Sings Ballads of True West [Original recording remastered]

Johnny Cash | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (August 27, 2002)
• Original Release Date: 1965
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Original recording remastered
• Label: Sony
• ASIN: B00006GO9E
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #209,275 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Though not among Johnny Cash's strongest overall efforts, True West is not a completely failed experiment, either. Originally released in 1965 as a double album, it weaves Cash's narrations and original compositions with traditional songs and interpretations of other writers' material to draw one man's portrait of the Old West. Cash turns in some of his sturdiest vocals, virtually inhabiting the likes of "I Ride an Old Paint" and Carl Perkins's morbid "Ballad of Boot Hill." And he gets points for not scrubbing up some of the more raggedy old traditional lyrics. But there's often too much extraneous stuff--background singers, strings, sound effects--and while they are clearly to Cash's specifications and executed seamlessly, his own weather-beaten voice alone would usually have been more effective; for all the drama in his vocals, too much of this exasperating set sounds like background music. By the way, this album's mythmaking "Hardin Wouldn't Run" provided the basis for Bob Dylan's mythmaking "John Wesley Harding." The 2002 reissue adds a pair of bonus tracks. --John Morthland

Product Description

The Old West was never more vividly limned than it was on this 1965 concept album, one of Johnny's all-time best, reissued here with two bonus tracks! --This text refers to an alternate Audio CD edition.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very unusual and interesting collection, October 28, 2000

By 

Robert Miller (Eastern USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Sings the Ballads of the True West (Audio CD)

I have this on very scratchy old vinyl that a co-worker gave me several years back, and I love it. I intend to buy this CD. 25 minutes to go is absolutely hilarious even though it's the story of a very worried man counting down the minutes 'til his hanging. Johnny pulls it off with a mixture of hysteria and humor. The Streets of Laredo, Boot Hill, The Blizzard are all great songs - really miniature human interest stories. I also love the Shifting Whispering Sands. There is poetry besides singing on this CD. It is very different, very unusual and quite excellent. I recommend it!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars well mastered CD from DCC and it's classic music, September 24, 2000

By 

Bradley Olson (Bemidji, MN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sings the Ballads of the True West (Audio CD)

This recent reissue of "Johnny Cash Sings The Ballads of The True West" is well mastered by DCC's Steve Hoffman. The music is great and although the liner notes say 26 tracks, there are 20 tracks like the LP, and here are Steve Hoffman's words about why this happened: We had it all worked out to separate the narration from the songs by track numbers. The artwork was then printed. When we sent our new master tape to Sony for laser cutting. Someone there oooopsed and ignored my written instructions while reverting to the old 1960's album indexing. So, a mismatch. Sorry. Mistakes are sometimes made! Still good music, though

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an Old West for the ages, March 22, 2003

By 

Jerome Clark (Canby, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sings Ballads of True West (Audio CD)

Ballads of the True West is a remarkably smart and accomplished recording. Hearing it for the first time in many years, I made the happy discovery that it is better than I'd remembered it. With vast ambition Johnny Cash sought to put down One Big Statement about the Old West, tying together in one coherent whole strands of history, legend, and popular culture. The result could have been pretentious piffle. It is everything but. If the record is not perfect, it's close enough.

The failings are fairly minor. The two most consequential are (1) the occasional use of the annoying, kitschy harmony singing of the Statler Brothers (for whose need to exist in any context no persuasive evidence has ever been demonstrated) and (2) the late Shel Silverstein's dopey, mean joke of a song "25 Minutes to Go." There is also a serious factual error in the late Carl Perkins's "Ballad of Boot Hill," about the celebrated, endlessly chewed-over OK Corral gunfight. The song has Billy Clanton pleading for mercy before being gunned down by the merciless Earps and Doc Holliday. In fact, the outlaw who so pleaded was Billy's brother Ike, whom the Earp party let go unharmed (see the meticulous reconstruction of the incident in Allen Barra's excellent 1998 book Inventing Wyatt Earp). Billy, who indeed died, was well-armed and spoiling for a fight. Further, "Green Grow the Lilacs" was not, Cash's liner notes to the contrary, "written in 1848" by a Texas soldier in the Mexican War. It's a variant of the traditional Irish "Green Grows the Laurel," which was already of advanced age by 1848.

These quibbles aside, Cash was in extraordinary artistic, even if not personal, form when, with Tex Ritter's able assistance, he conceived and executed BTW. The authentic cowboy folk songs are as powerfully rendered as one could ask. The venerable frontier waltz "I Ride an Old Paint" turns into a timeless anthem of the cowboy experience in Cash's resonant reading. "The Streets of Laredo" is equally magisterial, and "Sam Hall" is done with a perfect blend of humor and malice. There are some first-rate originals, in particular the hard-boiled outlaw ballad "Hardin Wouldn't Run." June Carter's spirited "The Road to Kaintuck" is a good song which would have been better if the Statlers had been locked out of the studio when it was being cut. Her mother Maybelle wrote "A Letter from Home" especially for the album, and it could easily have come from the early, classic Carter Family repertoire -- by which, of course, I mean high praise. Cash's fierce treatment of Merle Kilgore's "Johnny Reb" makes Johnny Horton's original seem almost comatose in comparison. There is also the two-part recitation "The Shifting, Whispering Sands," a stirring meditation on the desolate mystery of the Western landscape. "Stampede" is from the pen of doomed folk singer Peter LaFarge, better known for "The Ballad of Ira Hayes."

More a folk than a country record, never quite accorded the critical respect it so richly deserves, it is surely among Cash's most memorable albums. I suspect it will touch and thrill listeners long after Cash and we are gone.