Don't Take Your Guns to Town
Do not Take Your Guns to Town is a Country - Ballad of Johnny Cash , which in November 1958 for Columbia Records under the production of Don Law as a single and in 1959 on the album The Fabulous Johnny Cash was released. On the B-side of the single was I Still Miss Someone .
The track stayed at number 1 on Billboard Country Songs for six weeks and was Cash's first number one hit for Columbia. The song reached number 32 in the Billboard Pop Charts. It was also awarded a BMI Award .
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The lyrics are set in the Wild West . Young Billy Joe is asked by his mother not to take his guns into town. He does not comply with this request and tries to reassure the mother by saying that he can shoot as well and as quickly as anyone else, but that he would never take up a gun for no reason. He clashes with a stranger in a saloon and is shot by him before he can move.
Emergence
Cash wrote the piece during his time in the Air Force in Landsberg am Lech . According to his own words, the melody of the song is taken from the old Irish traditional clancy Lowered the Boom . On August 13, 1958, he recorded the song with Luther Perkins on guitar, Marshall Grant on bass and Buddy Harman on drums. Cash played the rhythm guitar.
New recordings
The first new recording of the song was made in 1974 for the album Junkie and the Juicehead Minus Me . A second followed in 1988 for Classic Cash . A live acoustic version of the piece was released on VH1 Storytellers in 1998 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Catalog No. Columbia 41313; Whitburn, Joel: The Billboard Book Of Top 40 Country Hits. 1944 - 2006. 2nd edition. New York, NY: Billboard Books, 2006, p. 74
- ^ Whitburn, Joel: Top Pop Singles 1955-1993. Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin: Record Research Ltd., 1994, p. 95
- ↑ www.numberonestars.com: Johnny Cash Awards and Nominations ( Memento of the original from February 9, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed May 3, 2010
