Rosanne Cash performs at Carnegie Hall, New York City, 2012
Photo by Frank Beacham
Rosanne Cash is 67 years old today.
A singer-songwriter and author, Cash is the eldest daughter of country music icon Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin.
Although Cash is often classified as a country artist, her music draws on many genres, including folk, pop, rock and blues.
In the 1980s, she had a string of chart-topping singles, which crossed musical genres and landed on both C&W and Top 100 charts. Her most commercially successful came in 1981 with the breakthrough hit, "Seven Year Ache," which topped the U.S. country singles charts and reached the Top 30 on the U.S. pop singles charts.
In 1990, Cash released, Interiors, a spare, introspective album which signaled a break from her pop country past. The following year Cash ended her marriage with Rodney Crowell and moved from Nashville to New York City, where she continues to write, record and perform.
In 1995, Cash married producer/songwriter/guitarist John Leventhal, with whom she had co-produced, The Wheel. Since 1991, she has released several albums, written two books and edited a collection of short stories.
Her fiction and essays have been published in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Oxford-American, New York Magazine and various other periodicals and collections. Cash has had 11 #1 country hit singles, 21 Top 40 country singles and two gold records.
Born in Memphis just as father Johnny was recording his first tracks at Sun Records, the family moved to California in 1958, first to Los Angeles, then Ventura, where Cash and her sisters were raised by mother, Vivian. Johnny and Vivian separated in the early 1960s and divorced in 1966.
After graduating from high school, she joined her father's road show for two and a half years, first as a wardrobe assistant, then as a background vocalist and occasional soloist.
In 1976, Cash briefly worked for CBS Records in London before returning to Nashville to study English and drama at Vanderbilt University. She then relocated to Los Angeles to study at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Hollywood.
On November 27, 2007, Cash was admitted to New York's Presbyterian Hospital for brain surgery. In a press statement, she announced that she suffered from Chiari Malformation Type I and expected to "make a full recovery." The surgery was successful, though recovery was slow, and in March, 2008 she was forced to cancel her spring tour dates for further recuperation.
She wrote about the experience in her New York Times article, "Well, Actually, It Is Brain Surgery." She resumed writing, recording and performing in late summer of 2008.
Cash released her next studio album — The List — on October 6, 2009. The album is based on a list of 100 greatest country and American songs that Johnny Cash gave her when she was 18. Cash picked twelve songs out of the 100 for the album. The album features vocal duets with Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Jeff Tweedy and Rufus Wainwright.
On September 9, 2010, the Americana Music Association named The List the Album of the Year. Cash signed with Blue Note Records in 2013 to release a new original album. The River & the Thread was released on January 14, 2014. It was her first album in more than four years and many consider it her masterpiece.
The River & the Thread was inspired by trips through the American South by Cash and her husband. Cash describes the album as “a mini-travelogue of the South, and of the soul.”
The Journey included visits to father Johnny Cash’s childhood home in Dyess, Arkansas, her own early childhood home in Memphis, William Faulkner’s house, Dockery Farms in Cleveland, Mississippi, the plantation where Howlin’ Wolf and Charley Patton worked and sang, Natchez, Mississippi, the blues trail, the Tallahatchie Bridge, as well as a visit with Natalie Chanin, a master seamstress in Florence, Alabama.
Throughout 2014, Cash toured extensively with partner Leventhal, performing The River & The Thread in sequence with first-person stories woven through historical time to much critical acclaim. The album was the #1 album of 2014 on Americana radio, and was honored by by many publications and awards
Here, Cash performs “A Feather's Not A Bird” from The River & the The Thread, 2014
Rosanne Cash and John Prine, Beacon Theatre, New York City, 2013
Photo by Frank Beacham