That Lucky Old Sun sung by Johnny Cash.
The
Sun is shining brightly in McHenry
County but temperatures are plunging and it will be well below freezing Saturday morning with
the possibility of a flake or two in
the air. That’s a recipe for Coronavirus ambivalence
and angst just the mood for Johnny Cash’s version of That
Lucky Old Sun with music by Beasley Smith and words by Haven Gillespie.
Like Ol'
Man River, its lyrics contrasted the toil and intense hardship
of the singer’s life with the obliviousness
of the natural world.
 |
| Frainkie Laine was featured on the sheet music for That Lucky Old Sun. |
The
song was clearly written to reflect the experience
and voice of a Black laborer or sharecropper
but Frankie Laine first scored a #1 hit with it in 1949 with another White singer, Vaughn Monroe hard on his heels.
Louis Armstrong only reached
#24 the same year.
Other
significant covers over the years
included Pat Boone (yeesh!), Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin,
Tom Jones, George Benson, and Willie Nelson.
 |
| A grizzled Johnny Cash in his late years. |
But
Cash’s version is practically a scab
ripped of wound. In 2000 Cash
released American III: Solitary Man, the third and final album in his Amirican
series. Between American
II: Unchained and Solitary Man
Cash’s health seriously declined and he was hospitalized with pneumonia. The illness
forced him to curtail his touring. The album contained his
response to his illness with selections like Tom Petty’s I Won't Back Down and version of U2’s One. Cash’s deep
voice was rawer and raspier and stripped down arrangements by producer
Rick Rubin let the songs shine,
as one reviewer put it, as a “raw-boned
meditation on redemption and death.”
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