A gospel train that carries brotherhood, repentance, and the hard earned weight of American music history
When THIS TRAIN appeared on THE JOHNNY CASH SHOW, it arrived not as a commercial single climbing a chart, but as a defining moment within THE JOHNNY CASH SHOW album, released in 1970 and credited to JOHNNY CASH. That album reached number one on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and crossed into the mainstream with a Top 20 showing on the Billboard 200, carrying with it this unforgettable performance by ROY ORBISON, JOHNNY CASH, CARL PERKINS, and JERRY LEE LEWIS. In the context of television music history, few ensemble performances have achieved comparable cultural weight or enduring reverence.
THIS TRAIN is an old American spiritual, its origins rooted deep in gospel tradition, long before it ever reached a television stage. By the time it was performed on THE JOHNNY CASH SHOW, the song had already traveled through decades of church pews, front porches, chain gangs, and revival tents. What Cash and his guests understood was that this song did not need reinvention. It needed testimony. The power of the performance lies in restraint, clarity, and collective belief. Each voice enters not to dominate, but to affirm.
The lyrical premise is stark and uncompromising. This train carries only the righteous. No gamblers, no liars, no backbiters, no hypocrites. In lesser hands, that message can sound sanctimonious. Here, it sounds earned. These four men were not choir boys delivering doctrine. They were survivors of addiction, scandal, loss, and spiritual exhaustion. When ROY ORBISON lifts his voice, there is an aching purity that suggests longing rather than judgment. CARL PERKINS brings humility and grounding, the sound of a man who knows failure intimately. JERRY LEE LEWIS, often dismissed as chaos incarnate, sings with startling reverence, his fire tempered into something almost trembling. At the center stands JOHNNY CASH, not as host or star, but as conductor of shared confession.
Musically, the performance is stripped to its bones. Acoustic rhythm, hand claps, and voices that rise and fall like a sermon shaped by breath rather than arrangement. There is no studio polish, no attempt to modernize the gospel form. The tempo moves like a train that cannot be rushed. The repetition becomes ritual. Each verse feels less like a warning and more like a self examination.
Culturally, this moment captured something rare. It placed gospel not on the margins, but at the center of American popular music. Broadcast into living rooms across the country, THIS TRAIN reminded viewers that rock and roll, country, and gospel were never separate bloodlines. They were branches of the same troubled, hopeful tree. The performance stands today as a quiet monument to unity, to shared belief without spectacle, and to the idea that redemption in music does not come from perfection, but from truth sung aloud together.