ALBUMS: Original Gold Hits. Vol. 1 (Johnny Cash, 1969); Ticket to Ride (Carpenters, 1970)
MVC Rating: Carpenter 3.0/$$; Cash 4.5/ $$$
Iconic is a word way overused these days. I should know, I love the word so I overuse it.
But I’m tying Johnny Cash and Karen Carpenter together because their voices, wildly, widely different, are iconic voices in the USA and beyond.
Iconic as in widely known and distinguished by excellence. Thanks Merriam-Webster.
Now I’m doing the cliché of using a dictionary definition as a lede (newspaper spelling for opening).
Focus. Stay focused.
Voices. “Hello I’m Johnny Cash.” You can hear it as you read it.
Not beautiful but craggy as a Tennessee ridge. Lifeworn and tinged with 
emotion.
His voice elevated the sometimes banal words he sang. Oh, he had dozens of classics, but there were some duds in his decades of songwriting and singing. Ballad of a Teenage Queen? I could live without that one for, oh, the rest of my life.
Karen on the other hand had the voice of an angel. A relaxed contralto or alto, I don’t know much about these music types. But it was different from the high timbre styles popular today. It was soft, deep and ever so slightly sultry. Like Mom putting you to sleep with a lullaby. It was butter. This Ticket to Ride album is their first and it was originally called ”Offering.’ It suffers from too much of brother Richard singingl and overdone arrangements. It was almost as if they didn’t know what they had with Karen’s voice.
The Johnny Cash record is a compilation of his early hits and they are iconic, or classic if you will.
Folsom Prison Blues, a song he wrote, has the classic line: “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.” Now he’s stuck in Folsom prison worrying about all the good food he is missing when the train comes presaged by its lonesome whistle.
A cold callous murdering line in a song that somehow resonated with mainstream audiences as part of the deep-throated storytelling of Johnny Cash. He had some tragedy in life, a couple of arrests for amphetamines but he never served hard time beyond a few short stints in jail. He did however play live at San Quentin, and his appearance helped turn around the life of an inmate. I wanna be a singer, convict Merle Haggard said after hearing Cash play.
Karen of course faced her own demons. What happened to her, starving herself to death, belied her persona, her songs, her voice. One can see the Man in Black crossing over once in awhile to the dark side. But few beyond Karen Carpenter’s inner circle, knew the pain inside Karen. From this experiment of a first album, she went on to produce standards of vocal pop, Closer to You, We’ve Only Just Begun. That’s what we’ll remember her for.
Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.