Johnny Cash Is Coming to Town/Boom Chicka Boom

ohnny Cash's 1987 debut for Mercury--after his ignominious departure from Columbia a year previously--reunited him with fellow old-timer Jack Clement, who gives him a polished, yet funky (for Nashville) production. On a set that cements his legend with sturdy country songs like "The Night Hank Williams Came to Town" and the old-school gospel of "My Ship Will Sail", Cash positions himself alongside more contemporary artists like Elvis Costello, whose "The Big Light" opens the album. While JOHNNY CASH IS COMING TO TOWN is sonically a world away from his Columbia debut nearly 30 years earlier, the artist's lyrical preoccupations--life, love, and religion--remain much the same. Two years later, BOOM CHICKA BOOM found him reunited with his signature sound (though Luther Perkins had died in 1968, his primitive picking is faithfully recreated here) in a stripped-down production that includes the complex, Costello-penned "Hidden Shame" as well as Cash's simple, charming "I Love You, Love You", which sounds like it could have been written during his days at Sun.|