Rosanne Cash in the backyard of her New York home in 2006.The Associated Press
Rosanne Cash is not a child of Nashville.
Yes, she's Johnny Cash's eldest, as well as the stepdaughter of June Carter, and she was for a number of years married to producer/guitarist Rodney Crowell. Moreover, she's spent a good bit of time on the country charts over the years, reaching No. 1 no less than a dozen times. But even if country music is, quite literally, in her blood, that doesn't make her a Nashville girl.
"I didn't grow up in Nashville," she says, over the phone from Manhattan, where she has lived the last 19 years. "My dad wasn't from Nashville, either. He grew up in Arkansas, a sharecropper. He moved to Nashville much, much later."
Rosanne was born in Memphis 55 years ago - "a month before my dad's first single, Cry, Cry, Cry, was released on Sun Records," as she writes in her newly published memoir, Composed. Three years later, the Cash family moved to Southern California, and that was where Rosanne grew up, attending convent school as her father became one of the most famous names in country music.
"Nashville is like this red herring," she says. "It's used as currency for a lot of things that it doesn't necessarily signify." Certainly, she doesn't shy away from her own time in Nashville, whether as a student at Vanderbilt University or as a recording artist signed to the Nashville division of Columbia Records. But she's just as honest about how much she loved the short time she spent, pre-recording career, working in London, and how she feels almost destined to have become a New Yorker.
"You know, my dad was persona non grata in Nashville for quite some time," she says. "After he kicked out the lights of the Grand Ole Opry, he was disinvited to ever come back, and even late in life he took out an ad in Billboard giving the finger to the entire music industry."
She laughs. "Nashville is not this mythic mother church in my family."
Cash doesn't have much use for myth, which - given that she has spent a lifetime enduring other people's ideas about her father - shouldn't come as a surprise. Nor does she have much interest in dishing dirt. Composed may talk about the trauma of divorce (both her parents' and her own from Crowell) but it never points fingers; instead, it focuses on how the children coped while noting that everyone found true love in the end.
"Well, I did have some guiding principles," she says of the writing process. "One, don't blame anybody; two, no score settling; and three, to try and do it in as poetic a fashion as possible."
Having published a collection of short stories as well as non-fiction pieces in The New York Times, New York magazine and Martha Stewart Living, she understood the form and possibilities of prose. "I was looking for the melody, the poetry," she says. "There were themes that kept resurfacing - like the mutability of time, how an experience would throw me into the past or the future."
She particularly liked the idea of using her life in music to express broader truths about family and living. "I used as a guide M.F.K. Fisher's memoirs, because she wrote about her life by writing about food," she says. "It was this beautiful, peripheral approach to her life."
Of course, some things had to be addressed head-on, and one of the most gripping parts of her book comes when she addresses the brain surgery she had in 2007. Cash had a very rare condition, which in the book she encapsulates by saying, "My cerebellum is too low, and it's crushing my brainstem."
"I didn't talk about it at the time, even though it was public," she says. "But in writing my memoir, that was a huge thing in my life. I couldn't write a memoir and leave that out."
Still, when she is complimented for not soft-pedalling the anxiety of surgery and the difficulty of recovering, she replies flatly, "Believe me, I soft-pedalled it. I'm still not completely there. I still get crushing headaches. But I'm much better than I was.
"Writing about it helped me begin the process of looking back on it, instead of still living inside it."
Then again, she's not the kind who likes to get stuck in the past. She's at work on what she hopes will be her next recording project, a collaboration with producer Joe Henry and English singer/songwriter Billy Bragg.
Henry, she says, "is just the most beautiful, welcoming kind of soul. He curated this concert that Billy and I were guests on in Germany a couple of years ago. We were both friends separately with Joe, and we got on so well and our voices blended so beautifully that we've been talking about doing this since.
"I'm still trying to get permission from my record company," she adds, laughing. "But we're planning on it. We're working towards it."