Pitchfork: Two Johnny Cash Box Sets on the Way

Inseparable in life, Johnny and June Carter Cash will likewise walk together onto record store racks everywhere this June 7 with the simultaneous release of two Columbia/Legacy box sets, according to a recent Billboard report. Each set promises all the usual extensive-liner-note bells and never-before-seen-photography whistles, and with a recent Guardian poll of pop stars naming Cash's "Hurt" video as the best of all time, clearly people still haven't gotten enough of the man's unnervingly emotional gravel-bottom voice.

Johnny Cash: The Legend, at four discs and 107 total tracks, will reportedly cover Cash's career from 1955 through 2002, including all the major Sun and Columbia recordings. However, the seven unreleased tracks-- a 1973 take of "I've Been Working on the Railroad", a 1977 Carlene Carter song called "It Takes One to Know Me" to which Carlene has now added her own vocals, and five more songs of early-80s vintage (not the most creatively fertile period for the Man in Black)-- don't seem particularly intriguing, especially compared to the wealth of unheard late-period material on 2003's Unearthed box. But on the whole its sheer size and scope dwarfs earlier sets like 1998's Essential Johnny Cash 1955-83 and the thematically-organized 2000 set Love, God, Murder.

Columbia is also issuing a limited edition of the set with a bonus disc of Cash's 1955 radio debut, a DVD of a 1980 TV special, and a hardcover book. Unfortunately, we don't yet have the tracklist.

Meanwhile, June Carter Cash's six decades of music-making have been much less exhaustively chronicled, so serious Cash family devotees may be more excited by her two-disc, 40-song anthology. Keep on the Sunny Side: Her Life in Music spans her entire career and represents the first complete retrospective for the underrated Carter Family alumnus.

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