Rosanne Cash Reflects on Her Life and Legacy – NPR

MANOUSH ZOMORODI, HOST:

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm a Manoush Zomorodi.

And if you've ever heard a song and instantly been transported back in time, you know the power of music to punctuate an event in your life or distill a moment in history. Musician Rosanne Cash calls this the rhythm and rhyme of memory. And she says it's the force behind her songwriting.

ROSANNE CASH: There's a mystery and a magic at the center of this process that's really undefinable and unexplainable. And when you touch that, you're touching something of the divine. It's this creative source.

ZOMORODI: That creative source has led her to record 15 albums over the past four decades and win four Grammy Awards. It also, she says, helped her accept the scrutiny that came with being the legendary Johnny Cash's daughter and, more recently, confront America's painful past, including her family's own role in that history.

R CASH: I often don't know what I feel or think. And I don't know how to process things. And I don't know what I want until I write about it.

ZOMORODI: On this episode, we explore the links between memory and music with singer, songwriter and musician Rosanne Cash, who is incredibly cool and funny and punctual.

Wait a minute, it's exactly 9 a.m. and we're both recording and ready to go.

R CASH: (Laughter).

ZOMORODI: How is that even possible?

R CASH: It's unheard of.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A FEATHER'S NOT A BIRD")

R CASH: (Singing) A stone is not a mountain, but a river runs through me.

ZOMORODI: And off we go.

Rosanne Cash, hello, and thank you so much for being here.

R CASH: Hi, Manoush. I'm thrilled to talk to you.

ZOMORODI: So, Rosanne, I have to imagine that as the daughter of Johnny Cash, there was probably a good amount of music in your life as a child. Was it something that was just everywhere? I mean, I know that your dad had his first single put out just a couple months after you were born.

R CASH: About a month, actually.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CRY, CRY, CRY")

JOHNNY CASH: (Singing) I wasted my time when I would try, try, try 'cause when the lights have lost their glow, you'll cry, cry, cry.

R CASH: Yeah. It was in the house all the time - and not just what my father was playing - you know, Jimmie Rodgers and Woody Guthrie and, you know, Hank Williams and all of the older country stars and Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the gospel and blues. All of that was around.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UP ABOVE MY HEAD")

SISTER ROSETTA THARPE: (Singing) Up above my head. Up above my head. I hear music in the air.

R CASH: But then when my dad was on the road, what my mother played was also incredibly influential. She loved Patsy Cline.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STRANGE")

PATSY CLINE: (Singing) Well I guess that I was just your puppet you held on a string.

R CASH: And then when I was old enough to discover the songs on the radio for myself, then it was the Beatles.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I SAW HER STANDING THERE")

THE BEATLES: (Singing) Well, she was just 17.

R CASH: I learned to love the Beatles and Patsy Cline and blues and Southern gospel and Marty Robbins and, you know, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. It was all swirling around.

ZOMORODI: In the talk you gave in 2021, which is called "The Rhythm And Rhyme Of Memory, Solitude And Community," you say that in your family there was a song for every loss, every celebration, every unspoken need, every longing. And I guess I would think, wow, that is a family that is great at communicating with each other. But that was not necessarily the case, right?

R CASH: No. Well, what you describe is the - if that was actually carried out, if that was actually something that was happening, the idea that we could sit down and go, this is how I'm feeling, and here's the song for it - no. What happened is that I found those songs for myself. They helped explain me to my selves, you know, that indefinable longing or sadness or melancholy or hope or loss or thrill. There were songs for every most nuanced expression of all of those emotions. There are songs for each one. And I was able to find them, you know?

There's something in my DNA that was attuned to that language. But the - my house was much more chaotic. I think that the - music is how I made sense of a lot of things, and it was my particular kind of special cave that I went into. You know, my father was a drug addict in my early years. My mother was not equipped to handle either a partner who was a drug addict or fame. And those are the two things that kind of permeated our household - and then my mother's anger and fear and grief about all of those things. So there was not a lot of room for other emotion.

