Customer Reviews

America

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
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If you're thinking of investing in your first Cash concept album, i'd recommend Ride This Train (1960). Try that, see if you like it. I loved Ride This Train, but wasn't as impressed by America, and sort of regretted paying retail for it. Like most of the Cash concept albums, its well under thirty minutes total, and each of the songs are slight two-minute affairs, the rest being made up by the between-song narration. In Ride This Train, the narration is backed by the sound of a train, which works quite well. On America, Cash just narrates in silence, and it doesn't work as well. I think Ride This Train has better songs, too. Preview 'Loading Coal,' opening track of Ride This Train, with its crisp production and assured vocal, and see for yourself.

I can't say enough about this CD. Like previous viewers, I too wore out this cassette as a child listening to it on family vacations. I know every word and song and basically this is how I began to learn American History. I was thrilled to see it available on CD a few years ago. Combination song and "spoken word," Johnny is in top form. Well, better go because "I'm goin' west to Kentuck, down the road to moccasin gap!"

Johnny Cash is cleary an icon in country music, but he is often neglected when the great folk singers come to mind. This album is clearly a testament to his versatility. I have been blown away by his recent releases from American Recordings. Rick Rubin seemed to call back to a period when Johnny was doing great folk cuts with a hillbilly twist (Unchained); and in this collection I see where it may have started. Big Foot, The West, and Paul Revere have an honesty that only one can display when they really care about the subject at hand. Guthrie, Elliot, and Dylan all have and had it; and Johnny Cash belongs in their category! During these patriotic times people often look to art as a window of escape. Johnny Cash does that with these songs; and I don't believe anybody loves America more than he does! Buy this with confidence. Enjoy!

Let me tell you, this was one of my favorite tapes that finally wore out... Now that it is on CD listening to it again clean and crisp is a pleasure. Ablums with songs like this are a hard find. you have to have this one if you like Johnny Cash.

Johnny Cash is a voice from along time ago for me, a voice I heard and enjoyed for the first time in North Carolina in the late 60s, yes after Woodstock that occupied my musical conscience a lot too. What attracts me, and many other people, in this music?

First it is the country style, and I should say his country style which is very distinctive by the voice and the systematic, too systematic some would say, opening chords. We can recognize his songs because of that trait. It is not in every song, for sure, but quite present.

Second the themes are often dealing with crime, outlaw-ness, prison, the death penalty, the loss of freedom and the dream of freedom. Of course his concerts in prisons are famous and the songs he wrote to these prisons are well-known but he sings in prisons and about prisons to celebrate freedom, a sort of compensation for the inmates, a sort of relief for the ex-con he may have been, the demonstration that no matter what a man is free everywhere, even where he is locked up and tied up and humiliated. Freedom is in the head and not in the hands and guns of judges that gavel things away and prison wardens that ring their sticks on all the bars of the gates.

The third interest is his singing about love. For him love is simple: I am yours and you are mine, hence I keep on the line. That means love is a way to live with someone else and to share duties and chores, to live under common choices and with common objectives. He does not elaborate on the subject more than that.

The fourth element is America and its rebellious history. It is amazing how he rewrites the history of the United States in that simple perspective that the constitution is to be improved all the time to keep the promise of a government from the people, for the people and by the people. At times he speaks like Obama spoke in his campaign. But he does not deal with the serious dramas of modern history that we know. These dramas were divisive and he looks for unity, the unity of the United States after Gettysburg.

Then he wrote some songs that were absolutely luminously brilliant and my favorite in that line is the Boy Named Sue. It portrays the relation between a father and a son in the most loving and moving terms. I think that it is probably one of the best songs ever written in the world about that subject, the recognition of the enormous debt a son has towards his father, and the acknowledgement of the tremendous responsibility a father has towards his son. And what's more this is contradictory and that contradiction is expressed entirely in a name. No love is lost here but there is a lot of love there anyway, but certainly not wasted.

The song about his ending up in prison because he was picking a dandelion flower after midnight in a city that had a curfew to prevent the roaming around of bad guys is also very funny and original, and yes I have experienced that in a small city in North Carolina. I did not end up in prison and with a ticket but I had to prove my identity because I was too close to some flowers in the street late at night.

That's what is most moving in Johnny Cash. He is speaking to us of a world that we have encountered, visited, liked and feared, disliked and jeered, and the night when I was more or less "kidnapped" for a few hours by some frantic students who pretended to be the Ku Klux Klan is one episode that goes in that direction: a deep love-fear relation with the deeper layers of the American society.

And yet I defended peace in Vietnam under Nixon, including in the press and no one ever said anything against the right to do so, even if they were in full disagreement with the content. My best recollection in that line is when I was asked, by a local newspaper, my opinion on Davis California in 1974 or so and I answered that I loved the extreme quiet working atmosphere of this campus city but that it was cut from the rest of the world like an intellectual ghetto. Some did not like the "ghetto".

That's what Johnny Cash is for me and He is not aging that much altogether.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

This recording is for Cash fans and Patriots, hard for me to see a difference. This is an update of an LP that seeks retirement.

Johnny Cash probably recorded these songs and narrations connected with the Bicentennial back in the 1970s. A great collection which did and ought today again give the listener some pause for thought and reflection. In the 1960s Cash did record, as did others, some songs that really did make a difference in America. He was an original. This album shows why for some of us he remains larger than life and why we thought that recent movie on his life omitted much that could have been told, things very much to his credit.
His narration "Ragged Old Flag" is one of the most stirring patriotic recordings ever made.

Used to have this on 8 track tape now have it on cd. Someone took the tape and never returned it. A history in song of hapenings in this contry.

I have always liked Johnny Cash. But this CD made me think of what a great county we live in. He says it very well.

I bought this album on vinyl when it was released in 1973. I was in the sixth grade and was the only kid I knew that listened to Johnny. I still have the record but it is good to see this old gem release on cd for a whole new audience. Buy this, you won't regret it.