I remember the first time I heard Cash’s version. I was lying in bed, listening to an Alternative Rock station out of Tuscaloosa and this played.
I jumped straight up in bed. I owned the NIN “ Downward Spiral” CD and “Hurt” was my favorite track. I couldn’t believe that Johnny Cash had covered it and how incredible the cover was.
Best cover ever. Another iconic cover is “Sounds of Silence” by Disturbed.
The ‘Hurt’ video is both touching and tragic to me. Seeing the Man in Black fragile but still powerful through his music.
This is getting eerie :-) I use SofS in my course to help teach the concept of musical interpretation, how one can take the same piece of music and, with changes in tempo, dynamics, timbre, etc., make it speak a very different message. I make it a personal example, saying that I as a Boomer appreciate most the "urtext" Simon/Garfunkel version, while my now late wife disliked that and preferred the GenX style Disturbed arrangement, and our Millennial daughter thinks we're both old coots and greatly prefers the more recent Pentatonix use of lush harmonies--much like one person prefers the original piano version of Mossurgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," another the orchestrated version by Ravel, and yet another the rock-band arrangement by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, though it is basically the same music in all three.
And don't get me started about the hundred covers in a hundred genres of Elvis' "I Can't Help Falling in Love," which itself is a takeoff on an aria from the 1700s by Jean-Paul-Egide Martini, Marie Antoinette's composer. Just as Chairman Mao might have put it, let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred genres of music contend. (The socialists among the students love that reference.) I had a presentation about "Can't Help" which I used back when I taught rock music history for another college, that closed its Orlando class about two years ago. Sorry to ramble so much...