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‘He’d turned into a weird old grandpa’: how Johnny Cash resurrected his career – and became an icon

In the early 90s, the Man in Black was unsigned, uncool and barely out of addiction. Releasing lost songs from those years that rank among Cash’s best, his son and bandmates explain how he came back around

By the early 90s, John Carter had grown up and joined his father, Stuart et al as a guitarist, playing frequent residencies with them at the country entertainment hotspot of Branson, Missouri. Stielper suspects the decisions Cash had made over the previous decade, from his Branson gigs to cultivating a family-friendly image, were the result of insecurity – and a need to prove he could be part of the mainstream country establishment. “What proved to be the most important 30-day stretch on Cash’s career since Folsom began in February 1993 with an encounter in Dublin with the Irish rock band U2 and ended with his meeting an admiring record producer in California,” he writes.

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