Tracklist
From the liner notes:
Johnny Cash is a renowned master interpreter of that most deceptively “simple” form of song, the folk ballad. Intensity of passion and dedication of spirit are the keystones upon which Johnny builds unforgettable performances to capture your imagination and stir your emotions. In his newest album, he offers a rich collection of the kind of songs aptly implied by the title he has chosen for it. BLOOD, SWEAT AND TEARS contains ballads about hard rock resisting hard muscle, ballads of hard times, hard heads and hard hearts.
Johnny devotes most of the album’s first side to a positively electrifying performance of The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer. This celebrated ballad tells what happened to a giant of a steel driver who could out-drill any man on the job. John Henry is tormented by a mine boss (“Give me enough coal to start another Hell”), challenged by the newly invented automatic steam drill, but he goes to his death gloriously defying both. “I’II die with my hammer in my hand (but I’II be laughin’),” Johnny sings, ’cause you can’t replace a steel-drivin’ man.” John Henry has heroic qualities in his vast strength and in the awareness of his dignity as a human being. Johnny Cash makes the point of this ballad clear: men are always more important than the machines they invent. The chorus underlines John Henry’s nobility when they sing the simple eulogy: “Yonder lies a steel-drivin’ man.”
After Johnny’s moving Tell Him I’m Gone, he sings Another Man Done Gone, a ballad about the grim fate of an escaped convict (“He had a long chain on”). Although it is spare of words, the song does tell us that he was captured and hanged before witnesses, his children among them.
Harland Howard’s song, Busted, is unusual in that it concerns the dire circumstances of a down-and-outer, but it treats them in a half-humorous, almost philosophically cheerful way. Until near the end, that is. Johnny changes his approach to the song when he sings, “A man can go wrong when he’s busted … where I’ll make a livin’, the Lord knows.”
The “brave engineer” Casey Jones was, of course, a real-life figure. A handsome, robust Irishman, he became an engineer in his mid-twenties. Ballad versions vary and embellish details of his spectacular story. Actually, Casey’s run was on the Cannonball Express traveling between Memphis, Tennessee and Canton, Mississippi. In the early morning hours of April 30, 1906, about ten miles north of Canton, Casey and his fireman Sim Webb roared around an S-curve right into the rear of another train. Viewed simply as a chronicle of events, Casey Jones is one of the world’s most exciting ballads. But it is at the same time a compelling argument for the inevitability of fate. From the very beginning of Johnny Cash’s version with its eerie, whippoorwill-like train whistle, we know that Casey is doomed. As Johnny points out, his orders that morning said, in effect, that Casey was “taking a trip to the Promised Land.”
Nine Pound Hammer (“When I’m long gone, make my tombstone out of number nine coal”), Chain Gang and Waiting for a Train tell their own stories. Johnny’s album concludes on a lighter note, however, with Sheb Wooley’s delightful song about a brawny character who can brag, “By the time I was five there was no kid alive who could get the best of me.” But now, “layin’ pipe is ha-a-ard labor.” He was “born to be a Roughneck.”