hear this song sung by Cash, who indisputably embodied the title. “Further On (Up the Road)”—the one by Springsteen, not the one Eric Clapton made famous—reinforces the theme of moving on. Aside from “Like the 309,” the only other original here is “I Came to Believe,” although Cash has recorded it previously. The song is a frank explanation that his faith was borne of desperation and helplessness, and that surrender to a higher power was the key to his cell—his ticket to freedom. This quiet album is all about transportation and transformation. It’s a dispatch from a man shuckin' off this mortal coil. Cash believed we build prisons for ourselves here on earth, and the final track proclaims: “I’m Free From the Chain Gang Now.” The sentiments expressed here are hard to find elsewhere in our youth-oriented culture, and yet it's likely to be embraced by young people—as were his other releases on American Recordings. In his final months, Cash lived only to record and certainly more of that material will be brought to light over time because of his ongoing appeal and because, let's remember, music is also a business. This particular CD resonates long after the music stops because of its candor, humility and unadorned beauty. Producer Rick Rubin, son John Carter Cash, engineer David “Fergie” Ferguson and musicians Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, Smokey Hormel, Matt Sweeney and Jonny Polonsky deserve to be thanked for crafting this humble prayer from a famously flawed but compassionately hopeful American original. It will be released on the Fourth of July.