Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash’s shadow looms so large over country music — from Sun Studios rockabilly to a post-millennial renaissance — that it’s almost impossible to distill his nearly half-century’s worth of recordings into a single playlist. Not long before he passed away, Johnny got some good advice from producer Rick Rubin: cover Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”; the angst-addled depth that the bent and nearly broken legend brings to the song opens up a whole world of pain and remorse that the original could just barely hint at. But right from the beginning, Johnny established his credentials as the thinking man’s country singer in his brooding ode to fidelity, “I Walk the Line.” But he wasn’t all gravity all the time, as he proves in the flat-out goofy fun of his highest-charting pop hit, “A Boy Named Sue.”

In Next Steps, we’ll take you back to where it all began, hear the track his daughter rode to the top of the charts, and more.

Tough as granite one minute, a big ol’ teddy bear the next, Johnny Cash was a walking contradiction, and he’s got the songs to prove it. First, he defines the very concept of outlaw country in one single line buried in the steely core of his oft-recorded “Folsom Prison Blues”: “I shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die.” But the dead-eyed murderer of that track morphs into a lady-killer when playing his “Tennessee Flat-Top Box,” a Cash-penned original that daughter Rosanne re-recorded a quarter-century later, taking it to the top of the Country charts. And Cash walks the line between Hank Williams and Buddy Holly in the “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” a fable about how love triumphs over fame in the end . . . even if it didn’t always work out that way in Cash’s personal life.

In Deep Cuts, Johnny hooks up with another songwriting legend, the biggest band on the planet, and more.

In Johnny Cash’s world, Daddy may have sung bass, but Johnny sang just about everything else, sometimes in the company of rather surprising musical partners. With a few lines lifted from British folk and a shared vocal from Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan revisits his wistful love song “Girl from the North Country” in the opening track of his Nashville Skyline. Cash’s former backup guitarist (and ex-son-in-law) Marty Stuart shows there’s no hard feelings in a rockabilly-tinged jailhouse rave-up duet on “Doin’ My Time,” a track that first appeared on Johnny’s debut album. And if you wanted to give voice to a pilgrim searching for God in a post-apocalyptic world, you’d probably do just what U2 did in “The Wanderer”: send up a prayer — or, better yet, send out an S.O.S. — for a lead vocal from the Man in Black.

They called Johnny Cash the Man in Black — and not just because he swaddled himself in dark clothing. No, that blackness went deeper than his outfit, penetrating his skin and burrowing right down into the soul of a man who knew the difference between sin and salvation, because he’d helped himself to a man-sized portion of each. Big and rangy, with a craggy face and voice to match, Johnny rolled through country music like the Rock Island Line, from the dawn of rockabilly to the twilight of country’s outlaw spirit nearly half-a-century later. Like many big men, he didn’t talk much. Didn’t really have to, because everything he really needed to say was all right there, etched in the grooves, just waiting for yet one more generation to come along and be astonished.