If you know any songs by Rosanne Cash, you already know she's a magnificent writer.
So welcome
Composed, a memoir in which Cash shares her thoughts on growing up as the daughter of the iconic Johnny Cash and slowly becoming an artist and an adult herself.
Unlike the sort of kiss-and-tell celebrity dishfest that currently passes for autobiography,
Composed is a series of connected essays about friends, family and lovers, and formative events both positive and tragic. Cash's book is completely enthralling, and it's overall spirit might be described as loving and forgiving. It's about Cash's life so far, to be sure, but about dreams and ideas as well as events.
In a recent interview to promote
Composed, Cash admitted that she was nervous about the book's publication. "With songs, there's always poetic licence, and only I know what's documentary detail," she says. "With a memoir, I felt the responsibility to be truthful, to talk about facts and reality, in a poetic way still, but I didn't want to exaggerate or embellish ... even though there's dishing or score settling, it feels bare."
On a lighter note, she adds, "And I think what I left out is as important as what I wrote about."
Cash has an extraordinary eye for detail, and her recollections about childhood are sharp and beautifully drawn. And often funny. She vividly recalls the anger she felt at age five when a film crew turned up at the house to interview her famous father; Cash and her three younger sisters had to get all dressed up, and she rebelled at the falseness of the situation.
This would be only the beginning, of course, of a life divided between public and private domains.
Rosanne Cash is the oldest of Johnny Cash's four daughters with his first wife, Vivian Liberto. She was raised Roman Catholic, and writes about the nuns who taught her in her childhood in the same breath as she describes the poisonous snakes and desert arachnids of the family home in Casitas Springs, near Ventura.
After her parents split up and her father married June Carter, Cash spent summers with her father in Tennessee; when she finished high school, he took her out on tour with him, a graduation gift that was actually part of a continuing education in the family business: Music.
"I belong to an extended family of musicians whose members sprawl across generations," says Cash, understating the situation more than somewhat, but she writes about learning to play the guitar and finding her passion for song writing at a young age, despite her adolescent determination to be an archeologist or a doctor.
Cash began recording, married Rodney Crowell and was only 24 when she had her first child, Caitlin. While bringing up baby (as well as Crowell's daughter Hannah, then four), she released Seven Year Ache, her second Columbia album. It was a massive hit, and her life changed again.
Cash's stories move back and forth in time, introducing people who came into her life in the 1970s or '80s, then moving into the present to see where they all wound up. She includes unexpected details in every story, and they are often personal and ostensibly mundane, such as the clothing items and shoes she chose to wear to June Carter's funeral, and four months later, to her father's. The effect is intimate and sometimes devastating.
On paper, Cash is never sentimental or maudlin, even when describing the two-year period in which she lost her father, stepmother, stepsister and aunt. Her mother's death came two years later, on her own 50th birthday, and after that there was 9/11 to get through in New York and a serious brain surgery from which to recover. Author, singer-songwriter, survivor.
"I feel fortunate," she says, against all the odds. "In writing about my life—there were certainly hard things—but I felt very fortunate. I've had an interesting and unusual life, and I don't have regrets about it."
Let's hope
Composed is just a first instalment.
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Do you have Rosanne Cash's Martin D-28 guitar? It was a gift from her father, as the card in the sound hole would have told you, and it's been missing since she checked it at LAX in 1979 on her way to honeymoon in Hawaii. Cash writes about it in
Composed, and 31 years later, she still believes she's going to get it back one day. If you've got it, give it back, and renew her faith in humanity.
liz.braun@sunmedia.ca
