New Johnny Cash Album ‘Songwriter,’ Featuring Unreleased 1993 Tunes, Due In June

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Johnny Cash at Cash Cabin in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Photo: Alan Messer

A new album of previously unreleased Johnny Cash recordings from 1993 have been unearthed and compiled into a brand new album, Songwriter, featuring tunes penned solely by the master himself.

The album will be released June 28 via Mercury Nashville/UMe, and a first taste of the project can be heard with “Well Alright,” an upbeat, infectious tune featuring a galloping beat and taut acoustic upright bass about finding love in, of all places, the laundromat.

In early 1993, Cash found himself between contracts and recorded an album’s worth of demos at LSI Studios in Nashville. 30 years later, son John Carter Cash rediscovered the songs and stripped them back to just the powerful vocals and acoustic guitar. Along with co-producer David “Fergie” Ferguson, the two invited a select group of musicians that played with Cash, including guitarist and Hall of Famer Marty Stuart, the late bassist Dave Roe, drummer Pete Abbott and several others to the Cash Cabin in Hendersonville, Tennessee, to breathe new life into the tracks and take them back to the roots and heart of the songs.

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Songwriter kicks off with the opening track, “Hello Out There,” which sounds like Cash reaching out from the beyond concerned about mankind and the state of the world. “Poor Valley Girl” is about wife June Carter Cash and her mother, country pioneer, Maybelle Carter, likely written in the wake of her passing in 1978. “Drive On” was inspired by the chronic pain he suffered from due to a broken jaw in the early ’90s and is about the hardships endured by veterans in the Vietnam War.

The 11-track collection showcases the breadth of Cash’s writing, with songs of love, family, sorrow, beauty, spiritual salvation, survival, redemption and some lighthearted humor he was known for as well. Songwriter will be available to stream and download, as well as on CD and a variety of vinyl options, including standard black and several limited edition color variants.

“I wanted it to be songs that mostly people hadn’t heard and that paid close attention to who he was as a songwriter and who he was as an American voice,” says John Carter. “One of my most important focuses in the past 10 years is to make sure that history, as best that I can possibly, is to give history the opportunity to notice him as the great writer he is. Bob Dylan says he’s one of the greatest writers of all of American written music and I agree. I want to put that in the forefront. His writing voice specifically is a certain voice, that I think if America wants to know their history, that’s a good place to look. Johnny Cash is definitely one true voice that we can listen to, specifically to his writings.”

Songwriter Track List:
1. Hello Out There
2. Spotlight
3. Drive On
4. I Love You Tonite
5. Have You Ever Been to Little Rock?
6. Well Alright
7. She Sang Sweet Baby James
8. Poor Valley Girl
9. Soldier Boy
10. Sing It Pretty Sue
11. Like A Soldier

Lorie Hollabaugh
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