Johnny Cash - I Walk The Line

Released in 1964, I Walk The Line gathers the songs that made Johnny Cash famous and re-records several of them for Columbia, the label he moved to after leaving Sun. That history matters, because the versions here are not the Sun singles most people know. They are slower, heavier and sung by a man in his thirties rather than his twenties.

"I Walk The Line" itself is taken at a noticeably more deliberate pace, and Cash's voice has dropped enough to make the vow in it sound harder won. "Folsom Prison Blues" and "Big River" get the same treatment. "Give My Love To Rose" is the one that stops people, a deathbed narrative delivered with almost no inflection, and "Understand Your Man" was the newest song here and became a number one country single. Luther Perkins's guitar and Marshall Grant's bass keep the boom-chicka-boom intact throughout.

For an album assembled largely from remakes, it holds together remarkably well, and it remains one of the clearest documents of Cash before the Folsom and San Quentin records changed how everyone heard him.