Ring of Fire: The Best of Johnny Cash

Despite its "Best of" billing, this 1963 Columbia release was Johnny Cash's sixteenth studio-era album for the label and largely a collection of previously issued singles and EP cuts from 1959 through 1963, most of which had never before appeared together on an LP^[1].

The album's twelve tracks range widely across Cash's early Columbia period, pairing the mariachi-horn drama of the title track with the aching "I Still Miss Someone," the homesick "Forty Shades of Green," the narrative sketch "Tennessee Flat Top Box," and gospel material like "Peace in the Valley," giving listeners a cross-section of the sounds Cash had been perfecting since the late 1950s^[1].

Commercially, the record became a slow-building landmark. It reached number 26 on Billboard's general Top LPs chart, then became the very first number-one album when Billboard launched its dedicated Country Albums chart on January 11, 1964. It was certified Gold on February 11, 1965, Cash's first Gold-certified LP^[1]. AllMusic later gave the collection four out of five stars in retrospective reviews, and it remains the only Columbia-era greatest-hits compilation included in the official Cash box-set reissue campaign^[1].