Gibson has unveiled a pair of stunning Custom Shop acoustic guitars celebrating the late Johnny Cash and his daughter, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, featuring some exquisite signature details (just look at those pickguards!) co-designed with the artists themselves.
The Johnny Cash SJ-200 is a real time machine reproduction, based upon a pair of custom SJ-200s that Gibson made for the Man In Black in the late ‘50s, complete with his own pickguard design, while the Rosanne Cash J-185 is very much a companion piece, featuring an alternative take on the jumbo, built to Cash junior’s specs, and featuring her own pickguard design – with some input from her husband, the musician and producer John Leventhal.
Both are high-end acoustic guitars, limited to 100 units each, and made in Gibson’s Bozeman facility, Montana.
As Rosanne says in the intro video, her father’s new signature guitar is a “very confident looking” instrument – befitting the man himself. “Mine is more subtle,” she says. “Mine is more a gentle-looking guitar. You have to come to it. That guitar? It’ll come to you.”
There is no mistaking who that SJ-200 was made for. It has Johnny Cash’s name inlaid in mother of pearl, and has his own Batwing-style pickguard lending this grand old jumbo a little outlaw attitude. There is no ignoring it either, not with that hot orange and red Vintage Cherry Sunburst finish.
A little quieter looking, the Rosanne Cash J-185 arrives finished in a high-gloss nitro Heritage Cherry Sunburst – and heritage is the through line with these guitars.
“It does speak to generational legacy, personal legacy, professional legacy,” says Rosanne. “To me it is so essential to my family. I’ve known that guitar, my Dad’s Gibson, for so many years. That guitar is part of Dad. I never even thought that of the idea that there might be a companion guitar to his. It’s like a dream I didn’t know I had. It’s really moving.”
Designing her signature model with Gibson couldn’t be any more personal, right down to the typography of the “Cash” inlay on the J-185’s tortoiseshell pickguard, which has a back story that goes all the way back to her father’s service in the United States Air Force.
“After dad died I went through his desk,” says Rosanne. “There was a little patch with ‘CASH’ on it that had been on his uniform since he was in the Air Force. I took the patch and I had it sewn into my guitar strap. And we took this Cash [on the pickguard] and modelled it on the patch that’s on my strap.”
Finding her own pickguard shape that would be complementary yet distinct to her father’s Batwing design was not easy.
“We went through like 10 variations of this shape of the pickguard,” she says. “We started with my dad’s pickguard, and its very sharp edge, and I said, ‘I could play off that but I want my pickguard to be a lot more feminine, to have rounded wave-like curves.’”
Fundamentally, both guitars have a lot of spec in common – not least, both will have some set of lungs on them, and songs in there, too.
The Rosanne Cash J-185 has a top of thermally aged Sitka spruce, with solid figured maple on the back and sides. You’ll find multi-ply binding on the guitar’s top, single ply on the back and fretboard. Its mahogany neck joins the body with a compound dovetail joint, set with hot hide glue.
With a SlimTaper neck shape, the 24.75” scale and 12” rosewood fingerboard, the J-185 should be a real player, and ready for the stage, too, with controls for the industry-standard L.R. Baggs VTC under-saddle pickup and preamp mounted discretely in the soundhole.
These high-end builds are all about the details; check out the bridge on this J-185, with the traditional belly-up style rosewood unit inlaid with MOP Maltese Crosses. It is very fancy.
But if you really want fancy, a show-stopper, and money is no object, there is the Johnny Cash SJ-200.
Besides the aforementioned signature bling you’ve got the moustache-style SJ-200 bridge, the binding that extends across the build, with single-ply on the headstock and fingerboard, three-ply on the back, and five-ply on the top of the guitar.
The tonewoods are straight out of the vault; this is the real good stuff, with AAA Sitka spruce on top, AAA flamed maple on the instrument’s back and sides, and – again – high-gloss nitrocellulose lacquer making sure all those details pop out under the lights.
There are no electronics on the Johnny Cash model. You’ll just need to find yourself a good acoustic guitar microphone. These Cash signature models are available now.
The Rosanne Cash J-185 is priced £4,799, while the Johnny Cash SJ-200 is an eye-watering £12,999. Both ship in custom hardshell guitar cases with certificates of authenticity, and at just 100 units each, look destined to be collectible. Fore more details, head over to Gibson.
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