And I think me and my sisters were - we didn't have anything explained to us. You know, they didn't talk to kids back then. There was no way they were going to sit down and say, look, your father's a drug addict, and here's what's happening. No. So the confusion and fear, you know? - and children think, oh, that's - this has to be my fault. It was complicated.

ZOMORODI: What were some of the ways that you coped with having a dad who was so famous?

R CASH: The thing is, is that I my family was so abnormal that I looked for, what did normal families do? I loved the "Little House On The Prairie" series because, you know, the washing was on Monday, and the baking was on Tuesday. And you did this and you didn't wear this, and you didn't speak like this. And I thought, OK, that's normal. And I wanted to create my own sense of normalcy.

ZOMORODI: So if you didn't live a normal childhood and you were looking for normalcy, what are some of your first memories, or what did you think you would grow up to become?

R CASH: Oh, I knew I would be a writer. I had a dream when I was 13 years old, and it was of my mother and my grandmother. And they were sitting at a card table. And they were vacant, just vacant behind the eyes and rote in their actions. And they kept putting cards slowly on the table to each other. And I woke up in a sweat at 13. And I said to myself, I will never be a card player. And I wrote my dad a letter - my dad was on the road - about my - those impulses. I didn't want to live in that kind of deadening routine. I wanted to do something that touched the divine. I didn't use those words at that time. But he wrote me back, and he said, I see that you see as I see.

ZOMORODI: Wow.

R CASH: And I held on to that. And I realized that there was a template for me to be who I was in the world, and it wasn't to copy, but it was to explore and find myself. And in some ways, my dad and I had a simpler relationship than I had with my mother. She saw that I was - there was some kind of DNA thread that was similar to my dad's, that I was an artist. And I think she saw that from a young age, and it terrified her.

ZOMORODI: So you started writing pretty early on.

R CASH: Yeah. Well, I did write poetry starting from about the age of 8 or 9. Rhyme and language were already - even from the time I was 3, my mother said, you asked what every word said and what it meant. So I was writing poetry all through my teens. And then at some point - this babysitter I had wrote to me, you know, like 10, 15 years ago and said, I babysat you. And I remember you said, how do you put poetry to music? And I thought to myself, why was I asking her?

(LAUGHTER)

R CASH: I had a better authority in my own house. But yeah, that's what happened, is that when I learned to play guitar, I started writing songs. And that was about age 18.

ZOMORODI: You tell a story in your TED Talk about some writing you did when you were younger - this phrase that you came up with that ended up revisiting you later in life and really influencing you.

R CASH: Yeah. I was in my mid-30s, and I was working on a song. And my mom at the same time across the country was going through my school papers and drawings and, you know, things from childhood of mine that she'd saved. And she sent me this whole box. And I was leafing through the box, and I came across this paper I had done in seventh grade on metaphors and similes.

And I looked at this paper, and I - it suddenly just washed over me. The thrill I had felt in doing that paper was the first time that I had ever been excited about anything that they had asked me to do in Catholic school. And there was this metaphor I had written. A lonely road is a bodyguard. This is a beautiful metaphor that I wrote at 12 years old. And it really moved me and struck me. And I just took that line and put it right in the song I was writing. The song's called "Sleeping In Paris."

ZOMORODI: Here's Rosanne Cash performing on the TED stage.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

R CASH: (Singing) I'll send the angels to watch over you tonight, and you send them right back to me. A lonely road is a bodyguard if we really want it to be.

A lonely road is a bodyguard. What did it mean? I had even pasted a picture of this empty road next to the line. So my 12-year-old waved at me across the decades saying that who I was was who I would become. As painful as that was then and as it still can be painful now, I knew what she was telling me - that solitude can protect the seeds of creativity and that loneliness contains a priceless gift. If we can tolerate the initial discomfort and avoid the seduction of despair, we're all just radios hoping to pick up each other's signals. And some of those signals have a backbeat and a melody, and they're universal. And music can unlock a frozen memory that melts into the seeds of our creativity. And the reverse is also true. A memory can unlock a song that's waiting to be written.

