JOHNNY CASH THE LIFE IN LYRICS

Fully authorised by the Cash estate and featuring 125 of his most iconic songs, the life of the Man in Black is revealed through his lyrics and by rare photographs and ephemera. 50 years of Johnny Cash's songwriting has been collected for the first time ever. With dozens of his handwritten lyrics reproduced and others laid out like poems across double page spreads of glorious images like 'Another Wide River to Cross' from 1982 of the Mississippi River or a journal entry on the occasion of his being awarded a degree in theology in 1977. One of his stops in life was New York City's Greenwich Village, home base of the folk music social protest movement. He sang at the Newport Folk Festival where Bob Dylan also sang and was involved in the Beat scene, a fascinating place for a fish-out-of-water country singer with a drug problem in the 1960s. Johnny Cash was one of the most beloved and influential country music stars of all time, having composed more than 600 songs and sold more than 90 million records. Perhaps more than any other American artist he spoke to the soul of the nation as well as to the triumph and challenges of his own. The book takes readers from his early life through periods of personal challenge, activism, and faith. He visited Vietnam and felt the terror of the exploding shells shaking the earth and soul. He stood at Wounded Knee, a blight on the national character, and told its story. He pronounced his faith as he visited the site of the first miracle at Cana in Galilee. There were his wry musings from a dying man in his last days, refusing to break, even as mortality grasped ever tighter. And he breathed that Southern air full of love, loss, laughter, pride and purpose. Johnny Cash's music has entertained and entranced us and his life astonished us. His words have spoken to our hearts and his enduring authority lay in the accounts, messages, emotions, cautions, imperfections and aspirations that made up his human experience. Here he is as poet and storyteller, these pages using his words as a lens through which to view and understand his life. Luther Played the Boogie, Folsom Prison Blues, I Walk The Line, So Doggone Lonesome, Mean Eyed Cat, Country Boy, I Will Rock and Roll With You... the music lives on. Packed with colour and archive photos, 374 heavyweight pages, 25 x 32.6cm.
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