Album holds the final works of Cash

February 23, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

‘American VI: Ain’t No Grave’

Johnny Cash (American Recordings/Lost Highway)

Grade: A

In the final decade of his life, Johnny Cash revived his career by collaborating with producer Rick Rubin on a series of recordings that yielded five studio albums and a box set — one of the great final chapters authored by any pop icon in the last half-century.

Now, more than six years after Cash’s death in 2003, 10 additional songs from those sessions have been collected on “American VI: Ain’t No Grave.” Skepticism would be in order, given that the legacies of artists from Elvis Presley to Tupac Shakur have been marred by countless ill-considered posthumous releases.

That is not the case with “VI.” Cash was determined to record as much as possible soon after the love of his life, June Carter Cash, died in May 2003.

Over the next four months until his death in September, the singer hunkered down with Rubin at Cash’s home studio in Tennessee, working against time and his own declining health. Rubin helped make Cash relevant again in the ’90s by serving as a low-key cheerleader and facilitator; he helped pick the songs and the musicians for each of Cash’s “American” recordings. He recorded Cash in small-group settings, an approach that only enhanced the singer’s gravelly conviction.

On his last recordings, Cash wore his mortality like one of his black suits, with a comfortable dignity.

In the traditions he grew up with — country, gospel, blues — death was a subject that came up frequently, serious yet matter of fact. It cloaked Cash’s first posthumous studio album, the 2006 release “American V: A Hundred Highways.” That record was a difficult listen; his voice sounded like a shipwreck, echoing Billie Holiday’s audible deterioration on her penultimate album, “Lady in Satin,” or the ravaged croon of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker in his final years.

Death remains the big subject on “VI,” and Rubin magnifies the drama. The music casts long shadows, packed with foreboding.

But Cash’s voice isn’t particularly morbid or self-pitying. Instead, it’s tinged by longing — not for what he’s leaving behind, but for what’s next. Just as he explored new sounds until the day he died, Cash paints death not as an end, but as the start of his next road trip.

The title track that opens “Ain’t No Grave” was originally a gospel rave-up recorded by the Pentecostal preacher Claude Ely in 1953. In Cash’s version, a spectral organ hovers and a bell tolls, as if announcing the violent climax of a Sergio Leone Western, and the drums trudge like a dead man walking. It’s all meant to suggest that for Cash, the term “eternal rest” will be anything but.

In songs such as Tom Paxton’s “Where I’m Bound” and especially Sheryl Crow’s “Redemption Day,” Cash amplifies his restlessness. The chug of Crow’s original is cut to a crawl, with earthly turmoil juxtaposed with what’s in store at “heaven’s gate.” “Freedom ... freedom ... freedom,” Cash mutters as the song fades, as if removing unseen shackles.

As the album winds down, Cash turns positively psychedelic: His music sounds like it was made in a semiconscious state, blurring the lines between the temporal and spiritual. He drifts into reveries such as Ed McCurdy’s protest classic “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” transformed into a twinkling, narcotized lullaby that imagines a world without war. The old country hit “Cool Water” centers on a mirage, the narrator stumbling through the desert with a thirst that can’t be quenched. The sole original, Cash’s chamber-pop interpretation of the biblical passage “I Corinthians 15:55,” finds him tracing a path through darkness toward the white light of redemption.

He bids farewell with a 19th-century Hawaiian song, “Aloha Oe.” Elvis Presley recorded a souped-up version of it for his 1961 movie “Blue Hawaii.” But Cash just rides the gentle melody over a bottleneck guitar, as if he were swinging in a hammock with a bottle of rum, biding his time until the next great adventure comes along.

What a way to go.