Tracks: 1) Goodbye Little Darlin’ Goodbye; 2) I Just Thought You’d Like To Know; 3) You Tell Me; 4) Just About Time; 5) I Forgot To Remember To Forget; 6) Katy Too; 7) Thanks A Lot; 8) Luther Played The Boogie; 9) You Win Again; 10) Hey, Good Lookin’; 11) I Could Never Be Ashamed Of You; 12) Get Rhythm.
REVIEW
While Johnny was continuing his winning streak on Columbia, his old alma mater of Sun Records went on going through its own archives, throwing out single after single, LP after LP with such verve that one might indeed have thought the man was having two different recording careers at the same time — «Johnny Cash» on Columbia and «Johnny For Cash» on Sun, that is. Seriously, it feels like Sam Phillips already had a premonition that things would eventually go that way and had Johnny and the Tennessee Two locked up in his basement every weekend so that the guys could record another bunch of sloppy demos for him to polish in later years. To add insult to injury — what’s with the album title? This is definitely not a «greatest-hits» or a «best-of» compilation, provided the word greatest! refers to the included songs. If it refers to Johnny himself, then it’s certainly debatable, but even if we agree that he is, in fact, greatest!, this particular album does a rather mediocre job of upholding that claim. Don’t record executives know that employing dishonest marketing strategies reduces one’s chance of going to Heaven?
The only good thing to be said about Greatest! is that at least all the songs on here had not been previously released on any other Sun LPs — and only one song out of twelve, ‘Get Rhythm’, had been previously released as a single while Cash was still legally bound to Sun (in 1956; it was already mentioned in the review of With His Hot And Blue Guitar!). Of the remaining eleven tracks, eight represent A- and B-sides released by Sun in between late 1958 and the fall of 1959, and three are covers of classic Hank Williams tunes which Phillips liked so much, he would later add one more and release all four again on a new LP called Johnny Cash Sings Hank Williams (where, of course, only those four tracks would be songs by Hank Williams and the others would be old Cash classics, probably making the customer wonder if Hank Williams really wrote ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ and if so, why the heck don’t they ever play Hank’s original on the radio?).
Anyway, the eight new-old songs are nice, but nothing too special. Some of them were released with extra overdubs, adding backing vocals to originally sparser tracks — a practice frowned upon by loyal fans, yet not too much of a crime in the light of the original recordings not being all that great to begin with. Jack Clement’s ‘Just About Time’ and Charlie Rich’s ‘I Just Thought You’d Like To Know’ are two fairly ordinary tales of love-gone-wrong, with heavy emphasis on the piano (quite similar to Jerry Lee Lewis’ playing style on his country records, but actually played by someone else) and not a lot to add to the legend of Johnny’s story-telling skills. More interesting in that respect is the better known ‘Luther Played The Boogie’, Johnny’s own tribute to his good friend Luther Perkins whose repetitive chorus will either amuse you or annoy you, but it’s at least novel how Johnny makes his voice match the up-and-down boogie-woogie scale of "Luther played the boogie-woogie, Luther played the boogie-woogie" — it’s a bit of a sentimental musical joke, and it gets me in a good mood.
Another musical joke, a bit too close-to-home this time, is ‘Katy Too’, a lightweight hymn to swinging and infidelity which sort of makes an uncomfortable contrast with ‘I Walk The Line’ (I’d love to see those two combined as an A- and B-side!), but then nobody ever said that Johnny Cash himself was a «comfortable» man. Of course, he’s actually playing a character and all, holding up the old folk tradition of ramblin’ men ballads, but given Johnny’s difficult history of relationships with his women, there is certainly a piece of himself in here as well. "I like Mary’s barbecue / But I still like ol’ Katy too" is not nearly as removed from the man’s life creed as one would hope to think. Then again, you can just take it as a lil’ ol’ catchy country ditty and leave it at that. The B-side was ‘I Forgot To Remember To Forget’, which he seems to sing as close to the Elvis original as possible, so I’ll probably not forget to remember to forget. Nor is there anything particularly outstanding to remember about ‘Goodbye Little Darlin’, backed with ‘You Tell Me’ — regular country patterns with regular bitter feelings scattered across the notes.
As for the Hank Williams covers... well, pretty much the only situation in which I could understand somebody covering Hank Williams would be a complete reinvention of one of his songs in an entirely different style (like, for instance, Jerry Lee Lewis’ conversion of ‘Jambalaya’ into breakneck-speed, maniacal rock’n’roll). These songs are more like a dutiful tribute to Hank Williams, and you’d have to really go gaga over Johnny’s deep voice to have a single reason to put on this cover of ‘You Win Again’ ever again. Even worse is the simple, bare-bones and truncated version of ‘Hey Good Lookin’, which, in Hank’s original version, might just be the single most joyful, uplifting, and hilarious country tune of all time — here, it sounds like something Johnny might have absent-mindedly played in rehearsal, then left it forgotten on the shelf until Sam Phillips picked it up and packaged it as one super-important artist’s personal vision of another super-important artist, which it simply isn’t. It’s just the kind of cover that any of us might produce if we were learning guitar, putting together a little band, and taking Hank Williams as a role model.
Overall, this is a predictable disappointment; perhaps ‘Luther Played The Boogie’ and ‘Katy Too’ are salvageable for those who really appreciate Johnny’s somewhat stiff, but amicable humorous side, but the other songs are either way too derivative or simply way too pointless to linger on for long. At least, as I said, most of them had been previously unreleased on LP; most of Sun’s subsequent Johnny Cash albums would be horrendous mix-ups of previously released tracks with absolute barrel scraps «sweetened up» with extra overdubs, so, with your permission, I shall probably omit most of them as we continue to trace Johnny’s recording career (rich enough, might I say, without having to pay close attention to every trifle Sun Records thought it necessary to make some extra money on).
The only songs I've heard from these are "Get Rhythm," which is one of my favorite Johnny Cash songs, and his covers of "Hey Good Lookin'" and "You Win Again," which, unlike you, I think are pretty much misfires. They're obviously good songs at their core, but without the weeping, world-weary phrasings of Hank, they just don't work. I'm not saying Johnny is not as deep, but their charismas are just too dissimilar for these covers to really work. Outside of that, haven't really heard anything else, but based on your review, probably will steer clear of the rest of the album.