Every lyric to every song that iconic American artist Johnny Cash ever wrote.

This is the complete, comprehensive catalogue of Cash's 55-year career as a songwriter, including nearly 500 songs.

Johnny Cash, 'The Man in Black', is one of America's most prolific and influential songwriters, speaking through his songs to the soul of the nation while capturing the victories and losses that marked his own life. This comprehensive and definitive book collects - for the first time - every one of his song lyrics alongside never-before-seen reproductions of handwritten pages from his own notebooks.

Organised chronologically and with critical commentary on themes that appear throughout his work, including a foreword from his son, John Carter Cash, this book catalogues Cash's range as a poet and storyteller. It traces his evolution from his earliest compositions to his last love song, through periods of personal struggle, political activism and tests of faith. What emerges is an unprecedented portrait of Johnny Cash as a timeless American artist.

In this trove of song lyrics, Cash lore, images and poetry, Mark Stielper returns the Man in Black to center stage and crafts a posthumous legacy befitting a legend. For both newcomers and diehard fans, this anthology is an opportunity to experience, in the words of Cash's son, 'the very essence of his soul.' A comprehensive, must-have collector's item * KIRKUS REVIEWS *

John Carter Cash is the only son of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. He has produced five Grammy Award-winning albums and owns and operates the Cash Cabin Studio in Tennessee. He is also the author of House of Cash: The Legacies of My Father, Johnny Cash.

Mark Stielper has chronicled the life of the 'Man in Black' for nearly 40 years, contributing to a dozen Cash biographies, appearing on screen in documentaries and speaking at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Johnny Cash Museum. Johnny Cash himself called Stielper 'my friend, the family historian' and said, 'He knows more about me than me.'