Rosanne Cash and Me...

I dream of songs. I dream they fall down through the centuries, and come to me. I dream of lullabies and sea shanties and keening cries and rhythms and stories and backbeats. I dream of the Summer of Love and the British Invasion and the cries of Appalachia and the sound and soul of the Mississippi Delta.
Rosanne Cash

Seven Year Ache (1981j signed by Rosanne

I did write him a letter when I was 12 years old which he saved. I'd had this burst of expansiveness about who I was. I told him I wanted to do something special, that I loved art and music, and I wanted to be out in the world, and I didn't want to be just a wife and a mother. I poured my heart out to him. And he wrote me back this letter that ached with identification. It was so great. And he said, 'I see that you see as I see.' I'll never forget that line.
Rosanne Cash letter to her father, Johnny Cash
It’s what you leave out that’s important, just as the moments of silence are essential to great music. I think the poetry lies in the periphery, and I think all the details of the event are what contain the resonance. And also a viewpoint that’s a little skewed, it’s not looking exactly dead-on.
Rosanne Cash

King’s Record Shop (1987) signed by Rosanne

I sew. It's calming, but it's much deeper than that. It frees me up from thinking about language and melody and rhyme scheme. It's pure. It's a single thing you're doing with your hands. And because everything is about what you're doing with your hands, space opens up. Your mind opens. It's incredibly refreshing. I like doing things that are non-verbal, that don't require those tracks to be run over and over again in my head....but it's not only meditative, it's social. I sew with other women, and we talk about our lives, our kids, our jobs, men. It's great because it's completely removed from what I do as a songwriter.
Rosanne Cash

There are a lot of performers and artists who examine the marketplace, see what's successful, then try to copy that. Even if that works, it's still hollow. The spark that comes from interacting with the world, from listening to and reading language, from conversations, from observing the color of the light and listening to great music. I like getting my competitive spirit aroused. I may never write a song as good as Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", but it still inspires me to try.
Rosanne Cash

Right Or Wrong (1980) signed by Rosanne

Like any person in their twenties, I needed to get away from my parents to find out who I was. But in your thirties, you start appreciating who your parents are, and by your forties, you say, 'They know a couple of things, maybe I should be friends with them.'
Rosanne Cash

King’s Record Shop (1987) signed by Rosanne

May 24th is one of my favorite days. The immortal bard (and recent Nobel Laureate) Bob Dylan was born on that day in 1941, singer/songwriter Rosanne Cash followed in 1955, and transcending all, my beautiful daughter, Camryn, in 2001. What a talented trio; and, I firmly believe the best is yet to come! Despite seeing Dylan perform more than a dozen times, I have yet to meet him. Over the years, I have met Rosanne Cash many times, and Camryn, well, she's stuck living with us. For now.

Rosanne is the eldest daughter of Johnny Cash, and the only one in her immediate family to follow in his formidable footsteps. It took balls to become a singer and songwriter in the vast wake of Johnny's tsunami. Big balls. Not surprisingly, Rosanne's got 'em. Born in Memphis, Rosanne grew up in Southern California listening to The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield, far from the madding Nashville crowd. In those days, the only thing growing faster than her father's fame and record sales was Johnny's burgeoning drug problem. Rosanne remembered her childhood as "fraught with anxiety. In my pre-teen years, my father's drug addiction was really consuming him and consuming my parent's marriage. I knew there was something wrong, but I didn't know what it was. There was just this background tension and anxiety to all of those years. I thought, 'He's taking medicine but it's not good for him. He's acting strange, he seems very unhappy and incredibly restless...' " Restlessness, irritability and discontent, the hallmarks of any active addict or alcoholic.

Somewhere In The Stars (1982) signed by Rosanne

Initially, Rosanne was attracted to books and literature. A turning point came when she went on tour with her father for nearly three years. Her education in country music sprang directly from its source: the music of Johnny Cash and June Carter, daughter of A.P. Carter, the patriarch of the renowned Carter Family. Hillbillies from rural, southern Virginia, A.P. Carter and his family basically invented country music in the 1920s, stealing Celtic airs and Scottish Highland reels, while grafting their simple, heartfelt lyrics, creating the aural and enduring masterpieces "Will The Circle Be Unbroken", "Wildwood Flower", "I''m Thinking Tonight Of My Blue Eyes", "Wabash Cannonball" and "Keep On The Sunny Side", among many others.

