Forever Words

November 15, 2016
Johnny Cash left behind quite a trove of writings, his son John Carter Cash reveals, and from it this selection of song lyrics, both apparently finished and probably incomplete, has been drawn. Introducing them, editor Muldoon, a Pulitzer Prizewinning poet, touches the right bases for appreciating both them and the recorded balance of Cash's legacy. Those touchstones are the Scottish border ballads and Scots-Irish traditional song in general, the King James Bible, the cowboy song (especially, its humor and exaggeration), and the assurance of Christian faith; and Muldoon adduces the evidence of those influences directly from pieces in this book. He also argues the timelessness of Cash's lyrics, their sense of immortality and inevitability, the impression they make that they tell of things that have always been precisely as these lines and rhymes and rhythms express them. Fortunately, reading any one these songs-sans-music bears Muldoon out. Gratifyingly, several can be read twice, once in typeface and again in facsimiles of the notebook and memo sheets on which Cash wrote them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)