
Death was a good career move for Johnny Cash. The Man in Black’s American V: A Hundred Highways, released three years after Cash’s 2003 death, quickly became the country crooner’s first Billboard No. 1 hit since 1969, selling 88,000 copies in its first week. The final installment of Cash’s critically acclaimed American series, American V was the product of his final recording sessions and featured his last collaborations with producer Rick Rubin. The success of Cash’s first posthumous album owed no small debt to the 2005 release of the Oscar-winning biopic Walk the Line, but it was also a testament to a timeless baritone sound that defied categorization. As Cash said in an interview with TIME just months before his death, “I can’t put myself in a box or a basket when I’m working. I’m really trying to prove that there aren’t categories you have to stay in, that you can branch out. You can touch others out there that have not been listening to you if you keep trying.”
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