Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian

It was the twelfth album Cash released on Columbia, a concept album about the history of Native Americans and their problems. He assumed his ancestry included Cherokee, which partly inspired it. Two songs deal with twentieth-century issues affecting the Seneca and Pima peoples, and The Talking Leaves is about Sequoyah inventing written words in 1821. Peter LaFarge wrote five of the eight songs, including The Ballad of Ira Hayes. Apache Tears and The Talking Leaves are credited to Cash, and The Vanishing Race to Johnny Horton.

The Ballad of Ira Hayes reached number three on the country singles chart, and the album went to number two on the country albums chart and number 47 on the pop chart. Radio stations rejected it. In August 1964 Cash ran a full-page Billboard advertisement calling some disc jockeys gutless and mailed more than a thousand copies of the single to stations. By 19 September the song had reached number three.

Afterlife

A 2014 tribute album, Look Again to the Wind, was released by Sony Masterworks with Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson, Steve Earle, Rhiannon Giddens and others. Antonino D'Ambrosio, who wrote A Heartbeat and a Guitar about the making of the original, was its executive producer. The PBS documentary We're Still Here followed, first airing on 1 February 2016.