Chris Cornell and Jamey Johnson will appear on a new album that sets the poems of Johnny Cash to music, Johnny Cash Forever Words: The Music. Cash’s son John Carter Cash helped put together the album.
Johnson spoke about the project in an interview with the blog Kentucky Country Music last week. “John Carter has a good number of poems that Johnny wrote. I say poems because they don’t have music to them,” Johnson said. “He’s working on an album where he’s pairing up these songs with songwriters from our day to finish up these Johnny Cash songs.
One of them that I know he’s most proud of and you can’t get it anymore – he’s got Chris Cornell having finished one of these songs and then recorded it. I’m excited for it to come out. I got to do a couple of them.”
Brad Paisley was among the first to set one of Cash’s poems to song. “If you’re ever down, I’d give you rows of roses and gold all over the ground,” he sings in “Gold All Over the Ground,” a track recorded for Paisley’s new album Love and War. John Carter Cash calls that session the “precursor to this project” in a Rolling Stone article.
Cash did a famous cover of Soundgarden’s “Rusty Cage” back in the 90’s.
