Johnny Cash's 'American VI' Due in February

The sixth and final installment of Johnny Cash's American Recordings album series will be released next month. Due on Feb. 26, which would have been the Man in Black's 78th birthday, the Rick Rubin-produced 'American VI: Ain't No Grave' counts a previously unreleased Cash original and renditions of songs by Sheryl Crow, Kris Kristofferson, Tom Paxton and others.

Recorded by Cash's longtime engineer David "Fergie" Ferguson at the Cash Cabin Studio in Henderson, Tenn. and at Akadamie Mathematique of Philosophical Sound Research in Los Angeles, the disc features guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench, who played on all of the series' albums except the first. Guitarists Matt Sweeney, formerly of Chavez, Jonny Polonsky and Smokey Hormel, who also played on the fourth and fifth 'American' discs, also appear, with the Avett Brothers' Scott and Seth turning up on the project's namesake 'Ain't No Grave.'

Speaking about the project, Rubin said that these sessions kept the music legend going after he lost his wife, June Carter Cash, to surgical complications. Despite his frail condition, Rubin stated, "Johnny said that recording was his main reason for being alive."

A press release describes the set as "deeply elegiac and spiritual" and calls it an "achingly personal and intimate statement." Stemming from sessions that started in 2002 and led up to May 2003, just four months before Cash died, "each song is its own piece of the puzzle of life's mysteries and challenges -- the pursuit of salvation, the importance of friendships, the dream of peace, the power of faith and the joys and adversities that entail simple survival."

The never-before-heard original, titled 'I Corinthians: 15:55,' was written over the last three years of his life. Tracks like Crow's 'Redemption Day,' Kristofferson's 'For the Good Times' and Paxton's 'Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound' appear alongside tunes by Bob Nolan, Ed McCurdy, J.H. Red Hayes and Jack Rhodes and Queen Lili'uokalai.