The Year Christmas Came Early

Or: Johnny Cash back-catalog legally available online for the first time!

Don’t know why, don’t know how, don’t know why now, but some of Johnny Cash’s ’70s & ’80s albums are finally being released digitally. I got an email from amazon alerting me to this fact and couldn’t believe my eyes when I clicked through.

There they were: a dozen previously unavailable (except at used record stores where I got mine, and probably ebay for an arm and a leg) albums, full of original material that hasn’t seen the light of day since their initial releases 25-40 years ago.

It answers the question I’ve been asking for years: WTF?? Forty years? Really?

I also noticed right away that they held back albums from that period, including 1971’s seminal “The Man In Black.” Not one of the thousands of greatest-hits collections released under that name since then, but the original, containing the first official release of the song, “Man In Black.” (Cash had performed the song a couple of times as a work-in-progress on his ’69-’71 television show, but didn’t record and release it until after the show got canceled.)

Hopefully, enough people will buy some of these albums to motivate whoever is controlling these things to release the rest of them. At the moment they appear to be available exclusively through amazon; iTunes doesn’t have them.

If you just want to buy a couple albums (and you really should buy the whole albums; Cash albums from this period are all very ambitious affairs containing discrete suites of music. The songs are designed to work together to underscore each album’s theme), I would recommend starting with “Any Old Wind That Blows” and “Thing Called Love.”

And then treat yourself special because you deserve it! and buy the legendary (and heavily bootlegged) 1975 “Live At Osteraker Prison” concert album, a worthy bookend to his wildly successful Folsom and San Quentin albums in 1968 and ’69.

Cash was on an amazingly fertile and fruitful creative streak for almost 10 years, from the late-’60s to the mid-’70s, and “Any Old Wind That Blows,” “Thing Called Love” and “Live At Osteraker Prison” represent some of his finest work from this period.

Finally—finally—“Welcome Back Jesus” is available to the general public again! Deck the halls, baby, Santa Claus snuck into town this year when we weren’t even looking.