Jackson (with June Carter Cash)

A marital brawl set to a shuffle, and one of the great duets in American music precisely because neither party gives an inch. The arrangement is brisk and bright — acoustic strum, a snapping backbeat, guitar fills darting between lines like interruptions. Cash comes in swaggering, all bluster about going to Jackson to mess around and shake it off; June fires back instantly, dry as a match, telling him to go and promising she'll be there to see him crawl back with his tail between his legs. Her voice is the comic engine of the whole thing: nasal, unimpressed, cutting him off mid-boast. Written by Jerry Leiber and Billy Edd Wheeler, the lyric is about a couple who married hot and burned down to embers, but the performance quietly contradicts the words — they're clearly delighted to be fighting with each other. Cash and June married the year after recording it, which everybody who hears it can somehow guess. It won a Grammy and became their permanent stage bit. Play it while cooking with someone you've been with a long time, when the affection is expressed entirely through insults and neither of you would trade it.