It is nearly impossible to listen to Johnny Cash’s last American recordings without thinking of Jimmie Rodgers.  Both artists filled their last days with a need to wring every last drip of their artistry before they left us, to peer into the other side and send us dispatches of what they saw.  Is it almost too raw to bear?  Is it painful?  Of course, it is death, front and center and unfiltered.  It is bound to make us uncomfortable, accustomed as we are to facing death made up picture pretty.  We live in an era when songs about death are songs meant to keep the realities of death at bay.  The songs on America VI:  Ain't No Grave are intimate and personal; they are Johnny Cash dealing with his own death the way he always dealt with his own life, honestly, spiritually and in song.

Many of the songs on the albums are spirituals, in keeping with Cash’s deep and abiding faith.  But even here, he doesn’t pontificate about finding God in a blade of grass or a baby’s smile.  These are bone, blood and sinew ballads that pull straight from the Bible.  The album opens with the defiant Ain’t No Grave, which serves to remind us that Johnny’s soul will be in heaven and his voice will remain on earth.  There will be nothing of importance housed in his coffin.  Sheryl Crow’s Redemption Day becomes follow up to Man in Black with Cash entreating us to prepare our place in heaven by caring for the world around us.  He borrows songs from old friends like Kris Kristofferson and Porter Wagoner (and Bobby Hebb) covering For the Good Times and Satisfied Mind respectively.  Cash closes the album by, quite literally, saying good-bye with the standard Aloha Oe.

Of course, these songs are Johnny Cash filtered through Rick Ruben.  Here is where we are all lucky to have a filter that so sincerely loved and respected Cash the man and musician.  There is a gravitas to this album, a haunting knowledge that this will be the last album of original music from Johnny Cash ever.  As such, it is a more than fitting album.  It is not a retrospective of the man’s work, nor is it an overview of everything he had ever done.  It is, however, the perfect final chapter for Johnny Cash’s musical career.  

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