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Title Johnny Cash - Lonesome In Black Subtitle The Legendary Sun Recordings Artist Johnny Cash Format: Double CD Cat. No.: METRDCD536 Barcode: 698458703620 Playing Time: 1 and a half hours

Spanning 1955 to 1958, Johnny Cash’s recordings for Sam Phillips’ Sun label stand amongst the greatest American music of the last fifty years. Showcasing the stark and simple sound that would become his trademark, `Lonesome In Black’ is a definitive look at Cash’s legendary Sun era, including all the hits and songs that have become indelibly linked with the Man In Black. See Reviews

Track List CD1 1 Cry, Cry, Cry 2 Hey! Porter 3 Folsom Prison Blues 4 So Doggone Lonesome 5 I Walk The line 6 Get Rhythm 7 Train Of Love 8 There You Go 9 I Heard That Lonesome Whistle Blow 10 Home Of The Blues 11 Give My Love To Rose 12 Ballad Of A Teenage Queen 13 Big River 14 Guess Things Happen That Way 15 Come In Stranger 17 Luther Played The Boogie 18 Down The Street To 301 19 Mean Eyed Cat 20 Thanks A Lot CD2 1 Always Alone 2 Belshazar 3 Blue Train 4 Born To lose 5 Cold, Cold Heart 6 Next In Line 7 Country Boy 8 Doin' My Time 9 Don't Make Me Go 10 Fool's Hall Of Fame 11 Goodbye Little Darlin' 12 Goodnight Irene 13 I Can't Help It (If I'm Still In Love With You) 14 I Was There When It Happened 15 If The Good Lord's Willing 16 Leave That Junk Alone 17 New Mexico 18 The Story Of A Broken Heart 19 You Win Again 20 Rock 'N' Roll Ruby         Sleevenotes   “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” ~That utterance, the American equivalent of “Bond, James Bond”, is enshrined in showbiz history, the stoic guarantee that a man of singular talent and integrity was about to perform. It’s appropriate, then, that the very name ‘Johnny’ is showbiz – chosen over John R. Cash’s protests by Sam Phillips, founder, owner and producer of Sun studios and the Sun label. Phillips, who knew a thing or ten about artist appeal, was intent on calling Cash Johnny. And so it would be. John R. Cash was born on 26 February 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas, moving to Dyess, a farm colony in the North Eastern part of that State with his family in 1936 as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal project – the first and last act of true democratic socialism in the US. The New Deal dragged the USA out of the Depression by offering such programmes as the Federal Government land reclamation scheme, so placing landless farm workers on public land that needed taming. Cash’s father Ray signed up and began growing cotton, one of the hardest, most labour intensive farm jobs going. The Pentecostal church, school and the music he heard on the family’s radio were young John’s relief from back-breaking field work. Cash sang white gospel in church, a Southern style adapted from black gospel, where the fervour is replaced with a more mournful intensity. His family weren’t musical and it appears that no one, not even teenage John, took his love of country and gospel music as anything more than youthful enthusiasm. Cash graduated from high school and shifted to Michigan, briefly working in an auto plant before returning home and joining the air force as a radio operator. He was stationed in Germany where he played music with fellow soldiers, received the distinctive scar on his face from a drunken doctor trying to remove a cyst and a damaged eardrum from a fraulein who stuck a pencil in his ear as a joke. Cash returned to the U.S., married his sweetheart Vivian Liberto and started a family. Of their four children, Roseanne Cash would go on to become a major country star in the 1980s. John took a job selling household appliances door-to-door in Memphis and, realising the ridiculous nature of such employment, began concentrating on music. His brother Ray introduced him to two friends, Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant, both of whom played guitar as a hobby. Once Cash convinced them he was serious about making it in the music industry, Grant was pushed into buying a double bass. Cash, a tall, muscular man with dark, brooding looks that allowed him for many years to claim he was “a quarter Cherokee” (he wasn’t), caught on to a new Memphis phenomenon. They called it rockabilly and it was wilder than any music white boys had ever before dared create. Aged 22 in 1954, Cash never tried to sound like neighbourhood hotshot Elvis Presley. Instead, Elvis’ success encouraged him to audition at Sun Studios where he presented himself as a gospel singer. Sam Phillips had an ear for talent: B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, Junior Parker and Elvis were all Phillips’ protégés. But gospel? Sam listened and told Cash he had lost money on both black and white gospel 78s so to return when he had “something commercial”. Cash went away and rehearsed with Perkins and Grant, developing the ‘boom-chicka-boom’ sound that would become Cash’s trademark, apparently out of the trio’s elemental musical abilities. They returned to Sun in early 1955 and this time Phillips heard a new star rising. Their first single ‘Hey! Porter’ / ’Cry, Cry, Cry’, credited to Johnny Cash And The Tennessee Two, was released in June 1955. Phillips, always the visionary, chose not to decorate Cash’s untrained baritone / bass. What he did insist was for Cash to bring a more rockabilly rhythm to some of his songs. To encourage Cash to move the crowd, Phillips put him on the same bill as Sun’s rising rockabilly protégé, Carl Perkins. Quickly becoming firm friends they encouraged