"The Greatest Cowboy of Them All" Released: November 1990
"The Mystery of Life" Released: March 1991
"Wanted Man" Released: July 1991
The Mystery of Life is the 77th album by country singer Johnny Cash, released in 1991, and his last for Mercury Records. The songs featured are culled from both recent sessions and from leftovers from Cash's first Mercury session in 1986 for the album Johnny Cash is Coming to Town.
It includes new recordings of two songs already associated with him from his Sun and Columbia days, "Hey Porter" and "Wanted Man", plus a remake of "The Greatest Cowboy of Them All," which had been recorded for Columbia but released on the non-Columbia release, A Believer Sings the Truth . "I'll Go Somewhere and Sing My Songs Again" is a duet with Tom T. Hall. The album's poor performance on the charts (it peaked at #70) and that of "Goin' by the Book", the only single to chart (at #69), coupled with Cash's unsteady relationship with Mercury, ensured his departure from the label following the album's release. In 2003, the album was re-released with "The Wanderer" from U2's 1993 Island Records album Zooropa as a bonus track. In 2006, "I'm an Easy Rider" and "Beans for Breakfast" were used in the soundtrack to the video gameScarface: The World Is Yours.
According to Cash's 1997 biography, Mercury only pressed 500 copies of the album, biographer Robert Hilburn in Johnny Cash: The Life (2013) dismisses this as an exaggeration on Cash's part.[1]
This was the final new studio album release to feature drummer W.S. "Fluke" Holland, who had been a member of Cash's backing group and featured on almost all of his recordings since the 1950s, as Holland would not participate in the recording sessions for the Johnny Cash Country Christmas or the recordings made for American Recordings, though he would continue to perform with Cash in concert.
Anita Carter – backing vocals on "The Greatest Cowboy of Them All" and "The Hobo Song"
John Prine, Debra Deklaita, Claude L. Hill, J. Niles Clement, Pat McLaughlin, Bill Maresh, Jam Dant, Cousin Bill Clement, Jay Patten, Suzanne Sherwin, Roberto Bianco – backing vocals on "The Hobo Song"
Recording engineers: David R. Ferguson (chief engineer), Richard Adler, Jack "Stack-A-Track" Grochmal, Mark Howard, J. Niles Clement, Cousin Bob Clement
