1) What is it about Johnny Cash’s music that keeps it in the public eye after all this time?

He was absolutely prolific. He never stopped creating and reinterpreting music. The man had four distinct career bumps, each marked with chart topping hits, in a body of work that spans nearly fifty years.

When musicians start playing music, they usually start by emulating artist that they like or are familiar with. For instance when I started performing Rockabilly out in clubs in about 1990, I began looking deeper than the recent or current influences of Robert Gordon, The Blasters, High Noon, or The Stray Cats. I began to look at and listen to the core artist from Sun Record of the early fifties as well as the Louisiana Hayride radio show artists. And there’s Johnny Cash as one of the seminal Sun Records artists. And that was really cool to discover that the same guy that I listened to and admired when I was a young boy, was one of the recording artists that seeded the genera that I was rediscovering.

Then I started really digging modern roots country like, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Dwight Yoakam, BR549, Asleep At The Wheel, and The Mavericks. Upon exploring even deeper I started looking more at the Bakersfield sound, Texas, Nashville, trucker country as well as the outlaw artists. Somehow Johnny Cash was linked back to all of these different scenes. His influence on multiple generations of musicians just naturally makes him highly accessible to music audiences.

And then there’s the anomaly of the American recordings. What a fluke to have Rick Rubin, a heavy metal - rap producer record Johnny Cash. It was so out, that it’s one of those things that was just crazy enough to actually work. And BOOM, his music is infused into the limelight of modern culture outside of the country music mainstream. He kind of ended his career the same way started out: a rebel and on top of the world.

So I’ll sum up by saying that Johnny Cash had this amazingly prolific career because, he had a rare gift to choose or write compelling and enduring songs. And after choosing his material, he had that unique booming baritone - bass voice with a long Arkansas drawl. It some how made the audience believe everything that passed over his lips.

Or I could say it was because his Mama taught him to love the lord and His music from the cradle on. And that gave him incredible faith and all the blessings that come with it...