Usually, when an artist of stature passes, the record company (or companies, and sometimes even family, look at the sad posthumous legacy of
Townes Van Zandt for example) raid the vaults and unearth loads of embarrassing garbage along with a few gems. Personal File, issued by Sony Legacy, is very different. For starters, other than
Hank Williams, there are no artists who have
Cash's stature (arguably not even
Jimmie Rodgers). Secondly, this material was not stored in Columbia's vaults but
Cash's own. He began recording these songs -- most of disc one, and four songs from disc two -- at home in 1973, for no one but himself. The rest come from the his personal file up through 1982. While closing down the studio, museum, and store,
John Carter Cash -- a fierce and honorable guardian of his parents' legacies -- invited the folks from Legacy in to sort through the many reels of demos, TV appearances, the awarding of honorary degrees, and speeches, and unreleased recordings. They found some tidy white boxes marked "Personal File," and it's from these tapes alone the tunes were drawn. Many of these are old
folk songs passed on through the ages, some
Cash sang as a kid, or heard from his companions: "Some of those old songs that I used to sing when I was a kid I still remember every word to 'em. A lot of 'em from the radio and I learned a lot of 'em from the boys across the road, the Williams boys, there was Guy and Otis Williams and Jack Williams. They didn't play the guitar or anything but they sang a little bit and they had a Victrola..." and
Cash recalls the names, records, and performers, and then says "Bradley Kincaid might have sung this song, I can't quite remember....." and then goes on to finish his intro and sing the song "There's a Mother Waiting at Home." He tells stories to introduce the tunes here. This is as close to a private concert as one could ever get. The portrait is so intimate the listener is tempted not to breathe. For example, when
Cash introduces "Far Away Places," he tells a story of one of the first talent contests he entered (he got only two votes) and thinks back that it might have been his selection of material that did him in, but it was the first song he ever sang in public. You can hear the memories, painful and hopeful, float back into the singer's delivery. His reading here of "Saginaw, Michigan" contains no peremptory tale, but the song says it all, and
Cash brings the intimacy of the tune's tragic narrative to life in the present. Likewise, it's followed by other Northern-themed tunes, "When It's Springtime in Alaska" and "Girl from Saskatoon," (written by
Cash and
Johnny Horton) before launching into a devastating read of
Robert Service's poem, "Cremation of Sam McGee." "It's All Over" is an original that comes from
Cash's early days and was never recorded properly in the studio. There are songs by
the Louvin Brothers,
John Prine ("Paradise"),
Doug Kershaw ("Louisiana Man"), and many others. Disc two is a collection of devotional songs, from well-known
hymns like "Lily of the Valley," "Farther Along," and "The Way Worn Traveler," to provocative tunes of unknown origin either in authorship or session detail, such as "If Jesus Ever Loved a Woman, (It was Mary Magdalene)" (and this was how many years before the -Da Vinci Code?) This tune and its delivery -- as well as its recording quality -- are open to speculation as to whether it is actually an original, improvised on the spot, and uncredited because of its controversial nature. There are gorgeous original songs such as "No Earthly Good," "What Is Man?" and the track
Greil Marcus' bases his liner notes on, "A Half a Mile a Day."
Marcus does his usual "big-American-dream-hoped-for-via-small-gesture -- of performance" riff here, but it is poetic and moving nonetheless. In sum, this is an utterly welcome and perhaps necessary addition to the
Cash catalog. This is history; it's lineage history in a sense,
Cash not forgetting the songs of his childhood or those he wrote for no other reason than to write them, or playing numbers by songwriters who were important to him. Personal File is an aural autobiography from one of the nation's greatest autobiographers; it's a portrait of the artist as a man, and a humble one at that. This is not even debatable as a purchase by
Cash fans, and goes a long way to explaining something so mercurial it still slips by even as these songs are grasped and internalized. The sound quality is warm, wonderful, and immediate; it's almost like having Cash in your home. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
