Review: Johnny Cash - Sings The Songs That Made Him Famous (1958)
Tracks: 1) Ballad Of A Teen-Age Queen; 2) There You Go; 3) I Walk The Line; 4) Don’t Make Me Go; 5) Guess Things Happen That Way; 6) Train Of Love; 7) The Ways Of A Woman In Love; 8) Next In Line; 9) You’re The Nearest Thing To Heaven; 10) I Can’t Help It; 11) Home Of The Blues; 12) Big River.
REVIEW
For just one moment, you might be left wondering how on Earth it was possible for an artist (at least, not a jazz one) to put out two completely different LPs in the space of less than two months in the year 1958. The answer, however, lies on the surface and is extremely clear: while the first LP was indeed a new one, put together by Johnny for his new record label (Columbia), the second was merely an instinctive reaction from his old one (Sun Records), which he had just turned his back on due to lack of attention. Belatedly, Sam Phillips turned around and, seeing how quickly Johnny’s fame and fortune began to grow with Columbia, ordered the release of this compilation — under a title that simply screams out J-E-A-L-O-U-S in big neon letters, but which, in a way, is also true, since it puts together six of Johnny’s Sun singles from 1956–1958, all of which made it to the Top 10 of the US country charts, and some of which made it to the Top 20 of the general Billboard Hot 100.
The only redundancy here is ‘I Walk The Line’, which was already included on Hot And Blue Guitar, but I guess that, since this was really the song par excellence that had «made him famous», Sam just couldn’t resist putting it on the LP as well (not that it helped — despite all the bravura, the LP failed to chart). The album would have been better rounded out if it also included ‘Come In, Stranger’, the original B-side to ‘Guess Things Happen That Way’, and ‘Give My Love To Rose’, the B-side of ‘Home Of The Blues’ — for some reason, both were left out, even if it would be hard to prove that they are in some way inferior in quality to most of what is on here. (Cash would later re-record both of these, even multiple times, but the original performances all come from the early Sun days). Instead, we have this extra fix of ‘I Walk The Line’, and one other outtake, the decently recorded, but predictable and not particularly necessary cover of Hank Williams’ ‘I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You’, which Johnny tries to perform as close to Hank’s original inflection as possible.
Anyway, all of this is typical Sun-era Cash with the Tennessee Two, but if you arrange the songs in chronological order, you will notice signs of evolution which prove that his stylistic change from Sun to Columbia was, in fact, gradual and already predetermined before he switched to the bigger label. The first two singles after ‘I Walk The Line’ are still completely in the old minimalistic style: ‘There You Go’ (the "you’re gonna break another heart, you’re gonna tell another lie..." one) is strict boom-chica-boom with a note-for-note vocal-imitating solo from Perkins, and ‘Next In Line’ only sounds a little bit denser because Cash’s acoustic guitar is brought higher into the mix than before (also, if you focus your attention on Perkins’ solo, he plays a few bars of ‘Baby Shark’ in there... why don’t we all go to YouTube and slam a few billion views on this sucker?) So are their respective B-sides, of which ‘Train Of Love’ is the bouncier and catchier one, and ‘Don’t Make Me Go’ is the slower and Hankier one.
However, ‘Home Of The Blues’, recorded in July 1957 in Memphis, gives us a bigger sound — fattened up by a lively piano track that runs through the entire song and ghostly whoo-whooing backing vocals. Although both the piano and the voices are still kept deep in the mix compared to the Trio, it is still a clear 180 degree turn, and one that may not necessarily have been appreciated by fans of the old Johnny Cash sound; fortunately, the song itself is one of Johnny’s best from that period, his own bitter take on the ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ aesthetics, nowhere near as flashy as Elvis’, but pretty piercing when he gets to that "I just want to give up and lay down and die" bit in the bridge section. Not sure if the piano track was really necessary here, but the gloomy backing vocals do lend the recording a useful ghostly atmosphere.