ZOMORODI: When we come back, more with Rosanne Cash, including a recent revelation about her mother that adds a twist to her family's history. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DANCE WITH THE TIGER")

R CASH: (Singing) Of just how alone are all who live here.

ZOMORODI: It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and with me for the hour is Rosanne Cash.

Hi, Rosanne.

R CASH: Hi, Manoush.

ZOMORODI: So we were talking about your dad, Johnny Cash. In the '60s, he moved your family from Tennessee to California. But as you said, it was kind of a tough childhood. As your father's success exploded, your parents' relationship really suffered. And I think most people know more about your dad's second wife, June Carter. But tell us about your mom, his first wife, Vivian, because she was a quiet but intense character.

R CASH: She wasn't very quiet at home.

(LAUGHTER)

R CASH: She was very intense. She's Sicilian, you know? She was very private and was not equipped to deal with my dad's sudden fame - explosive fame - and then his subsequent drug addiction. You know, in the '60s, it was like - he would have to drive 200 miles and do three shows a night, you know, on these tours. And at some point, someone gave a pill to him and said, take this. It'll keep you awake. Take this, and it'll help you sleep afterwards. And then that was it.

So my mom was not prepared for that. And then, you know, her - the template she had later on - when I went into, you know, became a songwriter and she realized that this was going to be my life path, she - her template for that was, oh, you get on drugs. You get divorced. Your family falls apart. You're never home, you know? And she was terrified that that's - was going to be my life.

ZOMORODI: Did you reassure her and say, no, I've learned from what not to do?

R CASH: No. I was not in the business of reassuring my mom anything at the age of 18.

(LAUGHTER)

R CASH: I just wanted to get away.

ZOMORODI: Just to step back for a second, in the beginning of your parents' relationship, they were madly in love.

R CASH: Absolutely. My dad was in the Air Force for three years. And my sisters and I have 1,000 letters they wrote to each other.

ZOMORODI: Wow.

R CASH: Yeah.

ZOMORODI: That's crazy - a thousand. And is he saying, like, I'm going to be a big musical superstar?

R CASH: No, he was - it was mostly besotted teenage love. You know...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

J CASH: I do, Vivian. I love you very much. I love you more than anything in the world. We'll be together soon.

R CASH: My darling, my darling, my darling, and then, you know, he would throw in, I bought this record. I bought a cheap guitar. I have a little band with two of the other, you know, Air Force guys. And so there were these sprinklings of what was being seeded in him at that time.

ZOMORODI: And so there was this period where your parents were really happy.

R CASH: Oh, yeah - I mean, until I was about 6, I think. You know, it was great. They were in love. They were building a life together. Like you said, we moved to California when I was 3 from Memphis. And then things started falling apart.

ZOMORODI: I had read the story - I knew in the history books that in 1965 your father was arrested in Texas for drug possession. But I didn't know the story that your mom went down to get him out of jail and that there's a famous photo that was taken as they left the courthouse. And the public had, I mean, outrageous reaction to this photo. Can you explain what happened?

R CASH: Well, it was a, you know, a photo in the newspaper - not very pixelated, as it was back then. And it was dark. And my mother's features are Sicilian. And it appeared that she was African American. And there was this outcry that my father had married a Black woman. And the Ku Klux Klan started this campaign against my father to ban his records. And, you know, they excoriated him in the press. And it was this kind of - it got very intense and scary. And I didn't know what this was all about. But it was very frightening.

And he had to - he wrote this letter, you know, saying that my mother was Italian. And, you know, this went on for a while. And my mother was, like I said, so private. And she was extremely embarrassed by this attention - you know, something about her appearance or about her history or her race. And that was incredibly hard for her to process. It was too much attention and in the wrong way.

ZOMORODI: And there is actually another layer to this story, because your mother always believed that she came from an Italian American family, but you recently learned that there actually is some African heritage, too.

