no grave ...

But you can also with great respect keep the memory of an artist growing, is already preceded, but has left behind important works unfinished. Just as it happens in the case of Johnny Cash estate. Meanwhile, survivors and producer Rick Rubin ensure that nothing is sold at a loss.

The current publication has been re-designed with the utmost care: "American VI: Is not No Grave" appeared on 26 February 2010 78. Cash at birthday. The album contains the last tracks that Cash has recorded for the "American Recordings" series Rick Rubin. For most of the pieces were written in 2003, in the few months between the death of Cash's wife, June, and his own. With groundbreaking, but still no peremptory voice here turns a farewell CompaniesRecent which over looks already, one last time to us.

But what more takes: The album sounds like not a bit wistfully. A man who has lost his life companion and is even terminally ill, singing his last song - and he knows it! -, Sounding proud, courageous and life-affirming. In the central piece ("I Corinthians 15:55"), the only one which he himself composed, Cash set to music almost elated the Bible lines from the Letter to the Corinthians: O death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?

Similarly, the key message of the first song, the traditional "Is not No Grave": "No grave can hold my body prisoner" singing cash, while the band is wild spooky, eerie chords. And in "Redemption Day" (by Sheryl Crow) Cash knows what awaits him at the end, after all the grief, the hunger and the other earthly tribulation when the railways reached the gate of heaven: Freedom.

The selection of songs is great, because this is not just about death, but about everything that makes life Johnny Cash. So we hear about a touchingly fragile version of Kris Kristof Fersens "For The Good Times", with the tender screened bottom, suddenly no longer sarcastic sounding line "Lay your head upon my pillow, lay your warm and tender body close to mine Hear the
Whisper of the raindrops blow softly against my window, make believe you love me, one more time ".

In "Satisfied Mind" again it is sung with the wisdom of a man who at the bottom, top and everywhere in between was: "No money can you buy back the youth when you're old, or a friend when you're lonely, or the love has grown cold. " And he also sings again the old protest song "Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream" and dreams clearly and powerfully from the end of the war - who dares that?

At the very end he says "Aloha Oe," and then he is gone, but not gone.