Background

Rosanne Cash was born in Memphis on May 24, 1955, two months after Johnny recorded his first sides with Sam Phillips at Sun Records (with “Hey Porter”), and the same month he recorded his second sessions (with “Cry, Cry, Cry”).  Three summers later, following his signing to Columbia, Johnny used his advance funds to move his family to the Los Angeles suburb of Ventura, where Rosanne grew up as the daughter of one of popular music’s most volatile and idiosyncratic figures.  When she was 11, her parents divorced and Rosanne was raised in the Valley by her single mom.

After high school graduation in 1973, she joined Johnny’s touring road show, beginning as a ‘wardrobe assistant’ (doing laundry!) and gradually making a transition to performing as a backup singer and occasional soloist.  Rosanne learned “from watching her father on stage every night,” Nash writes, “and from sitting at the feet of step-grandmother Maybelle Carter and the matriarch’s daughters Helen, Anita, and June, who taught her songs as they waited to go on for the finale.  She mixed that influence with the British pop of the Beatles and the Southern California rock of Buffalo Springfield, and knew she wanted to be a songwriter.”

After three years on the road, however, Rosanne chose to move to London, where she worked as a secretary at CBS Records and traveled in Europe.  Returning to the U.S. in 1977, she thought she might become an actress, and enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Hollywood for a year.  On a trip to Germany in December 1978, Ariola Records requested a demo.  Rosanne knew Rodney Crowell, “the Houston-born singer-songwriter and rhythm guitarist who had just left Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band,” Nash goes on, “who had contributed some of the most memorable songs to Harris’s groundbreaking records, with their organic synthesis of country, rock, and folk.” 

The demo was recorded in January 1978, and led to a full album with Ariola.  Though it has never surfaced in America, the LP was sufficient for Johnny to bring to CBS Records Nashville and get his daughter a deal with Columbia.  Rosanne had begun playing out with Rodney’s new band, the Cherry Bombs, when they were wed in 1979, and started working on the first Columbia LP in Nashville.  Rosanne’s actual U.S. chart debut was September 1979, when her duet with Bobby Bare on the Crowell composition “No Memories Hangin’ Round” (from the upcoming album) hit the C&W chart.  The LP, Right Or Wrong, was released in early 1980, and sent up two respectable top 25 chart entries, “Couldn’t Do Nothing Right” (written by Karen Brooks and Gary P. Nunn) and “Take Me Take Me” (by Keith Sykes, who also wrote the album title tune).  Rosanne was unable to do much touring, though, because she was pregnant with the first of her three children with Rodney.  Still, the album was a critical and (semi-)commercial success, and set the stage for her real breakthrough the following year.