Previously Unheard Johnny Cash Song Released, Full Album Announced for Later This Year
While country music icon Johnny Cash left this world more than 20 years ago just months after the death of his beloved wife June Carter Cash, the singer and songwriter has more music coming.
Tracks the legend recorded in the early 1990s while he was between contracts will be part of a new album to be released this summer.
But one of the songs is available to listen to now after it was uploaded to YouTube by Cash’s estate at midnight on Monday.
“Well Alright” is a two-minute track the singer recorded during sessions at LSI Studios in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1993, Rolling Stone reported.
The upbeat tune tells a story about finding love at a laundromat, and it does so in a way only Cash could have done it:
The song and 10 others will be released June 28 on the posthumous album “Songwriter,” Cash’s estate said.
“Co-produced by John Carter Cash and David Ferguson, the album features new musical arrangements with Marty Stuart, Dave Roe, Pete Abbott, and others, plus special guests Dan Auerbach and Vince Gill,” it said.
Gill is known for his catalog of country music hits, while Auerbach makes up one-half of the popular rock duo the Black Keys.
In a statement to Rolling Stone, John Carter Cash explained that the musicians he enlisted to complete his late father’s unreleased songs didn’t improvise much but played along in the spirit of what the country legend had already laid down on the tapes.
He implied there wasn’t a great deal of improvisation but a desire to speak for Cash through the roadmap he left behind.
“The musicians that came in were just tracking with dad, you know, recording with dad, just as, in the case of Marty and Dave, they had many times before, so they knew his energies, his movements, and they let him be the guide,” the icon’s son said.
He concluded, “It was just playing with Johnny once again, and that’s what it was. That was the energy of the creation.”
News of new music from Cash lit up the late singer’s social media accounts and was well-received on Instagram:
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Along with “Well Alright,” other unheard Cash songs coming this summer include “Hello Out There,” “Spotlight,” “Drive On,” “I Love You Tonite” and “Have You Ever Been to Little Rock?”
Two of the tracks will feature the vocals of the late country music legend Waylon Jennings.
Cash died from complications of diabetes on Sept. 12, 2003. He was 71.
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