This is followed by something completely different — ‘Ballad Of A Teenage Queen’, a little sentimental tale with no piano and no electric guitar (just the bass), but with several overdubbed sets of vocal harmonies, including what sounds like a barbershop quartet echoing Johnny’s vocals, and some quasi-operatic falsetto wailings from a lady called in to add a few extra strokes to Johnny’s portrait of "the prettiest girl around, golden hair and eyes of blue". The song is almost childishly simplistic in melody and attitude, which may have been one of the reasons why it quickly became Cash’s biggest hit up to date — and I think that people are still debating whether he was being perfectly serious or deeply ironic when recording it, because there is clearly no obvious answer. I mean, if ‘Home Of The Blues’ was Johnny’s equivalent of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, then ‘Ballad Of A Teenage Queen’ is more or less his ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’, meaning that you are entitled to hate this song today, love it tomorrow, and stay on the right side of justice every time. One thing’s more or less for certain: back in 1958, it gave every boy next door working at the candy store something to hope for.
As a solid piece of music, however, the B-side ‘Big River’ is unquestionably stronger — one of Cash’s gutsier and rockabillier numbers, possibly the fiercest of his musical statements after ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ (if nowhere near as socially relevant). The fierceness in question is generated by the opening «mini-battle» between Perkins and Cash, the former «taunting» Johnny with his thin electric riff and the latter «chasing» Luther with his battered acoustic rhythm chords, as if playing out the protagonist’s chase after the mysterious elusive woman in the lyrics. (Funny thing is that here Johnny sings an extra verse in the song, complaining that they originally forced him to cut it out because the song was too long — but then why the hell does he repeat the opening "now I taught the weeping willow..." verse at the end of the song instead of using the extra one? something about those memories just doesn’t add up, if you ask me).
The doo-woppy vocal harmonies and the rollickin’ piano, now much louder than before, make their return with ‘Guess Things Happen That Way’, which went on to become an even bigger hit than ‘Teen-Age Queen’ (incidentally, both were written by one and the same songwriter, Jack Clement, who kind of became Cash’s own Max Martin for a short while) and was also infamously banned by the BBC for lines such as "God gave me that girl to lean on, then he put me on my own" (apparently, the Force was way too strong with the BBC’s religious supervision back in 1958). Are the harmonies fitting or not? I have no answer to that question, but they do give the song an odd flavor, mixing country and doo-wop in a rather novel way, which probably also contributed to its success, so I vote stay for now.
Finally, we have ‘The Ways Of A Woman In Love’, the last Sun single that was on the way to stores and radio stations while Johnny was already negotiating his future with Columbia — no backing vocals, but the piano still stays, delivering a soft and soothing accompaniment to what sounds like a soft and soothing pro-woman song (Johnny delivers the line "you’ve got the ways of a woman in love" with the same kind of delightful purr with which men comment on women’s glowing beauty during pregnancy, or something like that), but is in reality a bitter complaint that she likes him instead of me. The backing vocals do return on the B-side, ‘You’re The Nearest Thing To Heaven’, in the form of a gospel choir — because you’re the nearest thing to Heaven, after all, and Johnny was never short on religiously stylized compliments to his ladies, though he certainly did this in his own way, rather than, say, Ray Charles’.
As usual, all of this stuff sounds way too deceptively primitive (or even bland) upon first listen, but opens up in more and more intricate details as you press on, and particularly when you start spending a little time analyzing it for another record review. In a more solid narrative of Johnny’s evolution than the one I am offering, The Songs That Made Him Famous should have naturally been covered before his Columbia debut, since they are the obvious not-so-missing link between his earliest rockabilly period at Sun and his emergence as America’s leading no-bull moralist at Columbia. But even if you just arrange all the tracks in decent chronological order, they still come together as a little mini-journey of their own, quite involving and intriguing without any context. The same could not be said about subsequent Sun releases, most of which had to scrape the bottom of the barrel, but with this one, they almost got it right.
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