InsideOut Interview: Rosanne Cash

Writing Her Own Story: A Conversation with Rosanne Cash
A Q-and-A By Owen Lipstein

One day on the road in 1973 Johnny Cash wrote the names of what he considered essential songs on a legal pad, then handed it to his teenage daughter Rosanne. A songwriter herself, Roseanne never thought to do anything with it beyond learning the songs, but she kept his list for over 30 years. While writing her Grammy-nominated 2006 album Black Cadillac, about the rapid loss of her parents, she found his original list. Cash has picked 12 of those songs, and in October the woman responsible for 21 Top 40 country singles will release her 12th studio album—her first of covers—aptly entitled The List.
When we talked, this part-time Hudson Valley resident told us what the list really means to her and spoke about her love, loss, autonomy and hard work with the heart-felt directness that makes her music stand alone.

OL: Why did your father give you this list of songs?

RC: I was 18 years old and we were on a bus going to the south somewhere on a tour and he started talking to me about songs and I said, “I don’t know that one.” He mentioned another one and I said, “I don’t know that one.” He grew alarmed that I didn’t know my own musical genealogy, as it were. Growing up in southern California I was very steeped in pop and rock music. So he spent the rest of the day making this list for me. It was very comprehensive. He titled it “100 Essential Country Songs” but I think it would have been better titled “100 Essential American Songs” because it really had a great overview of American roots music—from country, Appalachian, Southern blues and gospel, to Delta bottomland songs, early folk songs, history songs and protest songs.

OL: I’m sure that you became quite familiar with the songs on it. Did you learn more about these songs in the process of doing them yourself?

RC: It’s one thing to know a song and love it and another to step inside of that song by doing it yourself. Some of them were clearly period pieces, like “Motherless Children” and “Weeping Willow.” Even “She’s Got You” is a period piece because the list of things in the lyrics, like the class ring and the records, dates it. So doing some of them was like stepping into costume, but at the same time I didn’t feel any detachment. It was sometimes emotionally challenging but it was always a satisfying experience to embody these songs, primarily because this wasn’t just a personal legacy. The list has now become what I consider to be a cultural archive, and it was a great honor to get to show part of it.

OL: What were your feelings about doing “Girl from the North Country”?

RC: Well, that was a little scary to me because there are documentaries of my dad and Bob [Dylan] recording Nashville Skyline, which was a really important record to me as a teenager. Those images of my dad and Bob were seared into me, so to record “Girl From the North Country” was a watershed moment because I was thinking, I just can’t do this, it doesn’t make sense for me to do this—it’s kind of sacrilegious to even think about. But [producer] John [Leventhal] very wisely said, “Let’s go back to Bob’s original version,”—which is much more of a straight folk song—so from that perspective it became easy to get inside it.
You know, I also like that gender-bending thing that happens when a woman sings about another woman in these old folk songs—I really love that.

OL: I think that’s fascinating, too. From your perspective, what happens when it’s a guy’s song written to a woman, and now you’re a woman singing to her?

RC: It brings another dimension. Then the woman could be anybody—she could be my daughter, she could be my sister—so many questions arise and it gains another level of mystery.
Incidentally, before we go on, I have to tell you that I have a weekend house up in the Hudson Valley, in Columbia County.

OL: We’re neighbors. Are you a new-comer?

RC: No, after two decades you’re officially not a newcomer.

OL: You know I spent most of my so-called professional life in the city, but even though I’ve been living here full-time for 20 years my house is still referred to as somebody else’s. Someday it will become Owen’s house, but right now I still live in the Paley House.

RC: Right, a hundred years from now. [Laughter]

OL: What’s life up here like for you?

RC: When we go up there everything slows down so much. I was planting geraniums last weekend. I know it’s late to plant geraniums but I hadn’t been up yet. I’ve been working all summer.

OL: You have a garden?

RC: No, we don’t have a garden because the deer eat it up. We’re not up often enough to keep them away from it, but I did plant some hostas, which have bloomed beautifully, and some geraniums and one hydrangea plant. It’s great. Everything is slow. We take walks. We swim. It’s just wonderful.

OL: How was it for you, growing up in California and then coming to New York?

