In the course of a career that spanned nearly half a century, Johnny Cash (1932-2003) recorded hundreds of songs and dozens of albums. Most weren't very good. Their quality depended upon the degree of attention or distraction in Cash's life, how sympathetic a producer he had, or how furiously substance abuse dominated his affairs at the moment. The songs were mediocre as often as not, the arrangements slapdash. As a Cash fan from high school on, I learned to watch my purchases carefully. Good Cash is musical heaven, the worst based far south of there.

Broadly speaking, with some honorable exceptions his most successful recordings, those that made his reputation as a great American musical figure were his earliest, the ones in which he introduced his unique blend of country, folk, rockabilly and gospel, and his last with producer Rick Rubin, who stripped the songs to their basics and gave Cash the freedom to cut whatever he liked, which proved to be country, folk, rockabilly and gospel. The second- and third-rate discs are usually associated with those whose big arrangements (loud guitars, horns, strings, choruses) may have been intended to draw attention from the thinness of the material. Not many artists have viewed this period of Cash history as a model for creative exploration.

Until now. On piano player Clint Morgan's Troublemaker Cash is hardly the only influence, but he is the one a listener immediately notices, for example in the opener, "Hangman Woman," boasting a sort of Gothic humor to which Cash sometimes gave voice. It's a Morgan original, with bright amped-up guitars, pounding percussion, female chorus; it's country only in lyrics, otherwise pumping r&b. Yet it's country of a curiously rooted sort, non-honkytonk, calling to mind, memory and ear an older America where you might actually hear a gallows creak and swing as you do in the quiet after the song ends.

The flute in the spiritual that follows, "Go Down, Moses," is unapologetic cornball. The snake-charmer effect is there, I take it, to make clear -- in case you missed the reference to "Egypt's Land" -- that the action is happening somewhere out in the desert. Cash, who loved what used to be called "Negro spirituals," covered a number over the years, and he or his producer was sometimes just as ham-fisted in the insertion of sound effects. An actual Cash composition, "Big River" harks back to his Sun Records days. Here r&b horns give the narrative a firm kick, and this "River" eventually flows into a representation of the 1959 Ray Charles hit "What'd I Say?" It's a surprise, and a pleasant one.

At some juncture, likely the very next song ("Hungry Man Blues"), which starts with a quote from Robert Johnson's "Kind Hearted Woman," one starts to appreciate that Morgan's natural music is blues and r&b, not always of a profound sort but of a strain one wouldn't mind hearing on a jukebox. If you scan the long list of players who show up here and there in the studio, you'll recognize names of well-regarded figures on the current blues scene: Watermelon Slim, John Del Toro Richardson, Bob Margolin and others.

The singing then eases into a kind of un-Cash relaxed tenor, suited to the melodic pop of "Echoes" and "I'll Love You If I Want To." Then it's on to the harder blues of "It's Rough Out Here" and the Chuck Berry-toned, tongue-in-cheek "She Take My Money." Morgan riffs through blues history on "Too Rich to Sing the Blues," playing a privileged jackass enamored of the notion that all the blues immortals are to be judged inferior successes to Howard Hughes. (Why Howard Hughes? Because it rhymes with the name of a certain musical genre, of course.) By far the grimmest number, reminiscent of oldtime blues about natural disasters, "Hurricane Harvey" takes a bare-bones acoustic slide-guitar approach to recall, powerfully, the devastation the title entity visited upon Texas in 2017.

Rounding out more than an hour of music (a rarity these days), Morgan, with Kinky Friedman, brings both laughter and lament to the rueful "Somebody Put a Walmart on the Farm," while "The Cover of the Living Blues" parodies the late Shel Silverstein's Rolling Stone-themed novelty exercise that charted for Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show in 1973, when Rolling Stone was a big deal. If I'm correct, "The Troublemaker," not a Morgan original, was the title song of a 1976 Willie Nelson album. I imagine that its message in crude paraphrase, that Jesus was a hippie, will go down even less smoothly in some quarters than it did nearly half a century ago.

I've heard a shocking amount of music in my years, and I am not readily surprised. Yet I don't recall hearing anything quite like Troublemaker, or at least anything that worked well enough to stick in memory. Morgan brings an intelligent, original perspective to American pop, enabling him to wed the commonplace to the unexpected in happy partnership. His sense of fun and hijinks is irresistible, and who would want to fight it anyway?