Not long before Johnny Cash died, he recorded a collection of songs that were to become the next segment in his American Recordings series.  Although Cash didn’t live to hear the final result, producer and friend Rick Rubin recruited a group of musicians and added acoustic guitars, strings, and keyboards to Cash’s baritone, creating the album American V: A Hundred Highways, a haunting meditation on death that embodies Cash’s sincerity at its finest.

Like much of his previous work, the album is an exercise in contradictions: resilience vs. defeat, humor vs. misery, permanence vs. transiency, love found vs. love lost, the secular vs. the religious.  Each song is another link on his cavalcade towards finality, and Cash’s knack for making other performers’ compositions his own is on full display here.  

The album begins with Cash singing, “Oh Lord, help me to walk another mile, just one more” and hints at the singer’s broken down, brokenhearted state while his voice, reduced to a near whisper, sounds so brittle it could crack.

As these words indicate, spirituality is one of the running themes on the album, and is best seen in the traditional “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” where Cash reflects on the universal notion of mortality through God’s eyes, although his own mortality clearly weighs on his mind.  A razor-like slide guitar cuts across Cash’s evangelical vocals as the backup band stomps its way through the song’s duration, pounding home the Biblical message.  

Two of the compositions were written by Cash himself, including “Like the 309,” the last he wrote before his death.  Here we see a defiant Cash staring down death with his confident swagger, reminding us that he’s not gone until his casket’s on the 309 (a little more poignantly now since he is in fact gone).

Almost directly paralleling “Like the 309” is Hank Williams’ “On the Evening Train,” the story of a man whose deceased spouse is being carried back home.  Given his physical state and his own wife’s death shortly before this recording, Cash turns in a remarkable performance containing arguably the strongest vocals on the album.  

Most of the other tracks continue along a similar vain, telling stories of love, death, and God.  The final cut, “I’m Free From the Chain Gang Now,” would have taken on a wholly different meaning at an earlier period of his life.   As the last song on this collection, its metaphorical connotations become quite apparent.  

While each person experiences death individually, most of us won’t know how we’ll react until our own fates are nearby.  As one of the few performers infused with the spirit of the American outlaw, Johnny Cash left us one last piece of music and a final lesson on our own mortality.  

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