Hear Jamey Johnson Perform Johnny Cash’s ‘Spirit Rider’ [LISTEN]

Jamey Johnson has taken on country legend Johnny Cash’s "Spirit Rider," and the result is brimming with rich vocals and emotion. Readers can press play above to watch the full clip.

For the Johnny Cash: Forever Words project, Johnson, along with a slew of other country artists, furnished Cash's found poetry with music, in order to compile the songs into a tribute album. Johnson has added his own influence and interpretation to "Spirit Rider," one of the 16 unpublished written works from the Man in Black included in the release.

"Determining the artist for each song was truly a matter of the heart," says co-producer John Carter Cash in a press release. "I picked the artists who are most connected with my father, who had a personal story that was connected with Dad. It became an exciting endeavor to go through these works, to put them together and present them to different people who could finish them in a way that I believed that Dad would have wanted."

In the above video about Johnson's rendition of the poem, Cash explains how Johnson let emotion take the reigns in the interpretation. "There was a rule for this whole thing, it was only to follow the word. Not to say that the artist could individually perhaps change a word here or there, that was OK, I believe my dad would have been fine with that -- but the message had to be unadulterated," he said in the video. Press play above to get a preview of Johnson's rich version of "Spirit Rider," and to hear Cash speak about the song.

Recorded primarily at the Cash Cabin Studio, Johnny Cash, Forever Words is the musical companion to Forever Words: The Unknown Poems, the printed publication of Cash's found work. Other collaborators on the work include Ruston Kelly, Rosanne Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Brad Paisley, John Mellencamp, Carlene Carter, Elvis Costello and the Jayhawks.