Johnny Cash: Unearthed

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In the summer of 2003, six weeks before Johnny Cash died, Sylvie Simmons spent five remarkable days talking with Cash at his house in Tennessee. He and his producer Rick Rubin planned to release a box set to celebrate ten enormously successful years of working together, and Simmons had been asked to write the novella-sized hardback they wanted to include with the albums. They were also working on a longer, more in-depth book. Then Cash died and the box set came out posthumously. Simmons describes the book as her “tribute to a man who struck me as Abraham Lincoln, Joe Strummer, a bottle of pills and a Bible all rolled into one.

“Brilliant, deeply moving liner notes by Sylvie Simmons. Her written portraiture of Cash in his wheelchair talking about the music here and his future plans is realistic, humble, and respectfully empathetic.” -Allmusic