America can be a dark place on a conservative morning, even though art is expected to flourish under repression and economic collapse. Now, more than ever, we need a real storyteller to remind us of our nation’s underbelly—a storyteller with a dark side as storied as America’s.

Johnny Cash is that man. The shadow of the Man in Black is long, but his latest record, American IV: The Man Comes Around, proves he isn’t too old to fuck you up.

A little history: With Folsom Prison Blues, Cash foreshadowed the bloodstained rhymes of gangster rappers like NWA with a single line: “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.” He won a Grammy for liner notes penned to accompany 1968’s iconic concert album, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, where the opening text reads: “The culture of a thousand years is shattered with the clanging of the cell door behind you. Life outside behind you immediately becomes unreal.”

With those lines, Cash made life in jail real, relating the nightmare-inducing mentality of prison with a clarity no sane person would ever wish to verify. But even under the weight of his venerated dark side, Cash is funny. In One Piece at a Time, he translated the apple-pie experience of working in the Detroit motor mills into a hilarious 1976 hit about attempting to shoplift a Cadillac—netting a one-finned, three-eyed cocktail of American steel instead. Songs like this make the idea he could leave us, in a time of political darkness for everyone who shutters at the careful cadence in the writing of beady-eyed pundits like George Will, feel so desperately wrong.

America isn’t shining in 2003, though for 50-plus years, Cash’s brass balls, sheer talent and unquenchable thirst to push his art toward divinity have made it sparkle in the eyes of the world. His chapter in America’s cannon is as secure as his eventual place on a stamp. Because we’ll need Johnny Cash. We’ll need him to remember a time when his country was more than a blizzard of obfuscated ideas about “obsolete” freedoms.

In the interest of total disclosure, I should reveal I bought Johnny Cash’s new record, American IV: The Man Comes Around, because I read a review of it. I literally put down the paper, picked up my wallet and walked to the record store—something I can’t remember doing since high school. Of course, this wasn’t just any review. Bill Bullock’s haunting, dirge-toned piece from The Stranger, published Nov. 21, 2002, was delicately balanced between praise for Cash’s spartan readings of classic songs, and somber eulogizing for the man himself.

After silently enduring a lecture from an independent record-store owner—who wore his profession’s seemingly compulsory clunky black glasses and indomitable nicotine addiction with absurd relish—about the merits of earlier Johnny Cash releases and the improbable chance of finding his new album on vinyl, I walked two blocks down the street to Tower and promptly found the LP tucked neatly in with the “Cs.”

As I victoriously strode home, I began to think about Bullock’s assertion that the Man in Black is not long for this world, and that I’d had to go to a chain store to find his new LP. Then I remembered Cash has Parkinson’s, the same debilitating disease that made watching Muhammed Ali struggle to light the Olympic flame almost unbearable.

And those thoughts filled me with dread.

Given Johnny Cash’s fundamentalist Christian creed—which, spiritual insurance aside, probably saved him from death at the hands of amphetamines and cocaine—he would certainly object to being called a “god,” even in the terrestrial context of music.

But while the Man in Black may resist such deification, Cash’s laundry-list of artistic achievements makes it impossible to argue against his place as a central pillar of American music. Johnny Cash was the youngest inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He has won 11 Grammies. And in a sign that justice exists, Cash has made more pop hits than Barbara Streisand, the Osmond family (combined) and the freakshow who dubbed himself the the King of Pop.

Cash earned the title of the Man in Black during his first performance at the Grand Ole Opry: He wore all-black against the tinsel-drenched stars of Nashville. And though he’s become an American chronicler on par with Walt Whitman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Willie Nelson, Cash’s dark side has always been present. While Ferlinghetti got arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Cash got arrested for smuggling amphetamines in his guitar case. Willie Nelson may smoke weed all the time, and he got busted for cheating the IRS—who doesn’t want to cheat them?—but he didn’t smuggle drugs.

With total global destruction seeming more real these days than it has since the end of the Cold War, it’s fitting that Cash opens American IV: The Man Comes Around with a track describing the end of the world. In the liner notes, he reveals he spent more time composing this piece than any song in his career, and the slow gestation is evident in it. The track opens with a quote from the Book of Revelation, and Cash wears his weathered baritone like a perfectly worn pair of boots. A lacquer of eerie broadcast mumble lays over his words as he relates a conversation with one of the four beasts of the apocalypse, and this brief exposition immediately grips the listener, calibrating eardrums for the inspired rendering of man’s last stand that follows.

Against a backbone of plodding, open-ended piano, the narcotic bounce of Cash’s guitar balances depictions of the apocalypse’s terrible beauty with a hope absent in his words. Even as Cash reminds us there will be no peace until Armageddon, it’s hard—even for a heathen soul—not be drawn to the images of “one hundred million angels singing,” and the biscuits-and-gravy-comfort of a “father hen” calling his chickens home. With The Man Comes Around, Cash has not only written an inspirational song about the end of the world, he’s written one of the best Christian songs since Amazing Grace.

The remainder of the album, like his previous releases for Universal’s American Recordings imprint, features an extremely varied list of covers peppered with original compositions. In listening to this record, it’s remarkable to hear Cash take ownership of songs that at first glance could seem ill-advised or even comical. Upon its release, who’d have thought Johnny Cash would be covering Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus?

But while a country legend covering a cut from a band best known for its clinical ’80s synth-pop may conjure up a Pat Boone-styled train wreck, Cash’s unabashed spirituality lends the track a depth lacking in the sterile original. His version of Nine Inch Nail’s Hurt is even more powerful, with its gradually swelling acoustic arrangement providing a shimmering backdrop for the somber, questioning lilt of a voice heavy with penitent depression. Over the course of album, he achieves similar success with covers of Roberta Flack’s The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, the Beatles’ In My Life and Hank Williams’ country classic I’m so Lonesome I Could Cry. But after the record’s first few tracks, any surprise at the quality of the material has vanished, and you’re left with the knowledge that Johnny Cash could sing Happy Birthday and make you cry.

If the Man in Black’s shadow is too long for him to witness the recovery of our country from these dark times, it will leave a crater in our nation’s soul. Buy this record, lie down, and listen to the whole thing. You’ll see what I mean. Long live Johnny Cash.