She has lived in many houses of Cash, but it was the one where it all started that set Rosanne Cash on the path to her latest album, The River & the Thread.
Arkansas State University didn’t have to spend much time convincing Cash to support its drive to buy and preserve the childhood home of her father, Johnny Cash, in Dyess.
“They contacted my family and said, ‘Would you like to be involved?” the 58-year-old Cash recalls from New York, where she resides with her second husband and chief collaborator, John Leventhal. “That really got my interest.
“It was something my dad would have loved,” she continues. “His sense of where he came from was something he carried with him his whole life and was very powerful to him, and he was very proud of it. And I also thought it would be an important thing for my kids, to show them their own lineage and where they come from.
“And just objectively, I thought Rosanne Cash that these spots in the [Mississippi] Delta, they need to be seen as music heritage sites, and my dad’s home needs to be a part of it.”
That led to an odyssey of fundraising concerts for the project and trips through the South that would inform the lyrical and musical tone of The River & the Thread, Cash’s most Southern-flavored album to date and also her first composed of third-person narratives rather than introspective material. The album is still personal, however, in that it reconnected the Memphis-born singer/songwriter with her roots and inspired her to rethink her identity.
Cash is a Grammy winner who has scored 21 Top 40 country singles and released 13 albums, the most recent having been The List (2009). The River & the Thread debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Folk Albums chart after its January release, and at No. 2 on the Country Albums chart.
“I never thought of myself as Southern,” she says. “I was always proud I was born in Memphis, particularly in the era I was born in Memphis, musically, but the South felt kind of suffocating to me.”
Cash spent most of her youth in Southern California, after her mother and father divorced, although she’d spend summers and vacations with her father back in Tennessee. She also lived in Nashville for nine years with her first husband, country singer/songwriter Rodney Crowell.
“I was influenced by cool Southern California in the ’60s and ’70s,” says Cash, who has three daughters with Crowell and a son with Leventhal, “and when I would go to the South to visit my dad it just seemed backward to me. I was just a Southern California girl. I couldn’t fit myself into [the South], and then later I felt I was a New Yorker.
“And then, in the last several years, particularly the last three years, going back there was a perfect storm of things cracking my heart open,” the singer/songwriter says. “Just seeing my dad’s house and how far he walked from his house to school, and how hard my grandmother’s life was and all of that, I just felt my Southern self, if that’s not too grand a way to put it.”
One of those heart-cracking moments came in August 2011, at the first benefit concert for the Arkansas State initiative. Marshall Grant, who had played bass in Johnny Cash’s Tennessee Two and had become “a surrogate dad,” in Rosanne Cash’s words, after her father’s death in 2003, was on the bill but suffered a brain aneurysm after the first rehearsal. He died three days later. Cash spent several days with Grant’s widow, Etta, and their visit and conversations are captured in “Etta’s Tune.”
“That was the first song I wrote for the record,” Cash says, “and I really got a handle on [the album] with it. We woke up every morning and she’d say, ‘What’s the temperature, darlin’?’ I repeated that to John [Leventhal], and he said, ‘That’s the first line of the song.’
“So I wrote ‘Etta’s Tune’ and then, with more trips down South, the rest of the album began to form in my mind.”
Those travels took Cash and Leventhal to Dockery Farms, the Mississippi plantation where Howlin’ Wolf and Charley Patton picked cotton, and to William Faulkner’s home in the same state. They went to the Tallahatchie Bridge, immortalized by Bobby Gentry’s 1967hit “Ode to Billie Joe”; to the store in Money, Miss., where Emmett Till reportedly flirted with a white woman and was later murdered for it; and to the cemetery in Greenwood, Miss., where bluesman Robert Johnson is buried. They also stopped in the music hotbed of Muscle Shoals, Ala. In Florence, Ala., Cash visited her friend Natalie Chanin, whose sewing lessons show up in the song “A Feather’s Not a Bird” and inspired the new album’s title.
“I did learn to sew, and she did say, ‘You have to learn to love the thread,’ which made it into the song,” Cash says. “All of these songs are true to me, but at the same time they could be somebody else’s story, and I wrote them as if they were somebody else’s story.”
One track of which Cash is particularly proud is “When the Master Calls the Roll,” which Leventhal and Crowell started writing as a song for Emmylou Harris but wound up giving to Cash, who used it as an opportunity to write about her relative William Cash, who fought for the North during the Civil War.
“Well, first I’m proud that my husband and my ex-husband and I could write a song together. Let’s just start with that,” Cash says with a laugh. “It was a great full-circle moment. They already had John’s melody and another lyric that Rodney had written and, when Emmylou didn’t do it, I asked if Rodney would rewrite the lyric with me.
“I had gotten obsessed with my Civil War ancestry by way of my 13-year-old son, Jake, who was doing a project on the Civil War,” she continues. “The whole thing was perfect, the fact that I have Confederate-soldier ancestors and Union-soldier ancestry. It’s a beautiful metaphor for the whole album, me being a New Yorker with this connection to the South.”
The only time Cash breaks her storyteller mold on The River & the Thread is for “Modern Blue,” which she says is “about me and John going around the world and finding a sense of home at the end of it.” It’s also the hardest-rocking track on the 11-song album.
“It seemed like it lent itself to a pop song,” Cash says, “but then it was so pop when we were working on it that I got a little nervous, like ‘This doesn’t fit in with the rest of the record.’ But John said, ‘No, it will.’ It’s clearly the most hook-driven song on the record. It’s kind of a refresher.”
Cash will be playing live throughout 2014 to promote The River & the Thread, but the author of four books says that some of the songs may not stop with the album. They may have some future between covers or on film.
“Someone asked me if I’m going to write a sequel to ‘When the Master Calls the Roll’ to find out what happened to [the character] Maryann,” she says. “I don’t know. It’s not a bad idea.
Style, Pages 25 on 03/04/2014