one another, Cash insisting Perkins finish writing ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ while Perkins pushed Cash to complete ‘I Walk The Line’. “I got the idea for ‘I Walk The Line’ from a Dale Carnegie course,” Cash recalled. It taught you to keep your eyes open for something good. I made a love song out of it. It was meant to be a slow, mournful ballad but Sam had us pick up the tempo until I didn’t like it at all.” ~Late in 1955 ‘Cry, Cry, Cry’ rose to number 14 in the Billboard Country charts. And while Cash would always remain a country singer, he is one of the few artists to have ever appealed strongly to both country and rock audiences, in his lifetime being honoured by The Country Music Hall Of Fame and The Rock ’n’ Roll Hall Of Fame. Then in 1956 came ‘Folsom Prison Blues’. While many believe Cash to be a former convict, his longest prison stretch came at the height of his fame and lasted only three days: it was for starting a fire that destroyed a forest in Nashville. Instead, he had watched the movie ‘Inside The Walls Of Folsom Prison’ and this inspired him to write what would be his most memorable ever lyric: “I shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die.” Intriguingly for a man who always professed the strength of his Christian faith, Cash proved a brilliant chronicler of what Quentin Tarantino would call “songs of hillbilly thug life (that) go right to the heart of the American underclass.” Cash himself noted, “we, the people, put ourselves in the shoes of the singer. We want to feel his pain, his loneliness. We want to be a part of that rebellion… These songs are just for listening and singing. Don’t go out and do it.” ~‘Folsom Prison Blues’ hit number 4 on the Country charts in 1956 while the follow-up, ‘I Walk The Line’, hit the top spot. With Elvis having left Sun for RCA , Carl Perkins hospitalised from a car crash just as his recording of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ topped the Country and Pop charts and Jerry Lee Lewis only starting his Sun career, Cash was suddenly the label’s biggest star. Cash got on well with his label mates – Perkins eventually joined Cash’s touring band as lead guitarist (Luther Perkins, no relation, having died in a fire) ~– and he had his photo taken with Elvis, Carl and Jerry Lee Lewis on 4th December 1956, when Elvis dropped into the Sun studio for what would be called The Million Dollar Quartet (Cash didn’t stay to sing – he went shopping. Too cool!). ~Whilst at Sun, Cash wrote ‘You’re My Baby’ and ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Ruby’ for his struggling label mates Roy Orbison and Warren Smith. ~~ Cash kept scoring: ‘Give My Love To Rose’, ‘Home Of The Blues’ (named after a Memphis record shop), ‘Luther Played The Boogie’, ‘Train Of Love’, ‘There You Go’, ‘Next In Line’, ‘Don’t Make Me Go’. Jack Clement, Phillips’ ‘dogs body’ and engineer, took over producing Cash in late-1957 and added additional instruments with – in serious breach of rockabilly decorum – background vocals. These touches worked and Cash scored massive country and pop hits with ‘Ballad Of A Teenage Queen’ and ‘Guess Things Happen That Way’ although the Clement productions pushed Cash in a more pop direction than really suited the singer whose deep voice and reflective delivery was more Biblical than boy band. Songs poured out of Cash and the themes of these songs would stay with him for life – trains, rivers, prisons, heartbreak, enduring love, poverty, injustice, joy. The sound of Johnny Cash at Sun stands amongst the greatest American music of the last fifty years. Music so stark and simple yet capable of conveying goodness and evil, psychosis and redemption, happiness and despair. This was the sound of a white boy who had toiled alongside black sharecroppers, a singer with Mississippi soil beneath his fingernails and humility in his soul. At a DJ convention in Nashville in November 1957, Sun released its first LP (the format then relatively rare except for established mainstream stars), ‘Johnny Cash With His Hot And Blue Guitar’. Sales of said album weren’t strong and when Cash suggested recording another album Phillips vetoed the idea. Phillips’ refusal to increase royalties or let Cash record gospel songs meant that, when Cash’s contract with Sun ended in 1958, he signed with Columbia to Phillips’ disgust. For the next 45 years, Cash would continue to record and tour, surviving the wild, amphetamine fuelled 1960s, recording classic performances in San Quentin and Folsom prisons, and scoring pop and country hits. In 1969, when Cash was at the height of his popularity, ten Johnny Cash albums were released by Pickwick, all drawn from the Sun era, and ‘Big River’, ‘Get Rhythm’ and ‘Rock Island Line’ were hits on the U.S. country charts. Later, he championed and recorded with Bob Dylan, entered the 1990s with work produced by rap-metal maestro Rick Rubin, so winning a whole new audience and more Grammies, CMA Awards, even an MTV nomination for Best Music Video for 2003’s ‘Hurt’. Across the decades, Cash became one of the few performers to truly earn the title “legendary”. And throughout that time he would continue to reference his Sun catalogue, keeping his classic 1950s songs as the mainstay of his live performance, even re-recording ‘Give My Love To Rose’ for his last album, the magnificent ‘The Man Comes Around’. His death in 2003 was remarked upon as if a major statesman had passed. And in the case of Johnny Cash – iconoclast, survivor, entertainer, man - this was true. Garth Cartwright