Rosanne remembered the circumstances of her recruitment, "Once when I was in my late teens, I really fucked up. Me and my stepsister used his car and we were drunk and he found out about it. The next day, he was so quiet and the tension was building with every hour, and we were terrified that he was going to blow. Then, he finally took us out for an ice cream, and he said, 'I'm going to give you a choice. You can either go out on the road with me and sing and earn lots of money, or you can stay home and take drugs." I was crying and said, 'Yes, I'll go out on the road!' But my step-sister said, "I'm going to have to think about it." In the end, we both went. My step-sister died six weeks after my dad (in 2003). She never really got off drugs."

Seven Year Ache (1981) signed by Rosanne

Rosanne learned how to play guitar while on tour, and she treasured the time spent with her father, "It was great to stock in some time with my dad because he had traveled so much through my childhood. So just being with him on the bus every day, and going to new places and traveling with him, that was wonderful. And I really satisfied some childhood yearning for him that I had. But it was great in another way in that I sat in the wings every night and watched him for three years. And I saw the essence of him, that's where the essence of him flourished, under the spotlight. So to see that every night was beautiful."

When she returned home from touring, Rosanne studied acting briefly at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Los Angeles (one of her classmates was Kelly McGillis), but the acting life was not for her. The music came calling. She released her first album, Right Or Wrong, in 1979, produced by songwriter extraordinaire Rodney Crowell. They married, had three daughters and collaborated on several albums over the next thirteen years. A successful artistic partnership did not translate into matrimonial bliss. Of her time with Rodney, she reflected, "We were too similar. While we ruminated dreamily on philosophy and music and metaphysics and art, neither of us knew where to find a post office, or how to change the oil in the car, or whether we even owned a key to the front door of the house." When their marriage ended, Rosanne decamped to Chelsea in New York City in 1992, and there, she has become (and remains) a devoted New Yorker in every sense.
Fortunately, for music lovers and her family, Rosanne hasn't succumbed to the Cash family demons. She has released thirteen albums since her recording debut in 1979, and she has charted eleven Number 1 country hits, won four Grammys, and sold millions of records. She has also written four books, including Composed: A Memoir published in 2010 which details her background and family life in illuminating and unsparing detail.

Composed: A Memoir (2010)

Erin and I have seen Rosanne many times through the years. Two memorable shows stand out. She performed at President Clinton's Inaugural Ball at the Washington Hilton in 1993 with her current husband, John Leventhal, a marvelous string virtuoso. It was an amazing night of music as Jerry Jeff Walker, Emmylou Harris, Lou Reed, Bob Weir, and Paul Simon performed sets. The show started around 10pm and ended well after 4am, with Paul Simon singing "Bridge Over Troubled Water" to less than forty hearty though bleary souls. Rosanne played a flawless set including her hits, "Seven Year Ache", "Blue Moon With Heartache", "I Wonder", and "Runaway Train." Then, she announced a special guest would join her for a couple of songs, as Johnny Cash ambled on stage in his black tie finery. The crowd, mostly swells and politicos, was bedecked and bedazzled. Rosanne and Johnny opened with "Big River", then lit into a ferocious version of "Tennessee Flat Top Box", a song Johnny wrote and originally released in 1961. When Rosanne recorded the song in 1987 on King's Record Shop, she assumed the song was in the public domain and she was unaware that her father was its author. There was no denying ownership that night, Johnny and Rosanne were in complete dominion. Years later, I met her at a book signing and told her how much I enjoyed the Tennessee Inaugural Ball performance with her dad. She smiled, "You know, I was really sick that night. That's why I asked my dad to sing with me. I really needed his support. I'm glad you were there, that was an incredible night."

