With his 70th birthday last month, Johnny Cash celebrated nearly 50 years in the music business and more than 1,500 recorded songs across 500 albums ? and that?s only counting the albums released in the United States and Europe.

Johnny Cash?s new compilation album, “The Essential Johnny Cash,” features some of his greatest hits such as “Ring of Fire” and “I Walk the Line,” “Tennessee Flat-Top Box” and “A Boy Named Sue.” There are songs about almost everything in this collection: love, hate, fighting, drinking and even his own jail time, which inspired “Folsom Prison Blues.”

Cash has performed with the best in the music business, first starting out in the music industry opening for the King of rock ?n? roll himself, Elvis Presley. He has performed with such greats as Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis and received a Grammy for his writing on a Bob Dylan record.

Some people may not know how popular Johnny Cash was at the height of his career: He was outselling the Beatles in 1969. He was the hottest musician in the world and his record sales showed it, with 250,000 record sales a month. From 1969-71 Cash had his own show on ABC, and had talented guests such as Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Kenny Rogers, Dennis Hopper, Merle Haggard, James Taylor, Hank Williams, Jr. and many other famous performers.

Cash is the youngest person to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and is still the only person to ever be selected for the Country and Rock Music Hall of Fame (even the late Presley was only inducted to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1998). Cash has had 48 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 Pop charts, which is near what the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones accomplished.He has won 11 Grammies, most recently in 1999 for the Lifetime Achievement Award and a shared Grammy in 2002 for Best Country Album. He also produced and co-scripted a movie about the life of Jesus distributed by the Rev. Billy Graham organization, which remains popular today.

Contemporary artists such as Sheryl Crow, Bruce Springstein and others will be coming out with a tribute album for Cash later this year, and he recently recorded a song with Dave Matthews that can be heard on the movie soundtrack for “We Were Soldiers” with Mel Gibson. Today?s artists can only hope to have the same impact as Cash in his career, who still has 45 albums in print, even 40 years after their original release.

Cash has outlived many other music greats, has achieved awards that few ever receive and has done more than many could hope to do in the entertainment industry. He is a true legend and one of the last of his kind; his music is funny, entertaining, dynamic, original and most of all, enjoyable.