This week, I’ll explore the dialogue between Johnny Cash and Nick Cave, two great modern murder balladeers who wrestled with themes of redemption and retribution as they explored crime, death, love, isolation, religion and the myths and musical roots of the American Old West.

In today’s post, I’ll cover the beginning and end points of that dialogue. In one or two additional posts this week, I’ll cover the some high points in the middle. At all points, we’ll see how these two greats helped refashion the murder ballad with their sympathy, their unexpected tenderness, and their unflinching look at the “reckless ones” here on earth and the God above that judges and forgives them.


The dialogue begins with a stunning but (ironically) today not very well known song by Cash that focuses on the death of the folk singer himself — a victim of time, history, and the fickle attentions of the audience. “The Folk Singer,” co-written by Cash and Charlie Daniels, was first recorded by Cash in 1968 and released as the B-Side of a reissue of the hit single “Folsom Prison Blues.”

The A-Side:

“Folsom Prison Blues” combined two popular American folks song standards — the train song and the prison song (both of which would become Cash signatures, as would “Folsom Prison Blues” itself of course) – and fashions them into a new kind of murder ballad, one in which the empathy is squarely with the convicted and the condemned. More on that and Cash’s At Folsom Prison and At San Quentin recordings and performances later. For now, I just want to note the pairing in this single release of the emotional state and fate of the folk singer locked inside “the pages of your book” and the murderer locked inside the jail cell. Both of them have the blues.


In 1985, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds recorded a stellar, well-received version of the “The Singer” (dropping the “folk” in the title) and released it first as a single and then on their album Kicking Against the Pricks, which was composed almost entirely of covers of American blues, bluegrass, and rock songs, with some traditional ballads thrown in for good measure.

“The Singer” and Kicking Against the Pricks helped mark Cave’s shift from the “conceptual package of aggression and violence” that defined his gothic rock band The Birthday Party (described by one critic as “one of the darkest and most challenging post-punk groups to emerge in the early ’80s”) to his work with the Bad Seeds, which Cave described as “far more concerned with exploring musical avenues,” in particular American avenues. In multiple interviews, Cave credits Cash for planting the seed of this shift within him early on. (See, for example, this interview in which Cave discusses the impact that “The Johnny Cash Show” had on him as a boy living in the boonies in Australia.)

The song that came to serve as the lasting signature of that shift was Cave’s “The Mercy Seat,” which also cemented Cave’s credibility as a non-American singer who could nevertheless give authentic voice to uniquely American concepts of crime, justice, and atonement. Taking off where many traditional murder ballads end, the song is a first person narration by a condemned murderer of his thoughts in the moments leading up to and during his execution in the electric chair.


In the original 1988 recording, Cave sings over a fog of dark guitars, organs, and strings, with key words falling into clarity randomly, like clues at a crime scene, a situation that the video for the song reinforces:

Cluttered with references to both the American criminal justice system’s “measuring of truth” as well as both Old and New Testament Christianity, the song’s mercy seat is both the prison’s electric chair and God’s throne of grace. As a whole, the song is a record of the struggle between punishment and forgiveness, between condemnation and empathy, and between defiance and confession.

“The Mercy Seat” is Cave’s signature original contribution to the murder ballad genre. Poignantly, it also helped marked the end point of the storied career of his boyhood hero, Johnny Cash. In 2000, during the last years of his life, Cash covered the song on this album American III: Solitary Man. He identified it as one of the songs he sang to give voice to the “convicted innocent” – those innocent not necessarily of the crime of murder but, rather, innocent of final human judgment and attendant brutal punishments.

After covering “The Mercy Seat,” Cash invited Cave to contribute to the liner notes of the retrospective The Essential Johnny Cash, released on Cash’s 70th birthday in 2002. On his last album released a year before he died, American IV: The Man Comes Around, Cash invited Cave to record a duet with him. Harkening back to the themes in “The Folk Singer” – and the physical, moral and spiritual isolation of the “reckless ones” that the two often sang about – the duet was a cover of Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

In upcoming posts, I’ll cover additional high points in the dialogue between Cash and Cave, ones that continue the themes introduced by “The Folk Singer” and “The Mercy Seat” and include riveting covers of traditional murder ballads, songs about cowboys and the violent western landscape, and songs in which these two men in black warn us about what happens to sinners in the hands of an angry God.


To tide us over, I’ll end with three notable versions of “The Mercy Seat,” starting with this gorgeous “live and slow” rendition by an older Nick Cave and his longstanding partner in crime, Warren Ellis: