Bob Dylan has posted a tribute to Johnny Cash on his website. “If we want to know what it means to be mortal,” he says, “we need look no further than the Man in Black.” And he reminisces: “In ’55 or ’56, ‘I Walk the Line’ played all summer on the radio, and it was different than anything else you had ever heard.” (Link via Boston Phoenix Media Log.)
Dylan’s memory has a close echo in “I Walk the Line (Revisited),” Rodney Crowell’s joyful homage to his ex-father-in-law that appears on his 2001 album “The Houston Kid”:
I’m back on board that ’49 Ford in 1956 / Long before the sun came up way out in the sticks / The headlights showed a two-rut road way back up in the pines / The first time I heard Johnny Cash sing, I Walk the Line.
The best thing about this track, though, is the surprise cameo.