songs:365

Tag: johnny-cash

  • day 340: Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie

    Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie, by Johnny Cash.

    This song is not really karaoke-appropriate, but it’s one I love to sing/speak-sing along to in the car/train/boxcar/etc.

    I was playing a lot of the songs off the early American Recordings albums when I met my wife, so they tend to place me on a motel front porch in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico, strumming a guitar with a Tecate very close at hand, among other things.

    It is, of course, as with anything from those albums, more or less, a #cover-of-a-cover, being itself a cowboy traditional cover of a sailor’s lament. And then a Lomax recorded it, and then a Rogers made it famous, and somewhere in the distance beyond that, a Cash did the thing.

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  • day 225: Thirteen

    Thirteen, by Johnny Cash.

    Um, I think this is the first post in this project to really require a disambiguation section, maybe? Because this song is one Johnny Cash recorded, after (I assume Rick Rubin?) asked Danzig to write one for him. So it’s a Danzig song, but not really a #cover-of-a-cover? Says a lot of good things about Danzig that it sounds like an old standard, and obviously the kind of thing Johnny Cash would sing.

    But also, I think it might be the first song in this project to repeat a title from a previous song? I haven’t been keeping track.

    And, yes, it’s Friday the 13th, which I didn’t (consciously) notice when picking this from a list of songs on American Recordings (vol. 1), or playing it.

    Also, yes, back home with the black hat, and resolving to switch back to the real microphone and whatnot. Tomorrow. Probably.

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  • day 175: Tennessee Stud

    Tennessee Stud, by Johnny Cash.

    It’s later years Rick Rubin produced Johnny Cash, so no surprise this song is actually a #cover-of-a-cover and is really a Doc Watson song.

    Lucky for me, I love Doc Watson songs, but haven’t listened to the classics in a while, so now he’s on the project list.

    I was describing my “oh crap I don’t have a plan and it’s getting late, better go to the Johnny/Willie/Bob well again” project planning method to my partner earlier tonight, and softly sang a couple ideas, and she suggested this one without further prompting, and my dears, her wish is my command, so it is done.

    //

    More echo, more reverb, more black hats.

    Apparently, Johnny plays this in B? But I learned it without a capo years ago. (Not coincidentally around the time I met my wife, and I like the open chords.)

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  • day 119: Big River

    Big River, by Johnny Cash.

    Look, I know I’m going to have to look up the origin story of this one, but it’s a Johnny Cash song! How can it not be a Johnny Cash song??

    [looks it up]

    It IS a Johnny Cash song, thank goodness!!!

    I know I watched the Johnny Cash show with my dad when I was little but… [looks it up] uhhh it last aired a solid five years before I was born, so maybe we were watching reruns on like PBS or something? Or we just watched the same Johnny Cash special over and over? Or this all happened one night and made up a whole series? Or my dad would leave Johnny Cash on the TV any time he was on? Or it was that one episode of the Muppet Show?

    I literally have no idea which of these is true.

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    Added a bass-via-guitar-transposed-an-octave-down line, and that’s all. Would consider a brushy drum track if I had the patience tonight.

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  • day 77: The Man Who Couldn’t Cry

    The Man Who Couldn’t Cry, by Johnny Cash (and Loudon Wainwright III).

    When I started this project, I didn’t know how many covers-of-covers would be involved, nor would I have expected to play three Loudon Wainwright III songs in the first 77 days, but here we are, because it really might be the fourth Johnny Cash song, depending on how we’re classifying these things.

    I am a pedant when it comes to taxonomy, but part of the fun of this project is playing and singing songs I have always wanted to play and sing, and another part of the fun has turned out to be finding inspiration in the (heavily curated and crafted by my own habits) serendipity of the music that pops onto Spotify in the car on the way back from soccer practice or while I’m making breakfast, and just reflecting back the soundtrack of my day.

    This song (the original) came on today as we left the parking lot at soccer practice, and I made the 10-year-old listen a little, and maybe it was the rain, or maybe he was curious, or maybe he happened to drift into his own world right then, or replay the goal he scored, or maybe it really was the rain, but he seemed to be listening, didn’t complain, and didn’t reflexively chime in with his own pedantry about the impossibility of the lyrics.

    Or maybe I just tuned him out. 😉

    Kept it bare bones tonight, though I did have to tune up out of the weird Pavement stuff from yesterday.

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  • day 69: I’ve Been Everywhere

    I’ve Been Everywhere, by Johnny Cash.

    Let’s just assume you’re here for the feeling of this song, and not the audio quality. Still a long way to go to get this new mic position right, especially for a song like this where I want to bang away at the strings in the big dumb black hat, because Johnny Cash.

    I am no Rick Rubin, though we have “NYU dorm room” in common. He was incrementally more enterprising and entrepreneurial in his.

    OK, I have been to 31 places mentioned in this song. What’s your score?

    Also, the one I absolutely butchered, well, more than the rest, was Ombabika, and if you mash your mouse on that link, you’ll find someone who visited is visiting? WAS visiting?? all 92 places mentioned in this song.

    And apparently he is not the only one. This is a thing. His last post was March 11, and was a different post about Ombabika, which apparently is not easy to get to. Upon further review, I think he did it?

    Goals.im

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  • day 29: Down There By The Train

    Down There By The Train by Johnny Cash (originally by Tom Waits)

    The American Recordings series of Johnny Cash albums were a favorite of mine toward the end of my years in New York, but this song ended up being the one I learned best back then. I was playing it a lot when I met my wife, and so it stuck with me.

    I didn’t read the liner notes closely enough in those days to figure out this was a Tom Waits song — I might’ve not known that until looking it up earlier this month to put on my list for this project. Tom’s original is just as sweet, even a little less dark. Oh, and there’s a bonus verse I’d never heard.

    One full take after a false start, just a little reverb and whatnot, and we’re done. The end of a long week.

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