THE COMPLETE JOHNNY CASH

Paying tribute to an expansive musical career.

Stielper, a Cash historian, artfully assembles the prolific singer’s decorated career through the songwriting that established him as an iconic force in country music. Fronting the book is an introduction from Cash’s son, John Carter Cash, who fondly reflects on his father’s legacy as an artist best known for his distinctive singing voice, but, noting that poetry and song were his lifeblood, “it was what that voice said” that had a lasting impact. John Carter shares obscure details about his father, including how, despite being functionally blind during the final few months of his life, he was still recording music 10 days before his death in 2003. Curating nearly 600 compositions, Stielper scoured Cash’s various homes to source material from diaries, notepads, and scrap-paper scribblings found in coat pockets, on tree bark, and even inside the singer’s tall black boots. Alongside Cash’s career evolution, the author fortifies the singer’s oeuvre with insightful essays noting how the unique eras and events occurring throughout Cash’s life defined his creative process and his music. The book begins in the 1940s with his first recordings and notes how his hardscrabble south-central Arkansas roots had an immense impact on his future songwriting and his worldview. Cash, who sang as a “way to get what was in my head out,” would emerge as an instant standout with music labels for his composing virtuosity. Early hits included “Cry Cry Cry,” “Hey, Porter!,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” and the iconic “I Walk the Line,” followed by peak success years from the 1960s through the 1980s. In this trove of song lyrics, Cash lore, images, and poetry, Stielper returns the Man in Black to center stage and crafts a posthumous legacy befitting a legend. For both newcomers and diehard fans, this anthology is an opportunity to experience, in the words of Cash’s son, “the very essence of his soul.”

A comprehensive, must-have collector’s item for Cash completists.