Intervention Records will continue its Sun Records Hi-Fi Series—featuring classic titles from the Memphis label, mastered to vinyl from original master tapes in the Sun vaults—with a brilliant new pressing of Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar!, the first long-playing record from one of country music’s most enduring icons. The album, featuring “I Walk The Line,” “Cry, Cry, Cry,” and “Folsom Prison Blues,” has been given the ultimate treatment for this 180-gram, 45 RPM mono release, featuring audio from original master tapes mastered to vinyl in an all-analog process, plus restored artwork featuring new liner notes.
Pre-orders for Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar! are open now, with a release date of February 20, 2026. The album can be pre-ordered here.
“I never imagined that I’d hear the iconic voice of Johnny Cash on Intervention Records!” said Shane Buettner, Intervention Records’ founder. “And I don’t think music fans around the world have ever heard Johnny’s voice, or Sam Phillips’ famous Sun Studio sound, as clearly and definitively as they will on this new 45 RPM mono cut. This is as close you can get to a time machine back to Memphis in the 1950s!”
Originally issued in the fall of 1957—the first long-player for Sam Phillips’ Sun Records—Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar! showcases the stripped-down sound that would make the future Man in Black one of the most enduring and respected musicians of the 20th century. Backed only by his “Tennessee Two” (Luther Perkins on lead guitar and Marshall Grant on upright bass) and augmented by Phillips’ signature studio slapback that gave Cash’s “boom-chicka-boom” sound its kick, Hot and Blue Guitar! is the album that introduced many to Cash’s sonorous baritone.
The LP features Cash’s first three single A-sides for Sun, all self-penned: “Cry, Cry, Cry,” (a No. 14 country chart hit), “So Doggone Lonesome” (which peaked at No. 4 on the country charts) and Cash’s signature original “I Walk The Line.” The latter was a No. 1 country smash for six non-consecutive weeks in the summer of 1956 before crossing over into the Top 20 of Billboard’s pop charts. Additional standouts include Cash’s renditions of fare like “The Wreck Of The Old 97” and “Rock Island Line,” as well as a fourth original song, “Folsom Prison Blues”—which would top the country charts more than a decade later when Cash performed it as part of his landmark 1968 live album At Folsom Prison.
Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar! is the second title in Intervention’s Sun Records Hi-Fi Series, offering exquisite pressings of definitive country and rock material from the label’s storied discography. It follows the debut release in the series (and Sun’s second LP), Dance Album of Carl Perkins. The 1957 album served as a defining introduction to Perkins’ pioneering rockabilly songbook, including the standards “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Matchbox,” and “Honey Don’t.” (“Blue Suede Shoes,” later covered by Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and countless others, celebrates the 70th anniversary of its release in 2026.)
This Sun Record Hi-Fi Series pressing of Dance Album of Carl Perkins will be available in December and can be pre-ordered HERE
Intervention has handled the audio presentation and packaging of these vital albums with great care and attention to detail. Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar! was sourced from flat transfers of ¼” monaural master reels sourced from the Sun Records archive, which compiled the label’s original 7” single masters. This exhaustive research process resulted in the best-sounding tape version of each of the 12 songs on the original album, as well as the first vinyl edition of the album in decades to be sourced from these tapes. Acclaimed mastering engineer Kevin Gray at CoHEARent Audio has overseen this pressing of Hot and Blue Guitar!; lacquers were plated using RTI’s three-step process and pressed on ultra-quiet 180-gram vinyl by boutique pressing plant Gotta Groove Records, offering crystal-clear audio fidelity that sacrifices none of the spark of the original recordings.
The beautifully restored “old-style” jacket, manufactured by Stoughton Printing Co., features a new essay by noted Sun Records historian and two-time Grammy Award winner Colin Escott. His liner notes offer rich context on Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar!, from recording to packaging, and how the album planted the seeds for Cash’s singular career, spanning more than half a century. “[Hot and Blue Guitar] was…a summary of Johnny Cash’s roots and his story so far,” he writes. “The breadth of his song choices gave some idea of what awaited us in the years and decades ahead.”
JOHNNY CASH WITH HIS HOT AND BLUE GUITAR! TRACK LIST:
Side 1
- Rock Island Line
- I Heard That Lonesome Whistle
- Country Boy
- If The Good Lord’s Willing
- Cry, Cry, Cry
- Remember Me
Side 2
- So Doggone Lonesome
- I Was There When It Happened
- I Walk The Line
- The Wreck Of The Old ‘97
- Folsom Prison Blues
- Doin’ My Time
