Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash grew up in Dyess, Arkansas, a Depression-era government farming community, picking cotton with his family. His early records at Sun Studio in Memphis in 1955 — “Cry! Cry! Cry!,” “I Walk the Line,” “Folsom Prison Blues” — established his bass-baritone voice and the boom-chicka-boom train rhythm of his Tennessee Two (later Three) as a sound unto itself: rockabilly without the speed, country without the fiddle, something harder and more austere.

He moved to Columbia Records in 1958 and expanded his range: concept albums about Native Americans (Bitter Tears), prisoners (At Folsom Prison, 1968 — recorded live in the prison cafeteria and his commercial comeback), and religious faith (My Mother’s Hymn Book). “Ring of Fire” (1963) — written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore, arranged by Cash with mariachi horns — became his signature: a love song imagined as burning.

The American Recordings series (1994–2006), produced by Rick Rubin with spare arrangements that placed Cash’s voice against almost nothing, caught him in old age making some of his most powerful music — including a cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” that both artists recognized as better than the original. He died three months after June Carter Cash, in September 2003.