American Recordings

American Recordings is the sixty-third studio album by Johnny Cash, released in April 1994 on American Recordings and produced by Rick Rubin, the album that initiated the final and most critically acclaimed period of Cash's career, recording him stripped to voice and acoustic guitar with a selection of songs ranging from the American folk tradition to contemporary writers including Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Glenn Danzig, and Loudon Wainwright III. Cash co-wrote one track ('Let the Train Blow the Whistle'); the album's other songs were selected from outside writers, with the curatorial intelligence of the song selection functioning as a form of authorship in itself, choosing material that illuminated Cash's themes of mortality, sin, redemption, and frontier justice from multiple contemporary sources. The album was recorded partly at Rubin's Hollywood home with an audience of industry figures and partly in the studio; its acoustic austerity was a radical contrast to the Nashville Sound production of Cash's Columbia years and reconnected his voice to the stripped directness of the original Sun recordings. American Recordings won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album and received critical responses that described it as one of the most significant albums in country and folk history; it introduced Cash to a generation of alternative rock listeners who had grown up after his commercial peak. The album was the opening chapter of what became a five-volume American Recordings series that would constitute Cash's definitive artistic legacy.