R CASH: It's so fascinating. I did "Finding Your Roots" a few years ago. And my mother's paternal side was, indeed, 100% Sicilian. They - you know, her grandparents immigrated from Sicily in the late 1900s and opened a store in San Antonio. All of this is well documented. And - but it turns out on her maternal side, whose history goes back deep in America, that in the 1840s there was a freed slave married to - actually, I don't know if they could get married, but they were living as man and wife in Alabama in the 1840s. They had nine children together. And one of those children is my grandmother's - my maternal grandmother's - direct ancestor.

ZOMORODI: Yeah. It's an amazing coda to this chapter in your family's history. Was it on your mind when you wrote the song "The Killing Fields"? You sing about your family's Southern roots and the history there of lynchings and racism in the South. It is haunting.

R CASH: Yeah. So writing "The Killing Fields" was a slow awakening. And I do not claim to be awakened about race and about the suffering of African Americans and about the history of slavery. But I am - I want to be awakened about it.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE KILLING FIELDS")

R CASH: (Singing) There was cotton on the killing fields. It blows down through the years. It sticks to me just like a burn, fills my eyes and ears. And all that came before me...

And I had already been thinking about race. My grandfather - Cash - had a deep thread of racism running through him - you know, Arkansas farmer. And he was not well educated. And I'm not making excuses for him. It was a - it's a very painful thing to acknowledge about him. But I had been involved with the restoration of my dad's boyhood home in Arkansas for the past 12 years, 14 years. And going to Arkansas a lot, I became more aware of the really dark, dark history of racism and violence in Arkansas.

At around the same time, I was doing a show at Dockery Farms in Mississippi, which is really one of the birthplaces of the blues. It was a cotton farm where some of the great blues artists - Howlin' Wolf and Charley Patton - had picked cotton in the day and played guitar and music and juke joints at night. So doing this show, there was an after-party, all white people at the after-party and this nearly 90-year-old Black man playing blues harp with a guitarist - a white guitarist - at the after-party while the white people were milling around. And I kept looking at him all night.

And I went over to him after the party to say thank you so much, you know? That was so beautiful. Really appreciate you coming and playing. And he said, oh, I just want to tell you that when I was out behind the plow in the fields, that we had a radio sitting on the porch. And whenever your daddy came on the radio in the '50s, I would run over to listen to him. And I started weeping. I was thinking about my racist grandfather across the river in Arkansas behind the same kind of plow. And I realized that everything I do musically, creatively - that in some ways there's a thread that goes back to that Black man behind the plow in Mississippi musically and that white man behind the plow in Arkansas. And I started thinking about the threads you have to break in your life - the ones you bind, the ones you break.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ZOMORODI: OK. So that reminds me of another story you tell in your TED Talk about your grandmother, Carrie Cash, and what it was like to be a woman in the South - the American South - a century or so ago.

R CASH: Yeah. So she had seven children - one who died when he was 14. But she gave birth at home with the assistance of a doctor who came by in a horse-and-buggy to check on her. One of her labors - she was in labor for three days - he came by on a horse-and-buggy to check on her every day, once a day and pulled two aspirin from his pocket to give her. It was the same pocket in which he kept his fishing worms.

ZOMORODI: Wow.

R CASH: I know (laughter).

ZOMORODI: Here's Rosanne Cash again on the TED stage.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

R CASH: I read once that every time an old woman dies, a library disappears. And before her library disappeared, I tuned in to my grandmother's signals and gleaned her tenacity, which I borrowed, and her long suffering and her life of constant work with seven children - six of whom made it to adulthood - in a house without electricity in the sweltering cotton fields. And I wrote these words about her.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE SUNKEN LANDS")

R CASH: (Singing) Five cans of paint in the empty fields, and the dust reveals. And the children cry. The work never ends. There's not a single friend. Who will hold her hand in the sunken lands? And the mud and tears melt the cotton bolls. It's a heavy toll - oh, oh. His words are cruel, and they sting like fire, like the devil's choir - oh, oh. But who will hold her hand in the sunken lands? The river rises, and she sails away. But she could never stay - oh, oh. Now her work is done in the sunken lands. There's five empty cans.

(APPLAUSE)

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Rosanne Cash Reflects on Her Life and Legacy - NPR