The Last Gunfighter Ballad is the 55th album by Americancountry singer Johnny Cash, released on Columbia Records in 1977. Highlights include the title track, "Far Side Banks of Jordan" and "That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine", the latter of which features Cash's brother Tommy Cash. The title track was the album's only single, reaching #38 on the country charts; it tells the tale of an aging gunslinger who finds himself unable to deal with the modern way of life.
"Ballad of Barbara" is a new recording of a song that had first appeared as the B-side of Cash's 1973 single "Praise the Lord and Pass the Soup", while "City Jail" is a studio version of a track first released on the live album På Österåker. "Far Side Banks of Jordan", a duet featuring Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, is a remake of a track first recorded in 1975 for a planned Gospel album that was recorded in full, but for reasons unknown was never released (the 1975 version of the song, along with the other tracks, would not be released until 2012). The song is noted for its lyrics which feature June pondering the possibility of dying before her husband (she would in fact die several months before Cash in 2003).[1]
