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Rating: One day Rick gathers the courage in both hands, or perhaps it's blissful recklessness, and proposes to Johnny to play for him.
«What do you mean, play for you?» Johnny retorts, bewildered.
«You are Johnny Cash, it's easy for you: you sit on a chair, pick up an acoustic guitar and play me all the songs you'd like to play».
Johnny ponders that proposal: at first, he's hesitant but he was born for that, to pick up a guitar and tell stories, so every obstacle, every barrier is overcome.
Johnny picks up his guitar and sings his songs.
This is how the «American Recordings» are born, and this is how «Unearthed» is born as well.
The Man In Black is on stage.
Johnny reclaims the stage by flaunting his dark side: «Delia's Gone» inaugurates the first American Recordings; «Who's Gonna Cry» is the first of the five volumes of «Unearthed»; «Long Black Veil« opens «Who's Gonna Cry».
Who will shed a tear when old John kicks the bucket? «Who's gonna cry when old John dies» Johnny sings in «The Caretaker», his ancient song revived for the occasion and honored to set the opening step.
When Johnny truly dies, a few days before his music gets unearthed, many don't grasp the magnitude of such a loss. They won’t understand even after the release of «Unearthed» and they still don't. It's their problem; after all, Jesus died to wash someone else's sins, certainly not mine.
So, Johnny grabs a chair, picks up the guitar, and starts singing.
Johnny sings the Story; the Story is men and women born and raised, who love and hate, and die. And their small personal stories are more engaging than universal history.
Love, hate, death: this earth we tread has been feeding on so much for millennia.
Johnny has always known it, he's always narrated it: but in «Who's Gonna Cry» he is driven by an unheard passion and rigor.
Many ask him why death is so pervasive in this work of his: he doesn’t answer. Perhaps it happens because, at sixty, even queens have forgotten their adolescence and no longer flutter from flower to flower and have finally settled down with their first love – the candy shop boy from the hometown – waiting for death to part and reconcile them: those who understand it ask no questions; the others continue to ask Johnny why death pervades «Who's Gonna Cry» so much.
But Johnny doesn’t answer. Instead, he prefers to tell his first story: which is about a woman wrapped in a long black veil, who watches over the grave of her lover on cold winter nights; her lover was executed for murder; but he never committed that murder, because on the night of the crime he was in the arms of his beloved; but he didn't defend himself, because his beloved was his best friend's wife.
And then you understand how the paths of Rick and Johnny and a young Australian can cross and how those paths intersect somewhere in «Unearthed».
Those who don’t understand continue to ask Johnny why he sings about death so insistently in «Who's Gonna Cry».
Johnny doesn’t answer, he must fulfill his mission. What that is, patience is required to grasp it, all the time necessary to assimilate «Unearthed» and it could take years. For me, it’s been years and it’s not over yet, because each time I tell myself that I was wrong before and I start over.
The only certainty is that «Unearthed» is an absolute masterpiece.
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