Still walking the line... Johnny Cash in 2002.
Photograph: John Chiasson/Getty
The last great flourish of Johnny Cash's career was the American Recordings series of albums made with producer Rick Rubin between 1994 and his death in 2003. Four volumes were released, but Cash and Rubin had recorded enough material for a fifth, and American V: A Hundred Highways will duly appear next week.
It's not the first album of unheard "new" Cash material to surface - last month, 49 previously unreleased tracks were bundled together as Personal File, and a collection of live versions and alternative takes appeared at the end of 2003 as Unearthed. Three albums in three years isn't just a relatively prolific work rate for a musician, dead or alive, but an insight into the amount of material that is recorded but never used.
But then, much of the music languishing in vaults wasn't intended ever to see the light of day, mainly because the artist didn't think them up to scratch. However, as proved not just by Cash but Tupac Shakur, Eva Cassidy, Notorious BIG et al, the artist's opinion doesn't come into it once they're not around to object.
Tupac has acquired posthumous notoriety for the 11 albums - often with eulogistic titles such as Still I Rise and Until the End of Time - that have come out in the decade since his death. Two have even reached No 1 in America. They've provoked a moral tussle between music critics, who complain about the exploitation of his name, and fans, who buy them anyway.
So great is the flow of releases from Tupac and his great rival, Biggie Smalls, that they've been satirised by a spoof New Jersey hip-hop outfit called Sudden Death. Their song Dead Rappers goes: "I'm being haunted by the ghosts of dead rappers from both coasts/ Puttin' out albums long after they've decomposed... Livin' or not, I gotta give 'em their props/ They've been dead for years, but the rhymin' don't stop." For the entire excellent lyric, just click here. And what can you say but amen to that?
The campaign promoting Eva Cassidy's 2001 breakthrough album, Songbird, focused quite blatantly on the fact that she had died, aged just 33, five years before. The story's poignance, and Cassidy's uniquely pure voice, sent the album (a compilation of three earlier CDs) to No 1. Had it been left at that, she would have been remembered as a great lost talent, unbesmirched by commercial associations. But three more albums have followed, causing even her fans to question the appropriateness of releasing songs that Cassidy herself might not have been happy with. One website is asking visitors to vote on the question, "Would you buy a new 'authorised' Eva Cassidy album, even if you knew that the recordings were somewhat imperfect technically?"
Good question. The yearning for a connection to a deceased rock star has been exploited to varying degrees of tastelessness (Elvis Presley's label, RCA, is the winner in this category - apparently, Elvis didn't leave much unreleased material, so there have been, instead, nearly 50 greatest hits albums since 1977). Johnny Cash's American V, having been intended by the man for release, is probably allowable. But after this, will he be allowed, as it were, to rest in peace?
