Ten Favorite Days of the Week Songs: Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down (#1)

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Time to throw the calendar away! Here's the last song in the list of my favorite songs with a day of the week in the title. And, for this one, I'm going with the obvious again...and revisiting an old favorite. #1: Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down - Johnny Cash What? Cash was the #1 "songs about train" song, and here he is again? Sheesh, I should do a top 25 countdown on....oh, never mind. Lightning in a bottle. You put a great song and a great singer together at the right time and that's what you have. You may not know, but Johnny Cash was the third person to do one of Kris Kristofferson's greatest songs (although some would argue about "Me and Bobbie McGee" having that title). Ray Stevens did the first version that I heard (I remember the gentle playing of "Bringing in the Sheaves" after the line "I stopped beside a Sunday school and listened to the song that they were singing"). But, let's face it, once Johnny Cash got his meaty baritone into this song, it was his. I mentioned last month that I saw the episode of Columbo that Cash was in, where he played a murderous evangelistic revival singer. "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down" was one of the two songs Cash did in the episode. When you hear a song like that in an unusual setting, even though you can sing the lyrics backward, you can really appreciate the brilliance of the song. Cash and Kristofferson were close friends. There's even a story how Kris, who was instrumental in discovering John Prine and Steve Goodman, gave Johnny an early recording of Goodman's masterpiece, "City of New Orleans," and begged Johnny (who had a history of doing train songs...he even did an entire album devoted to them, and had a segment on his ABC TV series called "Come Along and Ride This Train") to do it, calling it "the best damn train song ever written." Cash passed on that one, but he didn't pass on the best damn Sunday song ever written. Thanks for reading. Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down Written by Kris Kristofferson Recorded by Johnny Cash From The Johnny Cash Show, 1970 (Also recorded by Ray Stevens, 1969, and Kris Kristofferson, 1969) Nothing short of dying that's half as lonesome as the sound: