By Golda Fulmer

Johnny Cash: a household name. Dubbed the Man in Black, this rock legend is still referenced to date, and though he lost the fight to diabetes and left this earth in September of 2003, Cash left behind a whopping total of 201 albums in the span of over 50 years, stemming from anything from Gospel and Christmas genres to Studio, Soundtrack, Collaborative albums and many more. And though he’s long gone, Cash’s son John Carter Cash has kept his old man’s personal poems, lyrics, notes, and letters and has truly transformed them into Johnny’s final musical achievement, which will be created into Cash’s 200-and-second album to be recorded.

John Carter Cash, rather than looking to simply make his father’s poetry book into just another album, sought out the Classics closest to his dad to help him out. The album, though composed of poetry and other writings and was not necessarily intended to be songs, puts all these writings from Johnny Cash’s poetry book Forever Words: The Unknown Words to music. Artists that helped bring this personal poetry book to life include Chris Cornell, John Mellencamp, Alison Krauss, Elvis Costello and Willie Nelson.

“Determining the artists for each song was truly a matter of the heart,” Carter Cash says. “I picked the artists who are most connected with my father, who had a personal story that was connected with my dad.”

The album Forever Words is scheduled to drop on April 6 of this year on various platforms such as CD, 2LP, and other digital formats. John Carter Cash concludes that the making of this final Johnny Cash album was “an exciting endeavor to go through these works, to put them together and present  them to different people who could finish them in a way that I believe that dad would have wanted.” As an ode to the Man in Black, look for this honorary, and final, Johnny Cash album coming this April.