Johnny Cash – God’s Gonna Cut You Down

Justin Timberlake Said “Stop” — And Hollywood Came To Church

The song was recorded in a living room by a dying man. Johnny Cash taped “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” in 2003 at his home in Hendersonville, Tennessee — frail, barely months from the end, his voice stripped of its old thunder but carrying something heavier in its place. He died on September 12, 2003, never knowing the song would become one of the most extraordinary music videos ever made. The single was released on November 9, 2006, as the lead track from the posthumous album American V: A Hundred Highways, and the video that accompanied it won the Grammy Award for Best Music Video in 2008.

American V: A Hundred Highways debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 on July 4, 2006 — America’s Independence Day — making Cash the oldest artist at that point to debut at the top of that chart. The album sold 88,000 copies in its first week. The song itself moved 672,000 copies in the United States alone, an extraordinary figure for a track from a posthumous album built around a traditional folk hymn that had been circulating since the 1940s.

The song’s roots go back far beyond Cash. Known variously as “Run On,” “God Almighty’s Gonna Cut You Down,” and “Sermon,” the traditional folk hymn had already passed through the hands of the Golden Gate Quartet in 1946, Odetta in 1957, Elvis Presley in 1967, and Bobbie Gentry in 1968. What Cash and Rick Rubin did with it was something different entirely — stripping away the conventional gospel arrangement and replacing it with something sparse, stamping, and ancient-sounding, built around claps, stomps, and multi-layered guitars. On a good pair of headphones, you can hear the creak of the chair Cash sat in, the click of guitar strings, and the labour of every breath. Rubin’s production was brilliant in refusing to hide a single mile of it.

The video idea came from Justin Timberlake, who was in the studio with Rubin working on his own record when someone pressed play on the unreleased Cash album. When “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” came on, Timberlake said “Stop” — and immediately laid out a concept: gather the biggest names in music and film, dress them in Cash’s signature black, and film their unscripted reactions to hearing the song for the first time. Rubin called director Tony Kaye, who had previously directed “Runaway Train” for Soul Asylum and “Dani California” for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Mark Romanek — who directed Cash’s legendary “Hurt” video — was unavailable, but suggested Kaye for the job. The resulting 40-strong cast included Iggy Pop, Bono, Keith Richards, Jay-Z, Johnny Depp, Chris Martin, Kanye West, Patti Smith, Lisa Marie Presley, and Brian Wilson. Nobody was asked to lip-sync. Every reaction was spontaneous. Shelby Lynne shed real tears. Kid Rock stomped and clapped alone. Rick Rubin himself closed the clip, riding in the back of a limousine with Owen Wilson, tossing a bouquet of funeral flowers over a cliff.

American V was the fifth instalment in the American Recordings series that had resurrected Cash’s career from 1994 onward — a partnership that produced “Hurt,” one of the most devastating cover versions in rock history, and reintroduced Cash to generations who had no memory of Ring of Fire. A sixth album, American VI: Ain’t No Grave, followed in 2010, drawn from the same final sessions.

The song’s afterlife has been restless. Marilyn Manson recorded a gothic-country version in 2017. Bailey Zimmerman covered it for his 2023 debut album. In 2025, the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security used a version of the track without permission in a recruitment video, prompting an immediate cease and desist. A traditional folk hymn about divine judgment, it turns out, has strong feelings about being used for government advertising.

Cash once told Rick Rubin that he had always wanted to make gospel records — that everything he had ever recorded was, in some way, reaching toward God. “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” is the purest expression of that longing, delivered in a voice that had earned every crack and rasp. You can run on for a long time. Sooner or later, you get a song like this.