Johnny Cash’s Never-Before-Seen Lyrics, Poems and Diary Pages Collected in Comprehensive New Book

Photo Credit: Alan Messer

Johnny Cash is indisputably one of the greatest songwriters of all time. In five decades of recording and performance, the Man in Black crafted countless unforgettable anthems that profoundly shaped not only the music of America and beyond but also the values and social consciousness of generations of listeners. In honor of that legacy of powerful language, the Cash estate has announced THE COMPLETE JOHNNY CASH: Lyrics from A Lifetime of Songwriting, a new anthology of his written works featuring previously unseen archival documents.

Set for publication on Oct. 14 via Voracious and White Rabbit Books, THE COMPLETE JOHNNY CASH spans 720 pages of Cash’s words in an authoritative record of his professional and personal writing. Housed within are an exhaustive 520 songs, poems and prose dating from his adolescence in the 1940s through 2003, the year he passed away.

Some highlights in the unprecedented view of the Americana legend’s catalog are reproductions of 38 previously unseen lyrics and poems collected from countless long-vaulted personal notebooks, including “A Man Should Try” and “Everything’s Alright.” The volume is introduced by a forward from his son, John Carter Cash.

THE COMPLETE JOHNNY CASH: Lyrics from A Lifetime of Songwriting is available to pre-order now. Learn more about the artist and book at johnnycash.com.

22 years after his death, Johnny Cash’s memory continues to be a tremendous influence on American music and culture. Last year, the late icon became the first-ever musician immortalized in a statue at the U.S. Capitol. “Words cannot come close to expressing our pride to see my dad accorded such a singular privilege,” his daughter Rosanne Cash expressed at the unveiling ceremony. “I can safely say that he would feel that of all the many honors and accolades he received in his lifetime, this is the ultimate.”

2024 also brought Songwriter, a collection of 11 songs written by Cash through his first four decades of performance and recorded and shelved in 1993. Read more about that posthumous album here.