Various Artists
Album: Look Again To The Wind: Johnny Cash's Bitter Tears Revisited
Label: Sony
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.sonymusic.com

Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian was an iconic concept album released by Johnny Cash in 1964. It explored the history of Native Americans in the US, and highlighted what he considered to be the harsh and unfair treatment of those people. At the time, Johnny believed that he had ancestry in the Cherokee tribe, so the project was particularly dear to him (although it was subsequently discovered that this was not the case, his enthusiasm for the cause remained undiminished). Five of the LP's eight songs were penned by Peter La Farge, a folk singer-songwriter with Native American bloodlines whom Cash had befriended. However, although the LP contained The Ballad Of Ira Hayes, which following its première at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, soon became a hit single in the US, the project in general was not as well received as Cash would have liked and it met with resistance from label bosses before he was able to secure its release. But it was an important album, and it brought Cash to the attention of folk music admirers who had hitherto seen him as purely a country star, for they found a kinship and common sensibility with his social and political convictions here and those of the great folk singers of that time.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Bitter Tears and pay due tribute to Cash's achievement, producer Joe Henry has brought together a collective of top Americana artists to revisit the material, and to reimagine and update the album's eight songs for today's generation. These artists have been hand-picked, matching their suitability for the individual songs. Arguably the most important of these is Emmylou Harris, whose connection with the original Cash LP is strong - as a 17-year-old aspiring singer-songwriter, she considered the LP revelatory and seminal, and she contributes a fresh interpretation of Apache Tears (one of the Cash-penned songs) to the updated album. The disc standout in this new set, however, has to be the epic nine-minute opening track, As Long As The Grass Shall Grow, impeccably rendered by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings - after that and Apache Tears, there's nothing can compare, although Kris Kristofferson's characterful take on Ira Hayes and Rhiannon Giddens' spirited, soulful account of The Vanishing Race (the finale of the original LP, written by Johnny Horton) both run them pretty close. The remainder, I feel, is little more than filler by comparison: I guess Norman Blake's Drums is OK, Steve Earle's Custer is sufficiently rough and ready, and The Milk Carton Kids do a reasonable enough job on White Girl, but I find Nancy Blake's spoken delivery of The Talking Leaves wearisome and the setting rather sentimental, while Bill Miller's account of Look Again To The Wind (a song that Cash left off the original Bitter Tears because La Farge had already released it on his own 1963 LP), which is tacked onto the end of the set, seems to add little to the main song-cycle; neither, for that matter, do the time-wasting instrumental "reprises" of the first two songs. The quality of the instrumental playing, however, courtesy of a crack team including Greg Leisz, Sam Bush, Dennis Crouch, Keefus Ciancia and Jay Bellerose, is nowhere in doubt.

David Kidman