Rosanne Cash, The TVD Interview

To find her voice as a musician, Rosanne Cash had to work diligently to move beyond the long shadow cast by her iconic father. In that journey, she felt compelled to move away from her native South and become a New Yorker, reveling in the creative chaos of Manhattan.

However, a series of life-changing events drove her to get in a car and drive across the South, visiting historic sites and touchstones of her early life. As she did, songs began to flow and she and her husband John Leventhal began writing what would become her new album, The River and the Thread, a concept album chronicling her recent travels.

Did moving away from the South help draw it into sharper focus for you?

Oh, yes. I think I pushed it away for a long time, it felt a little suffocating to me. In my mind, I was a New Yorker and I had to get away from it. I thought the South was in my past except for the people I love who are still there and I’m connected to. Two of my daughters live in Nashville, my sister lives in Nashville, my cousins live in Memphis, so I have family scattered throughout Tennessee in particular. But having a perfect storm of events happen in my life between 2011-2013 gave rise to a lot of songs.

Could you have written this record if you still lived in Nashville?

No. I do not think so. You have to get perspective. To try and write these songs there, it would have been too close. I had to let my heart expand and let down my defenses. That was crucial and my heart did expand when Marshall Grant died, when my friend Natalie Chanin taught me to sew, when I took my son to Sun Records in Memphis and to the place where I was born…those things were powerful.

What is it about the South that makes it such fertile ground for music, literature, and art?

I wish I had the answer. A huge part of this record is the mystery of that situation. As we say in “Money Road,” “we left but never went away”– that haunted quality stays with you. Why did Faulkner come from right down the road from where Emmett Till was killed and the Civil Rights movement began? Which is just down the road from where B.B. King, Charley Patton, Howlin’ Wolf, and Pops Staples started, which is next to where Eudora Welty grew up…you can’t help but be flabbergasted! My husband John and I kept saying, “What is it about the Delta? What is it?”

As a fellow southerner, I’ve found myself defending the South yet feeling conflicted about it. Regarding letting your heart grow, was that part of the experience?

Of course. When you say that, I think about my daughter telling me about voting for Barack Obama and standing behind this elderly black man with a cane who waited in line for three hours to vote and they found an excuse to turn him away, even though his name was on the roll. That’s the South that you just can’t understand and you want to push away.

But, as we said, there’s a whole other South, too; this richness of revolution and beauty and music and literature. I didn’t want to proselytize about the “other” South or the “good” South, I didn’t want to take a stance. In “When the Master Calls the Roll,” for example, I didn’t even want to say if he was Confederate or Union. My daughter reminded me, “Mom, Virginia went both ways!” So, no stance was taken, no preaching, just my own experience filtered through these other characters and how exciting it was to get into the music and filter it through us, too, everything from country, pop, to swamp.

The South certainly seems to be having a moment right now: wonderful things are happening in Florence, AL and all around Muscle Shoals is flourishing, Nashville is booming…

Yeah, Florence is fantastic!

I was blown away to learn that, at one point, there were over a dozen studios cranking out hit records in that remote area.

Yeah, can you believe that?!

Again, why there? People talk about the “singing waters of Muscle Shoals,” but there was something there that fostered creativity. Of course, there was also a lot of human suffering. Did you spend some time with Tom Hendrix? (Ed note: Tom has created a remarkable stone wall monument to his Native American great-great grandmother.)

Yes, we went out there one day. He told us the whole story of the “singing waters” and his grandmother. We walked the wall and I was crying by the end of it.

There are so many places like that throughout the region, that are in danger of disappearing.

Yes, it’s so heartbreaking. Like going to Bryant’s Grocery in Money, Mississippi, the site of where the Civil Rights movement began after Emmett Till’s murder and there was nobody there either time I went and it’s falling down. There’s a little sign out front but that’s it. I don’t want to see it turned into a tourist destination, necessarily, but it’s an important site in American history.

