Johnny Cash Memorial Tribute

Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, TN, November 10, 2003

photo by Alan Messer ©2003
Rosanne Cash at the Johnny Cash Memorial Tribute
Nashville 2003

Rosanne's remarks at the Tribute

Family photos
in CMT's Flipbook
My father's integrity as an artist was the same integrity that informed him as a parent. When I was a teenager, I was lying on the bed in my room reading a book on astrology. My dad walked in and asked me what I was reading.

I handed him the book and said, "You don't believe in this...do you?" He said, "No, but I think you should find out everything you can about it." That one comment became the template on which I later based my entire philosophy of parenting: trust...respect...and a wide open mind.

My father's own wide open mind explored an immense universe of ideas...sound...beauty...mystery...love...pain and rhythm.

He offered that universe to us...as our birthright...to delight in our own treasures...and slam up against our own walls...always knowing that his love was close at hand.

His heart was so expansive and his mind so finely tuned that he could contain both darkness and light...love and trouble...fear and faith...wholeness and shatteredness...addiction and enlightenment...old school and post-modern...Baptist and Jew...the sacred and the silly...God and the void. But always and relentlessly with the backbeat and the rhythm driving the paradoxes.

Daddy was a tremendous energy source...a radiant center of love in our lives. I cannot begin to describe the enormity of the empty space he has left. A friend told me that your parents keep teaching you even after they are gone...and my sisters and brother and I have already found that to be true. He keeps pointing us in the direction of our best selves. His humble and luminous spirit resonates so deeply in our lives...and I believe it always will.

Because Daddy understood his paradoxes so well, he also knew that every day held a choice to be made. I cannot count the times we heard him say, "Children, you can choose love or hate. I choose love." So I tell you...and him...tonight, from our own wide universe of choices, Daddy we also choose love...and rhythm.