In early 2002, Rick Rubin called up Nick Cave and asked him if he wanted to sing a song with Johnny Cash.

To Cave, Cash was a hero ever since he first watched him as a kid on Australian TV on The Johnny Cash Show. “As a kid I had been genuinely transfixed by the ‘Man in Black,’ as he was known, thrilled and intimidated by his dark, grave voice, thinking he was truly scary, like an outlaw or something,” shared Cave on his Red Hand Files blog in 2023. “He went on to have considerable influence over the songs I wrote in The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds and, of course, the way I would sing them.”

Shortly after Rubin’s call, panic set in. Cave recalled rushing to the room of bandmate Warren Ellis, who was in bed, in his underwear, listening to Hank Williams. Ellis responded to Cave’s announcement with “Far out, man” then asked what song he’d be singing with Cash.

“I said, ‘Rick Rubin says I can do whatever I like.’ Ellis said “Sing this” as Williams’ 1949 hit “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” played. “I say, ‘OK, great idea, but what if I sing the song f–king flat?’”

A ball of nerves before meeting and recording with Cash, Cave recently recalled their session on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. At the time, Cash was 70 and battling laryngitis and the flu, according to Cave. “When I saw him, he was sort of a terrifying apparition of a man, so different than the man I thought him to be,” said Cave. “He was essentially blind walking down these stairs with his hands out, going, ‘Are you there, Nick?’ And I’m looking at it, like, ‘How is this man going to perform?’”

Then Cave remembered Cash telling him, “I’ve never asked Jesus for anything, but I had to perform with you today, and last night, I dropped down on my knees and said, ‘Jesus, I’ve got to sing with Nick. Give me back my voice.” His wife June Carter was also present and said “Hallelujah, Hallelujah.” Cave added, “It was an extraordinary moment.”

In his blog, Cave also recounted Cash’s total transformation once the music started. “So we take our seats in our separate booths and the band [starts] up the song and I can see Johnny through the glass partition and the moment the music starts I see before my eyes a sudden, radical, and absolute transformation,” said Cave. “I am not exaggerating. Johnny comes alive. He is quite literally taken by the spirit, as the years fall away and he begins to glow, growing powerful and possessed by some kind of thing. And when he starts singing, his beautiful voice just runs right through me like a celestial force.”

He added, “I start singing and I’m sounding all right, and I’m deeply moved … I’ve got tears in my eyes, and June is over there swaying and smiling and praising Jesus, and Johnny is singing his heart out in his dark, measured style, and it’s one of those moments that just imprints itself upon your very soul.”

Along with their rendition of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” which also features Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell on guitar and Benmont Tench on keyboard, Cash and Cave recorded a few other things, including the folk song “Cindy.”

“He is the Real Thing”

Several years after their musical union, and Cash’s death in 2003 at 71, just four months after June Carter, Cave released a tribute to his hero.

Written by Cave and Ellis and released on the Bad Seeds’ 2007 album Abattoir Blues, “Let the Bells Ring” hangs on the life Cash had lived and his legacy—See all of us that have come behind / Clutching at your hem.

C’mon, kind Sir, let’s walk outside
And breathe the autumn air
See the many that have lived and died
See the unending golden stair
See all of us that have come behind
Clutching at your hem
All the way from Arkansas
To your sweet and last amen

Let the bells ring
He is the real thing
Let the bells ring
He is the real, real thing

Nick Cave (Photo: Joel Ryan)
By the second half, “Let the Bells Ring” plunges into Cash’s mortality and the world he left behind.

Take this deafening thunder down
Take this bread and take this wine
Your passing is not what we mourn
But the world you left behind
Well, do not breathe, nor make a sound
And behold your mighty work
That towers over the uncaring ground
Of a lesser, darker world

There are those of us not fit to tie
The laces of your shoes
Must remain behind to testify
Through an elementary blues
So, let’s walk outside, the hour is late
Through your crumbs and scattered shells
Where the awed and the mediocre wait
Barely fit to ring the bells

“Occasionally things happen in life that hold a special kind of resonance,” said Cave at the close of his blog, “and this day, spent with my hero and his extraordinary wife, is one that will live with me always.”

“The Mercy Seat”

A year before their “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” collaboration, Cash also covered Cave and the Bad Seeds’ 1988 song “The Mercy Seat” on his 2000 album American III: Solitary Man, after hearing about several cases of capital punishment.

“When I heard that song, I’d just been seeing the news the day before about executions in Texas,” said Cash in Dave Urbanski’s The Man Comes Around: The Spiritual Journey of Johnny Cash. “And Tennessee had executed a man. I don’t have a stand on capital punishment. I won’t say one way or the other because my heart is with the victims.”

Cahs continued, “The song, I don’t feel like it’s an indictment of capital punishment. I think it’s something we should call our attention to. If a man’s been there 25 years, maybe we should consider whether or not he has become a good human being and do we still want to kill him.”