A handful of my favorite songs Johnny Cash and Rick Rubin used on their american recordings project. That project yielded a set of nice recordings, but also pointed back to the original versions. These original versions create a kind of songbook of well-written songs with significant lyrics.
Support of folk, country, and Americana, as genres, can almost be a political stance. Rubin selects a wide swath of great songs from several genres, and Cash, in turn, treats each song with a sort of reverence (a feeling particular to the whole series). As a result, these series of recordings, though at first listen easily identified as Americana/related, rises above that clique of exclusivity, and opens each song to a wider, unifying review.
