Pick a heavy slab.

Maybe Giza NineFive.

Yeah, I agree with jupiterboy--a straightforward, bold slab face. Oddly enough, even if you want it to print in a color, the type will only print black.

"Black matte varnish on rich black."

Lovely suggestion.

Parkinson Black has a little wooden type feel to it. Like a Hatch print.

No, no, no!

These are all off by a country mile. Johnny Cash was an outlaw and a criminal before he found God and turned into a "good" or "lawful evil" dude. After that point Cash entered the mainstream yet he remained permanently on the shady side of the law and the establishment.

These bulky, masculine slab serif candidates are in the ryte ballpark but they lack the subversiveness and non-conformity of the man himself. They're too conventional and law-abiding. (Oh some dys I will do anything just to get a few hyphenates in. Ah, that was a good hit back there).

The embarrassing part is I can't name any butch slab serifs that evoke these aspects of Johnny's personality.

They are all good candidates but they lack soul.

j a m e s

That is why I said somewhere in between.

The counters in Giza NinFive are fragile, in contrast to the super heavy weight.

i'd say because it's a portrayal of the song more so than his personality, and the two perhaps aren't exactly the same. So it would be a representation of the period he wrote the song.

I don't think the typeface has to be bang on - it just needs to fit, the song portrayal will be emphasized with how i treat the type and the lyrics and print methods etc i choose.

On another note I am going to contrast this with another song, i was thinking 'White Christmas' - Bing Crosby. One song is quite brutally honest for that period of time and the other is more of a song for escapism and "feel good" listening (in my opinion). Oh yeah one's black and the others white, ha.

Cheers again for all the input!

Perhaps the task can be handled by a pairing of typefaces. I personally think Leviathan or Ziggurat by H&FJ would look great with a sharp serif like Farnham. If you want a grotesque, Maple by Process Type Foundry or National by Klim could work.

> Bureau Grotesque

Joe, the irony there is that while the Bureau Grots certainly have a feel of American early 20th-century industrialism, the series was originally based on fonts by Stephenson, Blake & Co. Ltd., Sheffield and London.

No no no. Johnny Cash has 23 separate dimensions, the later five only revealing themselves after his conversion. Only a deconstructed, then reconstructed font based on the handwriting of Johnny Cash taken and then reimagined as a swash gothic could ever serve as the basis for approaching a font to fully describe the Gordian evolution of the phenomena that comprise Johnny Cash.

Wait, Poplar looks pretty good…

I would not use a typeface of the digital generation (i.e. post-mid 1980s).
I see Hoefler types as a quite radical new take on your local culture (I'm speaking of North America, I am Italian), very related to the crispness of vector drawing.
Once, having met Stan Ridgway on his BBS, I would have liked to try a design of his Wall of Voodoo DVD, and what I though at the time was to scan original woodtypes and then arrange them.
But maybe you'd need to pair it with something more usable for textsetting…

EDIT: What about having a look at Marcus Burlile's "collage" alphabets:
http://www.identifont.com/show?48W
Maybe anachronistical, but there could be something handy…

Andrew, I channeled the late, great, JC's spirit last night. He said he wanted to see what you came up with. "Tell the young man that the friendly ole ghost in black wants to see."

So are you still around? What'd you pick? (Elvis was curious too.)

Gothic 13