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Johnny Cash (1932-2003) was an American icon and country music superstar. Cash first sang publicly while in the air force in the early fifties. Married to country legend June Carter, he became the youngest person ever to be chosen for the Country Music Hall of Fame, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, the Gospel Hall of Fame and is also a member of the Songwriter's Hall of Fame. Over the course of his career, he appeared in feature films, hosted his own television show, he won nineteen Grammy awards, four of them posthumously, and performed everywhere from the Folsom State Prison to the White House. John Carter Cash, having been involved in music all his life, is an accomplished and award-winning record producer. He is also a singer-songwriter and recording artist. He is the only son of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. He is also the author of three children's books, a biography on his father, one on his mother's life and a fantasy novel, Lupus Rex. Paul Muldoon is the author of twelve collections of verse, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He is Howard Clark Professor at Princeton University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
edited and introduced by PAUL MULDOON
foreword by JOHN CARTER CASH
‘If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need look no further than the Man in Black’
BOB DYLAN
‘The Man in Black was also an incredibly productive poet who was just as happy to let his pen do the talking . . . Love, mortality, addiction, humour, spirituality, pain, wonder, hope, heartbreak, freedom and resignation all weave in and out of Cash’s poetry – just as they did in his songs – in an attempt to paint the most accurate portrait of his true self’
WILL HODGE, Rollingstone.com ‘In some ways the poems mirror Cash’s songwriting, with terse ballads of outsiders in love, and parables drawn from the Bible . . . yet another look at a legend of American music’ BEN SISARIO, The New York Times ‘In retrospect, we should have assumed that outlaw country musician Johnny Cash was leading a double life as a secret poet’ DENNIS DICLAUDIO, The A.V. Club
Published in Great Britain in 2016 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2016 by John R. Cash Revocable Trust
Introduction © 2016 by Paul Muldoon
Foreword copyright © 2016 by John Carter Cash
Research and development Steve Berkowitz and John Carter Cash
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This edition first published in the United States in 2016 by
Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of
Penguin Random House LLC
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 196 9
eISBN 978 1 78211 995 1
Book design by Lauren Kolm
CONTENTS
Foreword: Redemptions by John Carter Cash
Does Anybody Out There Love Me?
Going, Going, Gone (version 2)
