American Communion; Johnny Cash thought his recording career was over.(Critical Essay)(Biography)

BYLINE: David Kamp

The last song that Johnny Cash ever wrote is called "Like the 309." Like the first single he ever recorded, "Hey Porter," from 1955, it's a train song. Cash loved trains-he made two concept albums about them in the early 1960s, Ride This Train and All Aboard the Blue Train, dangled his legs from atop a boxcar on the cover of his '65 album, Orange Blossom Special, and, in the liner notes to his 1996 album, Unchained, listed "railroads" second in his litany of favorite song subjects, right after "horses" and just before "land, judgment day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak, and love. And Mother. And God."

Trains resonated with Cash, and no wonder. He spent his first years in a house hard by the railroad tracks in Kingsland, Arkansas. He counted among his earliest memories the image of his father, Ray, a Depression-era cotton farmer who rode the freights in search of work when there wasn't cotton to pick, jumping out of a moving boxcar and rolling down into a ditch, coming to stillness only as he lay before the family's front door. Trains were in Cash's veins, insinuating their boom-chicka-boom rhythms into his early records for Sam Phillips's Sun label (in fact, he later recorded a nostalgic album harking back to his Sun years called Boom Chicka Boom) and serving him lyrically as metaphors for adventure, progress, danger, strength, lust, and American Manifest Destiny.

But "Like the 309" is less lofty than all that. "See everybody, I'm doin' fine / Load my box on the 309," he sings. "Put me in my box on the 309 ... Asthma comin' down like the 309." Yielding to a fiddle solo, Cash stops singing and starts ... wheezing-tubercularly, hammily, on purpose; he's conflating the groaning, hacking sounds of his dying body with those of an old locomotive. It's "Hey Porter" turned on its ear, the boxcar interment of the brazen, respiratorily robust young buck who sang in the earlier song, "Tell that engineer I said thanks a lot, and I didn't mind the fare / I'm gonna set my feet on Southern soil and breathe that Southern air." And Cash is playing it for laughs.

Every time Cash does one of his comic wheezes, the fellow to the left of me on the couch chuckles but keeps his eyes closed. He listens to the playback intently, legs folded in the lotus position, arms relaxed, feet unshod, his body rocking back and forth in time to the music, lending him the air of a shaman communing with the other world-or, given his untrimmed beard, a Lubavitcher rebbe in the throes of Sabbath davening. When the song ends, the bearded fellow snaps to and says, "Let me play you another one." The next recording, also from the final weeks of Cash's life, is of a folk song called "The Oak and the Willow," which begins, "He once was as strong as a giant oak tree / Now he bends in the wind like a willow ... " Another song about death, but this time dead serious, and beautiful. Sung from the point of view of a dying man's son, the lyrics conclude, "A part of my heart will forever be lost when the oak and the willow are gone." As the song ends, the bearded fellow, Rick Rubin, still has his eyes closed, but that doesn't keep the tears from running down his face.

In the decade they knew each other, from their first meeting in 1993 to Cash's death on September 12 of last year, Rubin produced five studio albums for Cash. From the moment their collaboration was announced, it caused a stir-at first, just for the odd-couple novelty of their pairing: the Man in Black, confirmed citizen of Nashville, and the inscrutable ZZ Top-lookin' dude who founded the hip-hop label Def Jam records in his New York University dorm room with Russell Simmons and later made a name for himself as a producer of hard-rock acts such as AC/DC, Slayer, and Danzig.

But no one was less fazed by the seeming incongruity of the new alliance than Cash-"I'd dealt with the long-haired element before and it didn't bother me at all," he commented, drolly adding that he found "great beauty in men with perfectly trained beards"-and it didn't take long for people to look past the Bard-Beard angle and get stirred up by the music itself. The first fruit of their collaboration, American Recordings, released in 1994, reconnected Cash with his fundamental Johnny Cash-ness, featuring just him and his guitar, playing the rootsy, heartfelt material that he longed to play but that achy-breaky 1980s Nashville had wanted no part of. The subsequent albums of the American series-so named because all the sequels except Unchained have "American" in their title (American III: Solitary Man; American IV: The Man Comes Around) and because Rubin's label also happens to be called American Recordings-were even better, mixing the rootsier material with Rubin-suggested, idiomatically unlikely songs that, once Cashified, came to be celebrated in the rock world: Soundgarden's high-grunge yowler "Rusty Cage" re-done as a bluegrass shuffle; Depeche Mode's aloof synth-pop song "Personal Jesus" as a swamp blues; and, most celebratedly, Nine Inch Nails' drug-addict confessional "Hurt" as an old man's devastating appraisal of his life, with the most stunning climax in a pop song since the orchestral glissando in the Beatles' "A Day in the Life." As for "Like the 309" and "The Oak and the Willow," they'll appear on the as-yet-unsubtitled American V, most of which was recorded last year in the four-month span between the May 15 death of Cash's wife, June Carter Cash, and his own passing-a raw, grief-stricken period during which Cash kept his loneliness at bay by writing and recording at a furious pace, as often as his strength would allow. American V comes out this fall.