ROSANNE

Mike and I can finally agree on a Cash!

Friday night we went to see Rosanne Cash at the Walton Arts Center and the show was a delight!  We LOVED her...and her strong voice that filled the room.

Rosanne sure got her Daddy's love for telling a story in song.

How would we describe Rosanne's music?  Her style is more varied than just country; we heard everything from blues to rock-n-roll to slow ballads.  Her band had some of the best guitarists we've seen and it was fun to watch her guitar war with her talented husband and with another band member on the lap steel guitar.

At 58, Rosanne Cash seems to be at a "making peace with the past" place.  She and her husband, John Levanthal, chose a tour through the South and wrote songs about their impressions.  Here is a LINK to the CBS Sunday Morning segment which explains her journey.

The evening's first set played through her new album called "A River And A Thread".  Here are words from one of the songs:

I'm going down to Florence

Gonna wear a pretty dress

I'll sit on top the magic wall

With the voices in my head.

Then we'll drive on through to Memphis,

Past the strongest shores

And on to Arkansas

Just to touch the crumbled soul.

Rosanne has that pathos that she inherited from her Daddy, eh?  When she introduced that song, she said she couldn't wait to sing the word "Arkansas" IN Arkansas.  She had the crowd eating out of her hand and they roared their approval.

Another thing we particularly liked was the way Rosanne set up each song.  When she introduced "The Sunken Lands" (her song about the Delta where her Daddy was raised) she made reference to the 1811 New Madrid earthquake which caused the Delta to drop and the gumbo soil to be filled in.  Their homeplace in the Delta near Dyess, Arkansas, is where Rosanne is working in conjunction with ASU to redo her Daddy's small frame home.  This is the front porch of the Cash house.

If you saw the movie WALK THE LINE, you know that this little girl was raised in California after her parents divorced.

As an adult she lived in Nashville, but remarked that city felt like a fishbowl.  She and husband now live in New York City.

Everyone knows that Johnny Cash had his roots in gospel music.  John Leventhal told Rosanne that a collection of songs about the South would not be complete without a gospel song.

Rosanne told her audience "the two of us are not traditionally religious". But they wrote the song "Tell Heaven", a song full of "spiritual" and emotional words sans good news.

Heavy hearts in empty rooms

Tell heaven

The empty sky will never 

take our burdens

Something good will someday 

come our way

Tell heaven

This daughter of the South talks about being a "Buddhiscopalian", saying  "The Buddhist because I actually studied more about Buddhism than I did any other religion, and it makes the most sense to me - self-awareness, compassion, nonviolence, etc.  And Episcopalian because my girls went to an Episcopal school and I loved the church.  It's in Greenwich Village and they do a lot of outreach to gay, homeless, young people.  So that's a progressive church; they're very ecumenical."

People find it easy (as we did) to fall in love with this passionate woman who is so talented.  Rosanne says people write her all the time with concern about where she will spend eternity.  They ask "Don't you want to be with your Daddy?"  For whatever reason, this poet-from-such-pain hasn't found the Healer.

One of Rosanne Cash's songs is called "The Long Way Home".  I'm praying that her journey will end at home.