Rosanne Cash
Featured Book
Fans of Cash family music and lore may be surprised that Rosanne Cash’s new memoir, Composed, is as quietly introspective as its title implies. Neither hatchet job, nor tell-all, the book elegantly elucidates its author’s growth from semi-rebellious daughter-of to mature artist. Along the way, Cash touches on her family’s darker moments, but always comes back to warmth, love, and humor. She also depicts both her musical and personal progresses: Grammy-winning records, and four beloved children. Which, for those who already know Cash’s sensitive-yet-earthy songs and fiction (she published a collection of short stories, Bodies of Water, in 1996), will come as no surprise. That’s not to say that Composed doesn’t come with its share of revelations: Who would have thought, for example, that the Man in Black had such a sly and vivid sense of humor? Or that Cash’s mother, Vivian Dorraine Liberto Cash Distin, enjoyed a post-John life as a happy Southern Californian matron?
When Cash reaches the latter half of the book, things go from relatively benign musical memoir, to a list of tragedies and deaths that would make any country ballad sound optimistic. Her father, stepmother, stepsister, aunt, and mother died within months of one another. And that was before Cash developed a rare brain malformation that required terrifying surgery and extensive rehabilitation. This makes Composed even more of a restrained celebration: True survival and artistry is both quieter and more complicated than any Hollywood bio-pic.
eMusic’s Elizabeth Gold spoke with Cash about guitar lessons, legacy, and the challenges of balancing music with writing.
Can you speak a little to the idea of legacy? How did you decide now was the time to write about your parents, and especially your father?
I don’t think that’s a cognitive decision I could come to. I had to live life to get to that decision, and part of that was actually losing my parents. I don’t think I could have accepted it until they weren’t on the planet any more. It’s a bittersweet paradox. After making The List — and actually after the brain surgery, the things I wanted to do in my life became very urgent, I realized how it would be to have not taken the legacy. It was too painful to think about.
I’ve read your very beautiful writing on songwriting. As a writer and a musician, what do you feel are the challenges of writing about music? How do you feel being a musician changes that for you?
It’s difficult to write about music — the classic quote is it’s like dancing about architecture. I guess it’s from Joni Mitchell.
Some people say it’s from Thelonius Monk.
In some ways [that quote] is true. In another way, I think you can go as deep into pure language as you can into pure music. If you just find the place that they connect, it’s possible to do it, to write about it. If that fails, you can write about process: how you got to this song, where the inspiration came from…
When you sit down, do you know you’re going to be writing a song or writing prose?
Oh yeah. It’s not that fluid. I do think it comes from the same kind of source, but I have to choose the medium.
Is there ever a song that you look at after a while and think, this could really be something else, or vice versa?
Yes, that happens occasionally. The most obvious example is I wrote — I can’t even remember which one I wrote first now! — I think I wrote the song first, “Bells & Roses,” on my album 10 Song Demo. I was just obsessed with that image of bells and roses together, so I wrote a short story called “Bells and Roses,” for an [anthology] Blue Lightning, which was all musicians writing about music. Certainly, there are also other more subtle cross-references.
Would you say that your prose style is particularly musical?
I listen for the melody in prose. Maybe that’s more important to me because I’m a musician, but I don’t even think so. Some of the best writers I know have an amazing sense of melody in their prose — Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I just read Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, and she has a great sense of melody. I’m reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog [by Muriel Barbary], and she goes even further than Mantel.
I have to ask: guitar lessons with Carl Perkins and Maybelle Carter. That was one sentence in the book. Come on!
[Dry laugh.] Other people have told me the import of that, beyond what I realized myself.
Which in and of itself is interesting — that it seemed just like another Thursday night on the bus for you.
Well, it kind of was. I was so young, Carl Perkins was like my uncle, he was a really close friend of my dad’s. At that time, I knew he was good and people liked him, but I didn’t realize his importance in the history of this. These guys were still alive, so their legend had not been codified yet. And Mother Maybelle… This was all grownups.
Did they set you lessons? What was the teaching process?
Carl would show me something, but then he would be impatient, and want to go off and play on his own. Maybelle would show me something… but it was Helen Carter who really put in the time with me. A lot of times [Maybelle] sat there while Helen would teach me the songs, and really stick with me, and then would suggest another song for Helen to teach me.
And you’d go back and practice in your room at night?
Oh yeah. Until I could do it — practice and practice and practice.
How old were you then?
Eighteen, 19.
And you hadn’t really decided you were a musician yet?
At that time, when they were teaching me, I started to decide I wanted to be a songwriter. I got very excited about the music, and learning to do it.
Did it take you by surprise that you actually wanted to be a musician?
No. It felt like something I’d been circling around for my whole life.
What were the first songs they taught you?
The very first one was “The Banks of the Ohio,” which is a classic Carter Family song. Then they taught me “The Winding Stream,” which is a very obscure one. “Blackjack David,” “The Merry Golden Tree,” some of the other murder ballads — “Hello Stranger.” It was a huge lexicon.
Were any of those on your dad’s list?
The one I did: “Bury Me Beneath the Weeping Willow,” and also “Black Jack David.”
This was the first time you were playing the guitar, but you had always been singing, right?
No, I didn’t care about singing — it just seemed like a horrible thing to do. But I had been playing piano for many years. I took a year of music theory around that time, so I had an understanding, and could read music very slowly.
Music is such a collaborative medium, and writing is about being by yourself. How does that work for you?
I have to have both. Writing becomes too isolating, and too depressing. It just leads to this solitary life and it’s all in your head.
Yeah…
So I really crave collaboration: being in a band, and playing with other people.
I guess songwriting — when you’re writing with another person, you’re not by yourself…
No, when I write with John [Leventhal — her husband], we don’t write together. I usually give him lyrics. So it is very solitary.
Sort of going with the idea of being a private person versus a public person, you’re so active on Twitter! And sometimes people write really rude things to you about your family.
Oh God, I’ve dealt with that my whole life! The distinction I have to make it that I’m very private, but I’m also quite gregarious. I love a social life, and Twitter is kind of a virtual café society. My mind moves around a lot, and I like discussions about politics and music and culture. Also, I’m not baring my soul.
What songs would be on your list, if you were to compile one for your own children?
I think there’d be an overlap with my dad, but I grew up in Southern California in the sixties and seventies, so I’d have to have Neil Young, Elton John and the Beatles, Springsteen, Joni Mitchell. But I’d still have “Long Black Veil.”
What else are you reading these days?
A. M. Homes’s memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter. She’s interviewing me at the 92nd Street Y [in New York City] next month.
And what are you listening to?
Cory Chisel, I love, love, love him so much. He’s new — a great songwriter. Alejandro Escovedo. Yesterday, I was listening to Sibelius.
Do you feel as if you have more books in you? A novel?
No, I’m not interested in writing a novel. I just don’t think I could. I’m interested in writing volume two of my memoirs.
