Ride This Train

Ride This Train is the sixth studio album by Johnny Cash, released in September 1960 on Columbia Records and produced by Don Law, the most ambitious conceptual project of Cash's early career, a narrative travelogue through American history and geography with Cash performing as multiple historical characters and linking tracks with spoken-word narration, anticipating the kind of historical concept album that would define his most celebrated work with Rick Rubin four decades later. Cash wrote or co-wrote most of the material; the album's structure, connected by Cash's narration and organized as a train journey through different regions and periods of American history, addressed coal mining, the antebellum South, Native American experience, and the American West, drawing on the documentary folk tradition of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly while applying Cash's own narrative compression. The album reached the top ten on the Billboard Country chart and demonstrated Cash's willingness to invest in thematic coherence over single-by-single commercial logic at a time when that approach was unusual in country music. Ride This Train is retrospectively cited as the earliest evidence of Cash's interest in the album as a sustained narrative form, the same interest that would produce Bitter Tears (1964) and, eventually, the American Recordings series, and its historical consciousness connects Cash to a documentary tradition that runs from Guthrie through Dylan. The album's historical consciousness connects Cash to the documentary folk tradition that runs from Woody Guthrie through Pete Seeger and anticipates the American history storytelling of his late-career American Recordings work with Rick Rubin, demonstrating that the narrative and civic ambitions of that final period were present from the earliest years of his Columbia catalog.