Stunning. It’s the best word I can find for this unprecedented collection of music, 49 precious, newly discovered recordings by one of America’s most treasured musical giants. And while I’ll admit to being a bit of a Johnny Cash fanboy (these days, who isn’t?), this is one case where hyperbole is impossible. If you’re a fan of Cash to even the slightest degree — just an interest in his life or a desire to dig beyond his greatest hits is all that’s necessary — this is the album for you: quite possibly the most intimate, revealing set of recordings the man ever laid to tape.

The first time I heard Johnny Cash’s Personal File, it was a Sunday morning — or, I suppose, a Sunday afternoon for church-going folks. I’d just begun my drive home from Ann Arbor to Lansing, and from the moment I slid the disc into my stereo, it was as though Cash himself was sitting in the passenger’s seat: playing songs and telling stories with nothing but his acoustic guitar and me, the audience, to keep him company. I spent the rest of that trip at rapt attention, just listening; sometimes laughing, sometimes profoundly moved. The songs he sang in that unmistakable, sonorous voice, might not have always been as memorable as Cash’s classic material, but something about them felt more, well, personal. I found myself identifying what parts of Cash’s life they were written about: the deaths of his older brother and later his parents, the beginning of his romance with June Carter. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that very few of these soul-baring songs were written by Cash himself. That’s exactly the kind of emotional investment which is on ample display here: Johnny Cash could take a song written by someone else, often decades and even (in the case of the second disc of spirituals) centuries before his performance, and still make it sound as heartfelt and intimate as a diary entry.

But then, in a way, diary entries are precisely what these songs are – or memoirs. In his liner notes, Greil Marcus writes that the music in Cash’s personal file “feels as if it were made as a kind of will, to be opened after his death.” It certainly has that feel; a man reaching the midpoint of his life (most of the recordings hail from July of 1973, when Cash was 41), looking back at the songs that inspired him and the memories they suggest. But let me add another metaphor to the litany: with the tapes collected in Personal File, Cash created a time capsule of himself; not just a will or a memoir, but his very essence, bottled for posterity. His homespun warmth, his spiritual convictions, his flair for storytelling of all stripes are all present and accounted for here in a form largely untouched by the “Man in Black” mythos which turned him into an icon.

Perhaps the real reason why Johnny Cash decided to create a personal file for himself is because he wanted a chance to be himself entirely – to make music without the mantle of expectation that came with legendary songs like “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” and “I Got Stripes.” Of course, Cash would later record in a similar vein for public consumption: the solo acoustic performances of American Recordings would meet with acclaim in 1994 for their spare, minimalist intensity. For all that album’s merits, however, these tapes from two decades earlier paint a far more complete, complex, and human portrait. Nobody’s claiming that Johnny Cash, the myth, didn’t scale greater heights both before and after he opened his personal file. But for J.R. Cash, the man — at least as closely as any of us could know him — this collection might just be the last word.

Reviewed by Zach Hoskins