By Robyn Smith
Though country music seems to run in her blood, Rosanne Cash has worked extremely hard in her 35-year career to get where she is. The four-time Grammy Award winner is producing her best work now.
Her newest album, “The River & The Thread” (released Jan. 14, 2014), is her most renowned album yet. It earned three Grammy awards, which also led her to famously quote Ray Charles in her third acceptance speech this year: “You’re a better singer at 50 than you are at 30 because your whole life shows up in your voice.”
Charles was right. The songs on the album are full of life, stories and the heart of the South, inspired by a series of trips she and her husband, John Leventhal, made over the past few years to key spots such as the Tallahatchie Bridge in Money, Mississippi, recording studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and her father Johnny Cash’s boyhood home in Dyess, Arkansas.
“I wasn’t setting out to learn anything,” Cash says. “I was just going down, and my heart was kind of open. We were very moved by just being down there and being connected to people I’d known in the past and meeting new people and going to these places that had a real resonance in my own history.”
She and Leventhal had made the trips to celebrate birthdays and other occasions over the few years. The talented couple recently celebrated their 20th anniversary. Despite a happy marriage, the two are polar opposites—something she has fully accepted. “The River & The Thread” is, according to Cash, as much his album as it is hers. “…We each brought our best selves, and the sum ended up being greater than the parts,” says Cash.
The album has been hailed by several renowned publications such as The New York Times and Rolling Stone as one of the best albums of 2014 on top of the trio of Grammys.
“The River & The Thread” is Cash’s 13th album, a culmination of her impressive 35-year career that took a year and a half to make. “Like I said, when I got the Grammys, I just showed up for work for 35 years and something happened. I worked when I thought no one was listening; I worked when I didn’t have any belief in myself; I worked when I thought I would never be a good songwriter; I worked when nobody was buying the records. I just kept working because that’s what I do, and that’s what I love.”
One of the songs on the album, “When The Master Calls the Roll,” was a collaboration between Cash, Leventhal and her ex-husband, Rodney Crowell, about a soldier from Virginia fighting in the Civil War. Cash is coming to perform at the Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas next week.
“The idea of singing ‘When the Master Calls the Roll’ in this part of Virginia is incredibly deep to me, is really thoughtful, and I’m really looking forward to that,” Cash says. The song doesn’t allude to whether the soldier, based on Cash’s own ancestors, was fighting for the Confederacy or the Union. The heartache was felt equally by both sides, according to Cash.
With all the travels and accolades and lessons that came with this album, Cash didn’t set out with any expectations in mind.
“I learned that home is something you take with you,” Cash says. “That geography is as powerful as people and that the things you’re connected to.”
The River & The Thread: In Concert
June 26, 8 p.m.
Hylton Performing Arts Center, 10960 George Mason Circle, Manassas
$45-99, tickets available at hyltoncenter.org