Composed: A Memoir (2010) title page signed by Rosanne

Erin and I saw her again at the Ridgefield (Connecticut) Playhouse in 2009, when Rosanne was touring in support of The List, an album culled from one-hundred songs bequeathed to her by her father some thirty-five years earlier. Rosanne explained, "When I was 18 years old, I went on the road with my dad after I graduated from high school. And we were riding on the tour bus one day, kind of rolling through the South, and...we started talking about songs, and he mentioned one, and I said I don't know that one. And he mentioned another. I said, 'I don't know that one either, Dad,' and he became very alarmed that I didn't know what he considered my own musical genealogy. So he spent the rest of the afternoon making a list for me, and at the end of the day, he said, 'This is your education.' And across the top of the page, he wrote '100 Essential Country Songs.' " Thankfully, Rosanne kept the list and still has it to this day. As a significant historical document, I think the Magna Carta may be its only rival or equal!

The List has special guest vocalists Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Jeff Tweedy and Rufus Wainwright applying their star power to the classic country songs of Harlan Howard, Hank Snow, Merle Haggard, and even Bob Dylan's "Girl From The North Country" gets a plaintive re-working. In concert, these songs were majestic. Rosanne and her band opened with Hank Snow's "I'm Movin' On", an uptempo ode to rollin' and ramblin'. As John Leventhal said, "It always goes over, it's fun, it's not all that serious, and you've got to build up to the wrist-slashers. You just can't hit 'em with it from the beginning." Beautifully stated from a man who knows how to put together a playlist!

10 Song Demo (1996) signed by Rosanne

In concert, a highlight was a song that Rosanne said was not on The List but should have been - "Ode To Billie Joe", written by Bobbie Gentry. The band did a deep, delta swamp boogie intro with Leventhal bending notes on his Telecaster amid swirling atmospherics by a Hammond B3 organ, before Rosanne sang the mysterious tale of Billie Joe MacAllister jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge in Choctaw Ridge, Mississippi. It was a riveting performance. There has always been ambiguity about what was thrown off the bridge which led to Billie Joe's demise. For her part, the reclusive songwriter Bobbie Gentry has remained evasive, "It's entirely a matter of interpretation as from each individual's viewpoint. But I've hoped to get across the basic indifference, the casualness, of people in moments of tragedy. Something terrible has happened, but it's 'pass the black-eyed peas', or 'y'all remember to wipe your feet.' "

Years later, Rosanne solved the mystery with some unexpected help. "I sang it live at Carnegie Hall at the Rainforest Foundation Benefit (in 2012) and President Clinton was in the audience. During the intermission, he summoned me so that he could talk about that song, and what was thrown off the bridge, and how that song was the quintessential expression of the shame of the South. It had been an abortion, a miscarriage, and they threw it off the bridge. It was stunning that he had put so much thought into this song and what it meant to Southern people. And it clarified my thoughts about it. It took the leader of the free world to explain the song to me, well, the ex-leader of the free world. I was thinking, 'This guy's mind is not full of other stuff? He's had time to think about this song?!"

The River & The Thread (2014) signed by Rosanne i

As successful as Rosanne's performance was, the album sold better, although Rosanne became concerned that her fans seemed more interested in her interpretative covers rather than her original songs. She rectified that on her 2014 release, The River & The Thread, featuring all original compositions. Interestingly, the Tallahatchie Bridge and surrounding environs loom large. Rosanne recalled a visit, "I thought it would be some overpowering structure, but it’s just this little bridge. We just sat there for half an hour, and then John (Leventhal) snapped a picture from behind me that became the album cover. But that area was like a vortex, and you can’t understand why so much came from this one spot. Down the road is Dockery Farms, which were the largest cotton plantations in Mississippi and all these great blues musicians worked there – Howlin’ Wolf, Charley Patton, Pop Staples. They’d sit on the porch of the juke joint at night and play music, and pick cotton all day.” To be sure, it is a ripe and fertile area. A mile away in Money, Mississippi, Emmett Till was slain in 1955 at Bryant's Grocery, a gruesome act that inspired and catalyzed the Civil Rights movement, and seminal blues man Robert Johnson is buried nearby. On vinyl, Rosanne mines these themes and influences adroitly with her compelling lyrics and melodies.

Rosanne Cash, an activist, author, sewer, singer, songwriter, and consummate storyteller.She once said, "I didn't want to be a musician when I was a kid. I didn't like the fact that you had to travel, that it appeared you had to take drugs and your relationships were in shambles. Being a performing musician? Crazy."

Thank God she overcame her objections. The world is so much richer as a result of her many accomplishments.

Yes, May 24th is one of my favorite days.