Unfortunately, there are many historic sites around the South that have been torn down or are in disrepair. On the other hand, some sites are being saved thanks to local tourism boards.

It’s hard to see the import of something when you’re really close to it and you grew up around it. When we started this restoration project for my dad’s boyhood home in Dyess, Arkansas, I found out that busloads of European tourists were coming through the area and visiting sites like Dockery Farms. By contrast, relatively few Americans were visiting.

I wanted to go back and ask you about The List. As much as that was a great collection of songs, it also represented great records. Did you grow up listening to those records?

Oh, sure. I knew all the original recordings and we revisited them, in part so that we wouldn’t copy them to closely from our memories. But, really, I knew I wasn’t going to make a record that was close to Ray Charles’ “Take These Chains From My Heart,” for example (laughs). I just had to do what I could do and hope it was okay. You’re right, they represented not only great songs but great, great records.

Is vinyl still a part of your listening experience?

I have a lot of vinyl and I’m going to start relistening to it. My kids have turntables and listen to vinyl, which I love, so I am getting back into it through my kids. When I first starting recording, vinyl was the main format. I would go to the mastering lab and watch them cut the “mother” and it was such a visceral experience. I loved making vinyl so much.

I’ll tell you something: we mastered Seven Year Ache three days after John Lennon was killed. I had the mastering lab engineer cut “Good-bye, John” into the runoff groove in tribute to him. The first pressing, 25,000, have that inscription so whenever anyone brings me that album to sign, I always pull out the vinyl to see if it was one of the first pressing. I’ve found several!

We live in such a digital world now. Do you think there is added value in tangible media—books, records, periodicals, etc.?

Well, I’m old school. I like artifacts, things you can touch. A book is an object as well as something that goes into your brain and I feel the same way about records. It’s not to say that these other delivery systems aren’t valuable. But I grew up and starting making records when sonics were hugely important, so the idea that someone listens to music through YouTube just bowls me over. Maybe they don’t know that that’s not the way the record is supposed to sound.

I don’t think they do! I think that’s part of the reason vinyl has had such a resurgence with younger listeners who grew up listening to digital files. Once they hear a recording in true fidelity, it’s a game changer. We spent decades improving fidelity and working for better sound but with MP3s, we threw all that out the window in exchange for convenience. Still, there’s nothing like playing an album on a good sound system…

It transports you, doesn’t it? It’s so different from the peripatetic nature of things now where people are consuming bits of information, pieces of songs, and being flooded by surface stuff rather than going deep into an experience. And that’s not to even talk about the concept of an album, or a concept album!

I obsessed over the sequencing of the new album, we must have had over 40 different sequences. At one point in the middle of that, I asked myself, “What are you doing? Nobody cares.” So I tweeted something about that and I immediately got 100 responses saying “I care!” and that was so encouraging, because it IS a concept album. And I loved those albums! You put the needle down on Side One and follow the thread all the way through. Those were important records to me.

And then you had a brief “intermission” as you turned the record over.

Oh, yes! I remember so well the discussions for my own albums regarding what was going to be the first cut on Side Two, where the album was going to split.

Country music, especially, had so many great concept albums.

Yes, Red Headed Stranger! Do you remember White Mansions and The Legend of Jesse James? Those were beautiful records. My dad’s Sings Ballads of the True West as well, I just loved them.

One reason I haven’t been listening to newer vinyl is that I was talking with a friend of mine, a terrific bass player, and he said that listening to vinyl is not a true analog experience like it used to be. At some point in the process, mastering is dumped down to digital, which makes me wonder if anyone is truly making analog records and cutting direct to vinyl.

Well, yes, Jack White is doing that at Third Man.

Oh, is he? Good for him! Here’s something even deeper: do you know about The 78 Project? Well, we cut one of those in my kitchen! There was somebody cutting it as we sang it and using a brush to clean it off as she was cutting it and that was it! One disc. It was so great to do that.