The final masterpiece Rick Rubin witnessed Johnny Cash write
No artist ever thinks about what happens when writing their final song. Songwriting is an ever-evolving process, and if someone knows their time is limited, they’re going to want to give it their best shot. But for a life that was steeped in music legend, Johnny Cash was hauntingly prophetic when composing his final tunes.
But during the last few years of his life, Cash was going through one of the greatest reinventions of any artist of his generation. Working with Rick Rubin was always going to be a strange choice for someone like Cash, but they were joined at the hip throughout his American series of albums, with he and Rubin floating ideas back and forth in terms of what would work the best for him. He could still write great tunes, but when picking covers, it was always about what suited the character of ‘The Man in Black’.
Most people needed a reminder of why Cash was considered one of the greatest minds in country music, and when listening to a song like ‘Delia’s Gone’ opened up his first album of this era, people knew that they were hearing a different version of him. This was Cash being depicted as some gothic spirit, and listening to him sing about murder and running away after murdering his wife, it felt like he had spent all that time away locked inside Folsom Prison alongside his audience.
While the last few albums had Cash making brilliant covers of Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’, he never stopped being a composer, either. Sure, there would be times where he could dig up some of his old country favourites like ‘Give My Love to Rose’, but when he started working on his final tunes, Rubin remembered that he was still trying to keep his faith close to his chest at all times.
There had always been a religious undercurrent to all of Cash’s music, but when looking at the massive collection that was accumulated of his work, Rubin remembered that ‘First Corinthians’ was most indicative of where Cash’s mind was when putting together those albums, and judging by what happened within months of Cash’s performance, Rubin saw the tune as a perfect swan song.
While there were technically songs that people heard that Cash recorded later, Rubin felt that this tune was his final masterstroke, saying, “I guess ‘First Corinthians’ (I Corinthians 15:55) is a good one to talk about because John had worked on writing those words over a long period of time and went through many different versions. This one was a longer process. I think that one just happened, and he talked about writing it and rewriting it for three years, which was unusual for him. I think he wrote pretty quickly. I think he usually had an idea and then wrote the song. I think it was unusual to really labor over one.”
And when looking at the lyrics, it’s not like Cash didn’t realise where he was headed. He had been in ill health for a good portion of his final years, but even if he didn’t have the best immune system, hearing him sing passages from the Bible is truly haunting, especially since the Corinthians passage has to do with the resurrection of Jesus and how death is meant to be a new beginning rather than someone’s final moments.
Then again, Cash could have turned anything into a faith-filled song at that point. ‘Hurt’ was written by someone who was going through the throes of addiction and was desperately trying to fix himself, but when it was in Cash’s hands, it was practically a message to God from a man in his dying hours, bargaining with his higher power about whether he has done enough good in this world to be let into heaven.
