Stunning Cash difficult to pigeonhole

It’s unfortunate that the words “adult contemporary” connote compromise and a certain failure of ambition, for they might otherwise prove handy for corralling the work of Rosanne Cash.

It is wrong to call Cash a country singer, although that’s the genre where she started and is a legacy she’s never betrayed. She is indisputably Johnny’s daughter, and her heritage - her brand - is strongly American. Yet her vision is so catholic, so cognizant and full of empathy for the wider world that a fairer comparison might be to songwriters such as Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell rather than any of the great country artists of the past or of the post-Shania Twain/Faith Hill Nashville, Tenn., cohort.

Cash is a perceptive writer who just happens to own a warm, throaty alto; a sure rhythm guitar style; and excellent taste in partners. Her husband and guitar accompanist, the professorial John Leventhal, is a player of extraordinary taste and discretion who, for all his jazzy inflections and collection of stomp boxes (for an acoustic player he uses a lot of effects, though never unsubtly), rarely plays three notes when the right one will do, and has mastered Gillian Welch’s David Rawlings-esque habit of providing near-invisible vocal support.

The show the pair put on at South on Main on Saturday evening was simply stunning, with Cash in excellent voice and Leventhal demonstrating an easy mastery of his instrument and idiom, alternating between an almost Wes Montgomery-esque silkiness, a velvet swampiness and some aw-shucks cowboy chording.

Much of the night was devoted to new material from Cash’s next album, The River and the Thread, to be released in January. She said the album is conceptually about the South, although the first song they played, “Modern Blue,” touched down in Barcelona, Spain, and Paris as well as Memphis. “Etta’s Tune” was a lovely number about the 65-year love affair between her father’s bass player Marshall Grant and his wife. Later, Cash and Leventhal shared a beautiful agnostic hymn that may be called “Tell Heaven.”

Cash touched lightly on her past catalog, favoring the crowd with a couple of numbers from her last album of country standards, The List (“The Long Black Veil” and “Motherless Children”), but the highlights of the night were a sultry, slow burn through the Bobbie Gentry classic “Ode to Billie Joe” and Leventhal’s workout on “Tennessee Flat-Top Box,” one of her father’s songs (a hit for him in 1961) that Rosanne took to No. 1 on the country charts in 1987.

The show, a benefit for the Oxford American, came off flawlessly except for a couple of lighting glitches (and a rather charming moment when it appeared the couple onstage might have been negotiating keys). South on Main proved itself an excellent venue for this sort of intimate, magical show.