Johnny Cash: The Hospice Sessions

Let me tell you a story about my dad and Johnny Cash. Many American music lovers of a certain age could spin out such a connection; Cash is primary among artists who represent the tough psyche of the post-war patriarchal male, his music exposing the connections between empowerment and violence, pride and repression, that defined an ideal still romanticized long after it became dated.

Frank Sinatra did it, tux tie loosened, with a Scotch in his hand. Muddy Waters shouted about it in a sharkskin suit before the folkies persuaded him to put on overalls. Cash wore black, keeping everything primal even when he was playing a role or just goofing around. He was the ultimate father figure, King James biblical in proportion, showing how deep a baritone voice and a limited color wheel could go.

My father, also named John, was never a Cash fan. His taste ran more to the big bands and sentimental singers like Mario Lanza. But when he died of pancreatic cancer at 82, John T. Powers did so in a way that John R. Cash's late-period music perfectly describes. Exiting this world, the imperfect patriarch of my family was forced to reach for the essence of dignity in a way that both called upon and challenged him as a traditional American man, which is what Cash does on the album that producer Rick Rubin gives us now.

Drawing on my experience with my dad, I'd call “American VI: Ain't No Grave," due out Tuesday, Cash's hospice record. The singer lost his battle with diabetes and asthma months after he recorded these songs; during the sessions, his wife and primary support system, June Carter Cash, unexpectedly succumbed after heart surgery. Though he wasn't formally in end-of-life care, it's clear that when he selected and interpreted these 10 songs, he was closing his life's book.

Taken as a whole, the six-part American Recordings series offers a striking portrait of an artist confronting physical decline. The word “physical" is important here. Cash's late-coming sobriety and Rubin's ability to get the old showman to take himself seriously again, combined with the singer's natural tendency toward minimalism, produced a remarkable clarity.

There might be hokum on these albums -- as the critic Jody Rosen pointed out in a 2006 Slate essay, Cash going Goth with covers of Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode was “both great art and shameless kitsch" -- but there is no fat. Adopting Trent Reznor's angst, applying his own writing talents to old folk forms like the murder ballad, or simply praising the God who helped him get through, Cash unadorned every lyric, exposing the dumb phrases as well as the gems. The musicians Rubin enlisted to embellish the work, many of them famous but obviously all hushed by the legend's presence, listened and gave him room.

Cash's legend grew exponentially, because while Americans have heard many men in their prime declare themselves tough or wounded or murderous, we've been less open to the voices of the old or the vulnerable. The sound of Cash in decline was a powerful shock that reminded listeners of the breadth of every human life.