RC: I was one of those people who was always just a New Yorker. You know that story people tell, “Oh, we thought she was so weird, but it turns out she was just a New Yorker”? That’s me! [Laughter]
I was always a New Yorker. I knew it from about the age of 12. It just took me a long time to get my body here. Somebody recently asked me, “Did you have any of those experiences in New York where you thought ‘Oh, I’m in the big city now’”? No! I lived in Los Angeles, London, Munich. I’m a city girl. It feels normal and it feels good.

OL: You come from such a famous, public family. How has that worked for you as an artist, having had this fame before you did anything, just by being who you are?

RC: I’m pretty careful not to let that into the work itself because that’s a real destructive, polluting type of force. I’m a writer and performer, and I think that I would be writing and performing no matter who my family was. People bring this back-story to it sometimes and expect me to fit into their version of that, but I can only be in my own life; I can only just follow my own nose, put one foot in front of the other and do my work to the best of my ability. I have kind of a worker-bee mentality with a very strong work ethic so I think that keeps me sane. I try not to read a lot of stuff about my family or get involved in that. I try to keep my private life intact.

OL: Your discipline is to not think about it, not let that part in.

RC: Well, Johnny Cash is someone different than my dad. Do you know what I mean? They are the same person, but there is a persona that people project all kinds of things onto that wasn’t the man that I know as my father. A lot of the time his rabid fans think they have to protect him from me and everyone else, and that they really know who he is, but it’s all a myth. So I can’t spend any energy supporting someone else’s myth or buying into it or bringing that into my life. I know who my family is and what they were to me and who they are privately, and also respect my dad’s work tremendously, but that’s my own experience and my own life.

OL: On another level, you’ve written many songs about the loss of your parents.

RC: Yes, Black Cadillac was all about that loss. I’m not the first person to lose their parents—also it’s not a tragedy when an elderly person dies of illness. That’s the natural course of events. So people try to implant this idea of great tragedy onto me, this idea that I have suffered so much. I didn’t want to be a poster girl for suffering. I was a woman in middle age who lost three parents [her two parents and her stepmother, June Carter] in a short period of time. It was really hard, but I am certainly not the first person. All of those songs that I wrote about navigating our way through loss and all that entails—not just grief, but anger and also liberation and also longing and fear—all of those things, they are universal. I was not the first person to experience that.
I found that a couple of times hospices would start passing out Black Cadillac to families because it really did talk intelligently about loss. It didn’t matter what the back-story was; it just so happened that my family was really famous so everyone knew the back-story, but that didn’t really matter.
Even a song that is very specific in documentary detail like “House on the Lake” prompted some guy to come up to me after a show and say, “You know, everybody has got their house on the lake.” Even that transcended back-story, and that was the most fulfilling part for me.

OL: What at this stage in your life interests you most?

RC: Music still interests me as much as it did when I was 14. I still feel just as passionate if I find a new record or artist that I love—I’m just crazy about it. I am finishing a book that will be out next year, and that interests me. My husband is endlessly interesting to me. [Laughter]

OL: What is your book about?

RC: It’s a memoir.

OL: Writing seems to be a big part of your life.

RC: That’s who I am. I’m a writer, and sometimes I’m writing songs and sometimes I’m writing prose. Sometimes it’s fiction and sometimes it’s non-fiction. To me it’s all the same water, different pool. I mean, there is a special love I have for songwriting because it’s married to a melody, and it’s a prescribed three-minute playground—and I love that. But I really enjoyed the series I wrote for The New York Times on songwriting because it was very illuminating to me to write about the process of songwriting. I love the piece I wrote for The Nation on Sarah Palin—it was so snarky and so much fun to write. And the memoir, well, I guess anyone who has written a memoir will tell you that to go back in your own life and fit pieces of your puzzle together is deep, and a good process.

OL: My sage advice on memoir is to figure out when you are going to end it because the temptation is to keep going and refine it and you never finish it.

RC: Oh, that is good advice because I thought I was done, but now I’m writing another chapter—and I just thought, OK this is it, this is the final chapter!

OL: This interview is going to run in our Harvest issue. Can you comment on themes of harvest in your songs, and what it means to you?

RC: Bringing in all of the rewards of hard work. I like the period of hard work and the harvest image that at the end you get to rest and bring in the all of the rewards of that. It’s a beautiful sentiment. It almost scares me though.

OL: Why?

RC: Because hard work feels like the norm. Gathering the reward feels like there is going to be anxiety after you do it, like, Really should have I done it? Do I deserve that much? [Laughter]