Album Review: The Complete Columbia Album Collection by Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash left Sun Records in 1958 after seven albums and many successful singles when Columbia Records offered him something that Sun did not: the ability to release a gospel album. Released in 1959, Hymns by Johnny Cash was the second album of Cash’s career at Columbia, one which spanned more than three decades and produced some of the best and most well-known country music ever produced. .

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Motherlode: Spanning the decades with the Man in Black—59 albums-plus, across 63 discs…Johnny Cash was, and remains, the Mighty Oak of 20th-century popular music: singer, song-writer and collector, seeker, provocateur, folklorist, storyteller, historian, family man, outlaw, moralist, drug addict, TV and movie star, joker, preacher, philanthropist, spokesman for the downtrodden, musical bridge from the Carter Family to Nine Inch Nails . . .

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Weighing in at 63 discs, Johnny Cash's The Complete Columbia Album Collection certainly is hefty. Its only true rival is another massive Legacy set, the 2010 box of Miles Davis' The Complete Columbia Album Collection which bests this 2012 box by a mere seven CDs, yet they share the same blueprint: each contains every one of their Columbia albums, including some posthumously released records (in Cash's case, an expanded version of his debut Sun LP and a double-disc set of non-LP singles are also included), presented as mini-LPs in cardboard sleeves with no bonus tracks, all housed in a simple flip-top box, supported by bare-bones annotation. Miles and Cash are genuine American icons deserving of such monumental tributes, but their legacies are very, very different, largely due to their respective styles.

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