The Man in Black is back. Technically, anyway. When you have recorded as much work as Johnny Cash did in the final years of his career it was bound to be pilfered for more. The American Recordings lasted longer than the man did and more from before this period has been unearthed. Well Alright may mark just a two-minute recording from the early 1990s but for fans of the Folsom Prison Blues mastermind, it will mean much more. Those days under the thumb of poor record deals may have felt to Cash like his time was up but the beauty of hindsight is finding much to love in what became throwaway tracks across an influx of releases. Never forget your first Chicken in Black experience and now remember the first time you heard Well Alright, a classic slice of Cash which serves as a tremendous reintroduction to the famed country star.
These are the songs left behind because Cash had found himself with stronger material through Rick Rubin. Just eleven tracks – the first of which provides a classic shot of Cash guitar work and deep, bass-like voice – are set to feature on Songwriter but for the dedicated bootleggers there is no doubt more to it than this upcoming collection. Laundromat encounters and the nods and winks of dealing with the silk and lace of a stranger is a blisteringly short and sweet moment which hears Cash in a shock situation which had eluded much of his best works. He posed as an outlaw and presented tracks of being far from home and out of luck. This is a complete reversal. Cash finds love in the every day, quite literally. Going about his business at the laundromat sees the man strike lucky.
Well Alright does not peel back the layers of Cash so much as to reinforce his writing style of the time. Wasteful at times but still packed a neat and direct punch which shone a spotlight on his withering talents which were doing nothing for him at a record company refusing to push his efforts. The consistency of Cash was never in doubt yet the focus on materials such as this suggests he was fed up, to say the least. Well Alright is a simple country tune with a story to its heart and a flicker of the classic joys Cash would find in later covers of contemporary artists. He was a storyteller first and foremost. Well Alright is as story-driven as it gets, the tone and tempo set by an ever-present and comfortable acoustic guitar guiding listeners through a brief, unexpected encounter.
John Carter Cash has done a solid job of stripping down the tapes to just his father and the guitar. It is what made the Rubin recordings such a ground-breaking moment which tipped Cash into good favour once more. But is it honest? Were there other instrumentals surrounding Well Alright? Unlikely, but it feels as though recapturing the thunderous acclaim of the American Recordings is the aim, and not preserving the track in its original quality. Whatever the case there is a new Cash song out there and it is worth clamouring about. While Cash does well to hide the intensity and fear of being between record deals the source of love on Well Alright comes from a place utterly opposed to it. Cash found himself on his own, however briefly, and reflects on it by countering those thoughts of isolation with a breezy connection in the everyday life of a laundromat-going guy.
