Johnny Cash, Bootleg Vol. 3: Live Around the World
My daughters have been gaining an appreciation for Shel Silverstein’s work outside the poetry volumes ubiquitous in their grade school classrooms. They dug Dr. Hook’s “Cover of the Rolling Stone” even without fully understanding its 1970s rock stature implications. (Is that the greatest parody rock solo on that or what?)
This collection of live Johnny Cash bootlegs contains a version of Silverstein’s “A Boy Named Sue” performed at the White House during the Nixon administration. The live audience sounds less canned, and there’s some self-censorship masking the phrase “son of a gun.” But most significantly, Cash also swaps the concluding “Anything but Sue!!” punchline for this touch of realism: “When I have a son, I’ll name him… “John Carter Cash.”