Johnny Cash, damn that's a good one. I didn't lose it when he died but the first time I heard his cover of "Hurt" I had to walk out of the bar, walk home, download it and play it about 300 times, go out to the store the next morning and buy it and play it 3,000 more. Then watch the video online another 30,000 times. I have about 2,000 random CDs of music and Johnny Cash in one form or another is on every single one of them.

I never really got it until I read Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song in high school. After Gary Gilmore got out of prison (but before he went back and was executed), he sat at home with his mother and they played every single Johnny Cash record she had (he was a hick, so that was lot). Johnny Cash before then was a TV host from the '70s to me. Only when I read Mailer's description of that was I able to get what he was all about.

Miles Davis said that listening to John Lee Hooker sing was like someone stabbing him with a knife. Johnny Cash is pretty close to that.