Johnny Cash, Unearthed

Although it would be a mistake to overpraise the last decade of the Man in Black’s career, it’s certainly true that the four albums in his American Recordings series more than rehabilitated his eighties-era reputation as an irrelevance. The work he did with producer Rick Rubin was of such consistent high quality that when he died in September, his status as one of the century’s great American singers was unquestionable. No posthumous rediscovery needed here. The new box set Unearthed treats his legacy with due gravity, even while its raison d’etre is largely to clear out Rubin’s vaults of the Cash material that didn’t quite make the cut for the initial releases. This wouldn’t be the place to begin exploring Cash’s work, but the sixty-four previously unreleased songs here include any number of must-hears for the initiated. Among those are an entire disc of acoustic spirituals Cash learned from his mother as a boy, and his duet with Joe Strummer on Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”—beautifully low-key and dignified, a worthy song to remember both of the dearly departed by.