Which Cash should I get?

Cafe Society
1

Contemplating the recent tracgic loss of the Man in Black set me looking on my pitifully small collection of Cash CDs.

When the Man Comes Around, Live at Folsom Prison, and at San Quentin are three of my favorite albums, with infinite replay value. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never gotten tired of them that I’ve never gotten any other Cash works.

I’ve read somewhere that Johnny put out something like 50 albums over the course of his career. Amazon lists 265 hits for “Johnny Cash”. So help me out here, Dopers, which should I get?

One thing, can we keep the repetition of songs to a minimum? I don’t need eight “greatest hit” albums each with a version of “Ring of Fire”. The one thing that bugged me about American IV was that I already own a disc that had “Give my Love to Rose” yeah, it’s a silly pet peeve, but can we indulge it? :wink:

Thanks, all.

2

Hmmm, you may want to stay away from the boxed sets, then. But the two I have–Columbia Country Classics and Love/God/Murder (3 discs each)–have a surprisingly low redundancy rate, and they’re both amazingly diverse collections. YMMV, but if I had only 10 albums to live with for the rest of my life, Murder would be one.

3

Either The Complete Sun Singles, The Essential Sun Singles, or The Sun Years (you’ll get some repetition of hits, but you need “Get Rhythm.”)

Bitter Tears/Blood Sweat and Tears/I Walk The Line (3 CD set of 1960s albums Amazon has for cheap)

Johnny 99

American Recordings (the first one, from '94.)

And The Essential Johnny Cash is a good overview (though it doesn’t have anything from his great American Recordings of the last decade.)

4

Another voter for The Essential Sun Singles