![\"M-32-Rosanne-Cash\"](\"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/M-32-Rosanne-Cash.jpg\")
<\/h1>\n<\/h1>\nThough Rosanne Cash leads a richly textured urban life in New York, the South has always haunted her. Born in Memphis but reared in Southern California, at 58, she realizes that there is no such thing as separating yourself from something that is part of you. From her earliest recordings, she has always been at once part of the indigenous music of the South\u2014she\u2019s had 11 No. 1 country records\u2014and beyond it. Her stunning new set, The River &\u00a0<\/i>the Thread<\/i>, more country than virtually anything on country radio, finds her plowing new earth both melodically and thematically.\u00a0Following the success of 2009\u2019s\u00a0The List<\/i>, a covers collection of classic country drawn from a syllabus her father, Johnny Cash, once made to further her musical schooling, Cash wanted to return to songwriting, but \u201cI didn\u2019t want to just write a CD of 10 songs off the top of my head.\u201d<\/p>\n
After beginning to make road trips to Arkansas to help restore her dad\u2019s boyhood home, she realized as the highways flashed by that she needed to map the landscape of the South\u2014and its soul\u2014in song. Eventually came side trips to artisan textile workers in Florence, Ala., the Dockery Farms Plantation (largely believed to be the birthplace of the Delta Blues) in Cleveland, Ms., and Money, Ms., where the 1955 murder of Emmett Till helped fuel the Civil Rights Movement. \u201cIf I never make another album,\u201d she says, \u201cI will be content because I made this one.\u201d<\/p>\n
What was your goal?<\/b><\/p>\n
It feels like, if not a completion, that everything that came before was leading up to this. I see it as a map of the Southern soul, my own and others\u2019, but also a real geographical map.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Is this a departure for you?<\/b><\/p>\n
Yeah, I don\u2019t see the departure so much as I see the integration. But I know why the press release said that, because The List<\/i> was more stylized and created with respect to a certain tradition. But \u201cdeparture\u201d meaning, I guess, going back to the South and really embracing that in a whole new way, feeling my heart crack open to the South again. And there are songs in there that are unlike anything I\u2019ve ever done. \u201cNight School\u201d is not like anything I\u2019ve ever done, nor is \u201cA Feather’s Not a Bird.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In what sense?<\/b><\/p>\n
The orchestral arrangement of \u201cNight School,\u201d and how melodically different it is from anything I\u2019ve approached before. And also, the really gritty, swampiness of some of the songs, which was great.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
How did you work with your husband, John Leventhal?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
He wrote the music for all the songs. But that\u2019s not how we usually work together. Sometimes he wrote the music and I wrote the lyrics. We\u2019ve co-written quite a bit, like \u201cBurn Down This Town\u201d [on Black Cadillac<\/i>], but never an entire album where we wrote all the songs together. That process was the most difficult and rewarding, to keep refining the vision for it. He kept reminding me to put the characters in my songs\u2014like Etta Grant in \u201cEtta\u2019s Tune,\u201d and my grandmother in \u201cThe Sunken Lands,\u201d and then Robert Johnson and Emmett Till in \u201cMoney Road\u201d\u2014and not have it all be a first-person record. The landscape of the South, both physically and soulwise, was heavily peopled.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
You recorded a gospel song.<\/b><\/p>\n
If we were going to do a record representative of the South, we had to include a gospel song. But neither John nor I are religious. Obviously, art and music are deeply spiritual pursuits, and we have our own concepts of God. But neither of us is allied with any church or religion. So we were going, \u201cBut we have to put a gospel song on a Southern album!\u201d (laughs<\/i>) So we wrote \u201cTell Heaven,\u201d about the longing for connection to something that\u2019s greater than yourself.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
How did you choose collaborators?<\/b><\/p>\n
We wanted guests who had some connection to the South. [The Civil Wars\u2019] John Paul White and I had become friends, and Joy Williams, too. I just loved his voice, and I loved him as a person. He\u2019s a good soul. And he just seemed kind of perfect for \u201cEtta\u2019s Tune.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Tell us about \u201cWhen the Master Calls the Roll,\u201d which you wrote with John and your ex-husband Rodney Crowell.<\/b><\/p>\n
I kept revisiting that song saying, \u201cI really love that melody. Do you think Rodney would be open to different lyrics?\u201d I found a soldier on a Civil War database named William Cash. I went on Ancestry.com and found all these women in the right age group who never married, and I figured they were the fianc\u00e9es of these soldiers who never came home. So I picked one of those women, Mary Ann. Rodney happened to be in New York, and he came over and worked on this song with me. So when we came up with the framework of the Civil War, I wanted this couple to marry, and I wanted William to have his bugle in his hand when he went off to war. Rodney said, \u201cWhat if it was his father\u2019s rifle? And what else would he have in his hand?\u201d And I said, \u201cWell, her locket.\u201d One day I was standing in the shower, and I realized William was going to die, and that he was from Virginia. That last line came to me: \u201cOh, Virginia, whence I came, I\u2019ll see you when I\u2019m younger \/ And I’ll know you by your hills again, this time from six feet under.\u201d And I just started weeping. The part about \u201cI\u2019ll see you when I\u2019m younger\u201d\u2014only knowing it as a youth, and never as an old man. It was just so moving to me.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Do you think you were meant to write that song?<\/b><\/p>\n
Well, that sounds self-aggrandizing. I think there are songs that are complete, out in the universe, and you\u2019re really lucky if you can get your hands on one\u2014if you\u2019ve gotten to a place in your songwriting that you can receive it. We were kind of groping for them, and we got that one.<\/p>\n
Your integration of pop, rock, the South, your dad\u2014that\u2019s part of what informs the song \u201c50,000 Watts.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
Listening to FM growing up in Southern California, you would hear Miles Davis followed by George Jones. It was so ecumenical and so incredibly inspirational\u2014Santana followed by Merrilee Rush, followed by Jefferson Airplane, followed by Bobbie Gentry. It was inspiring! You got this really expansive sense of music\u2014there were no boundaries, no borders, no allegiance to be paid to any one type of genre, that music in itself was a religion, and yet not a dogma. I was imagining not just my dad, but all those kids in the South. And even<\/p>\n
Ry Cooder\u2014I had a conversation with him about this, that when he was a kid, the\u00a0radio was this portal into possibility. Ry said to me, he heard \u201cHey, Porter\u201d on the radio, and he thought, \u201cThere are people out there like me. I can live in this world.\u201d And there was real salvation\u2014when your life was so hard and you heard this music, you thought, \u201cThis will save me. This is<\/p>\n
redemption, right here.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013Alanna Nash<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ROSANNE CASH\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 Her latest album captures the heart and soul of the South in song\u00a0\u00a0 Though Rosanne Cash leads a richly textured urban life in New York, the South has always haunted her. Born in Memphis but reared in Southern California, at 58, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[7403,675],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12298"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12300,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12298\/revisions\/12300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}