On This Day in 2006, a Treasure Trove of Long-Lost Johnny Cash Recordings Was Finally Unlocked

On this day (May 23) in 2006, the posthumous Johnny Cash album Personal File was released. The two-CD set featured 49 unreleased songs pulled from the House of Cash vault. It contained an album’s worth of original songs, written or co-written by Cash. The rest of the tracklist was packed with folk songs, standards, and covers.

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Behind the recording studio in the House of Cash is a room that contains hundreds of tapes. The bulk of those are songs that were released during Cash’s life. However, some boxes were treasure troves of unreleased material. The songs on Personal File had been sitting in that room since the 1970s.

According to Cash’s website, several boxes of tapes in the room were marked “Personal File.” The earliest recordings were from July 1973, the newest were from April 1980. Producer Gregg Geller believed that the oldest songs in the collection were the beginnings of a concept album. They were songs like “Missouri Waltz,” “In the Great By and By,” and “Galway Bay,” that Cash would have grown up with.

[RELATED: On This Day in 1956, Johnny Cash Released the Career-Defining Single That Spelled Out His Values]

Johnny Cash Left Behind an Amazing Collection of Songs

Personal File contains 16 previously unreleased Johnny Cash originals. He wrote most of them himself. Some, though, were co-writes with the likes of Johnny Horton (“Girl in Saskatoon”) and June Carter Cash (“Matthew 24 (Is Knocking at the Door)”).

Hearing new original material from Cash was a treat for fans around the world. The covers he recorded were nearly as good. The collection contains his take on John Prine’s “Paradise” and “Saginaw Michigan,” which was a hit for Lefty Frizzell in 1964. He also recorded a rendition of his longtime friend Johnny Horton’s “When It’s Springtime in Alaska (It’s Forty Below).”

“I knew there was treasure there,” John Carter Cash said. “But specifics–that was the mystery of it. My father was creative until the very end of his life. He was genius wherever he went, whatever he did. Luckily, there was a place where this stuff was set aside.”

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