The Song Johnny Cash Thought Was His “Signature” (And 2 Songs We’d Add to His List)

Over his decades-long career, Johnny Cash amassed an impressive discography of over 100 albums, leaving him with plenty of material from which he could choose a “signature” song. For most people, their answer would be “I Walk the Line”, a suggestion even the country icon could understand. But in a 1994 interview with Guitar Player, Cash suggested a different track embodied his legacy more than that early career hit.

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We’d agree with him, but we’d add two more tracks, too.

Johnny Cash Considered This Song To Be His “Signature”

Johnny Cash cut countless songs over his lengthy career, including easily recognizable hits like “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I Walk the Line”. But his musical legacy extended far beyond jailhouse blues and shuffling odes of love. For as much as Cash was a down-home Everyman from rural Arkansas, he was also a traveled, insightful, and socially minded artist. During his 1994 interview with Guitar Player, Cash selected a “signature” song that reflected the more conscientious side of him as a man and musician.

Cash’s pick was a song from which he received his iconic nickname, “Man In Black”. He explained, “That was a thing that I wrote for the campus show I did in 1971, one of my regular TV shows. Everybody asked me, ‘Why do you wear black?’ In the lyrics of the song, I pointed at the black as a symbol for social consciousness, that I was aware and mourned things such as the loss of a hundred Americans a week in Vietnam, our treatment of the elderly, our great illiteracy factor. The social ills of the day.”

Despite feeling as though the song embodied his personal and professional mission, Cash rarely played the song except for when he felt “really called on to.” The song was a crossover hit, reaching No. 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 and peaking at No. 3 on the Hot Country Songs chart.

We’d Argue These Songs Should Be Included, Too

While we would agree that “Man In Black” is perhaps one of the best songs to summate Johnny Cash’s decades-long career, we’d argue that two other songs he wrote during and about opposite ends of his life are worthy contenders, too. The first is “Five Feet High and Rising,” a song Cash released in the summer of 1959 on his third album, Songs of Our Soil. Though the song’s success somewhat paled in comparison to his more popular hits (“Five Feet High and Rising” peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart), it offers tremendous insight into Cash’s childhood.

In the late winter of 1937, the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers experienced catastrophic flooding that stretched from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Cash’s boyhood home in Arkansas. Cash and his family fled the water when he was only a toddler, foreshadowing the hardships that would punctuate most of his childhood and, later, inform his creative, philanthropic, and faith-based spirit.

Another notable inclusion would be “The Man Comes Around”, although to Cash’s credit, he hadn’t yet written the song when he was conducting this 1994 interview. “The Man Comes Around” is the title track to the singer’s 67th studio album, American IV: The Man Comes Around, and centers around the Book of Revelation from the Bible. Cash was an incredibly religious individual, and if gospel music would have had the same commercial viability as its secular counterpart, he might have stuck with singing traditional hymns and faith-based songs.

With just under five decades in the music business under his belt, Cash was able to speak his truth through country and gospel-based tracks that remain some of the most hallowed of the 20th and early 21st centuries today.

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