How Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash's new releases put a different spin on two classic voices

They've both been gone for decades, and yet it's still possible to hear two Country Music Hall of Famers who got their start at Sun Records, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, in new ways.

Presley is his subject Memphis (due Aug. 9 via RCA/Legacy), a 111-track, five-disc set that mines recordings from five different locations in his hometown: Sun Recording Studio, American Studios, Stax Studio, Mid-South Coliseum and Graceland Mansion's Jungle Room. On three of the studio discs, the previously released tracks are strictly mixed using the instruments from the basic tracking session, leaving out material that was overdubbed at a later date.

“By not having the added strings and backing vocals, there [is] an intimacy that would reveal things we hadn't heard before,” he says Memphis producer Ernst Jorgensen, an established Presley authority. “So the songs come out with a different feel.”

The Presley package arrives on the 70th anniversary of the recording of “That's All Right,” the single that launched his career.

Coincidentally, Cash's 11 track Songwriter (out June 28 via Mercury Nashville/Universal Music Enterprises) features the similarly titled “Well Alright” — a 30-year-old unreleased song that echoes the spacious, simplistic sound that characterized his own Sun recordings. John Carter Cash produced the album with David Ferguson, extracting Man in Black's vocals from a series of 1993 recordings and reframing them with new arrangements.

“I've always wanted to know what would happen if it came down to the essence of the right, simple image behind my father,” John Carter said during a media listening event earlier this year. It's “the right orchestration, the Johnny Cash sound backed by people who had played with him, mostly.”

It's no secret that labels are able to boost their bottom lines by repackaging and/or reimagining catalog material from top-selling artists, although after creating multiple retro releases of classic artists, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find new ways to celebrate them. The new Presley and Cash releases manage to represent multiple aspects of each artist's career. Memphis captures Presley in the early rockabilly scene, explores the “Suspicious Minds” comeback era, and concludes with the massive productions that marked his live performances and studio efforts in his final years, the mid-'70s.

Songwriter, while based on cash cuts from 1993, points to different eras in its own evolution. “Well All Right,” adapting the boom-chick production to a story about meeting a woman in a laundromat, takes cues from the 1957 hit “Ballad of a Teenage Queen.” “I Love You Tonite” reflects on his relationship with June Carter Cash while employing a proper country-ballad attitude. “Hello Out There” — written after the launch of the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 — has a spiritual view of the vastness of the universe, like the “I fly a starship” line in “Highwayman.” And the tremolo-enhanced “Spotlight,” with a bluesy guitar solo from Dan Auerbach, fits right in with the kind of Americana that Cash's later years coalesced into.

“Dad saw no boundaries and said, 'Always follow your heart,'” recalls John Carter. “Well that's what we did.”

Working with catalogs of such cultural weight as Presley and Cash is not for the faint of heart. “It's pretty scary,” says Memphis engineer Matt Ross-Spang, who remixed Memphis.

With Cash's material, the job was to enhance unfamiliar songs with musical settings that felt right for his artistic sensibilities. With Presley, the assignment included treating well-known performances—including some classics—with respect, even while revising them. “You want to make it better, but you also don't want to take it out of the realm of how we've all heard it and loved it all these decades,” says Ross-Spang. “I tried to be really faithful to the original. I tried to be faithful to the direction of the musicians and the producers.”

On the new remix of “Kentucky Rain” without the background choir and horn section, Hammond B-3 stabs suddenly become apparent. And on Presley's understated “My Boy,” Ronnie Tutt's drums take on added significance. In a way, it sets the tone for the live record, where Tutt is the driving force.

“In a wonderful way, he overplays,” observes Ross-Spang. “Every hip shake Elvis makes, every scarf toss, every look or hand throw Elvis makes, Ronnie does amazing drum fills. All the songs go 90 miles an hour and Ronnie leads the way. It is incredible. A big reason why those live shows were so exciting was Ronnie Tutt's drumming.”

Considered parallel, Presley's Memphis and cash Songwriter hint at interesting parallels between the two artists. They each played a role in the development of rockabilly while they were friends with Sun in the 1950s. Both used large concert ensembles during the 1970s — Presley stacked two vocal ensembles on top of a full-sized live band. Cash performed similarly on his ABC-TV show in the early 1970s with his band augmented by two backing vocal groups (The Carter Family and The Statler Brothers), as well as a large orchestra.

Cash eventually returned to a simpler sound produced by Rick Rubin American Recordingsstarting just months after he recorded the featured vocals Songwriter. Since Presley died at the age of 42, how he would have approached the recording years remains a mystery. But the two packages provide a reminder of how two seminal voices of the 20th century drew on music from their small-town roots to help shape the arc of modern country.

“They had a great determination to follow the melting pot of music that they came from,” notes Jorgensen. “Any kind of music—if you were from Arkansas, or Mississippi, or Louisiana—it was available to you. You couldn't say the same about many city environments.”