IN CONCERT
What: Roseanne Cash
When: Sunday, Sept. 29, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Farquhar Auditorium at the University of Victoria, 3800 Finnerty Rd.
Tickets: $45-$79 from tickets.uvic.ca or the UVic Ticket Centre (250-721-8480)
Note: Cash will also perform Tuesday at the Port Theatre in Nanaimo
Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has won practically every award in his field. But that wasn’t enough to sway country singer Rosanne Cash when he asked for her involvement in his recent 16-hour documentary, Country Music.
As the eldest daughter of country icon Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto, Cash often got the impression, when she was starting out as an artist, that people only wanted to talk to her in order to get to her father. That feeling grew following his death in 2003.
The New York-based singer-songwriter, 64, has developed a coat of armour to protect herself and her family when those looking for tabloid fodder show up at her doorstep. She can’t count the number of times something in poor taste or inaccurate has had her name attached to it.
“I’ve had so much crap over the years, and so much untruth, and so many projections from people who want my dad to live out their own agenda,” Cash said in an interview with the Times Colonist.
She was contacted by Burns before production had started, to be an “ad-hoc consultant” and on-camera interviewee, Cash said. Her fear was that the Country Music director would treat the genre of music in a less-than-flattering way, as had been done by other productions many times before.
“But he didn’t,” she said happily. “It is really beautiful. And my own family’s legacy in it, it makes me really proud. But I was suspicious in the beginning.”
Cash is ecstatic at the response the documentary has received since debuting Sept. 15, in part because it has reminded people of the value of country music, and the roles Willie Nelson, Hank Williams, Emmylou Harris and her father played in shaping North American culture.
Having grown up in the shadow of it all, with a country-star father and influential stepmother in June Carter Cash, she hasn’t had to apologize for yet another poorly conceived production using her father to generate buzz.
It’s amazing Cash even had time to watch the documentary series.
She was in a car shuttling to Calgary at the time of our conversation, and has been keeping a whirlwind pace of late. She was in Europe for a tour prior to landing on Canadian soil this week, and will be back in the U.S. for more dates after her shows in Victoria tonight at the Farquhar Auditorium and Tuesday in Nanaimo at the Port Theatre.
Though she is much more than a singer-songwriter — Cash has written several books, including the 2011 New York Times bestseller Composed: A Memoir — the four-time Grammy Award winner is on the road promoting her most recent album.
She Remembers Everything is a collection of personal songs co-produced by her husband, John Leventhal, on topics ranging from the #MeToo movement to gun control.
Cash knew when she was writing the album that She Remembers Everything would have an emotional impact. “But I also knew it wasn’t as accessible and some people would have trouble with it,” she said with a laugh.
She isn’t tracking sales of the album or what audiences are saying, however — the songs needed to come out, and it’s all the same to her if they fall on deaf ears. “I felt like I had to do this.”
While Cash wrote largely in the third person on 2014’s The River and the Thread, in order to disguise how she was feeling about the American South, the new songs are “definitely really personal,” she said. “I had a feeling of urgency about returning to personal songwriting. My own life is part of the stamp of these songs.”
During the 2016 presidential campaign that ultimately saw Donald Trump become U.S. president, it was Cash’s daughter, Carrie Crowell, now 31, who prompted the surge of creativity that became She Remembers Everything.
“My daughter called me, crying, and she said: ‘I feel like I don’t matter.’ And that has stuck with me every day. That is what gives me a sense of urgency, because she does matter and every one in her generation matters.
“I have children. I want them to have better than this. It’s so disheartening and frightening. We’re living in a mass extinction, and while we are living through it, all the science says the same thing. We have a leader who is undoing every single protection that we have against a future cataclysm. Every single one. It’s beyond comprehension. And that’s just one thing — let’s not even go to the corruption and the narcissism.”
The 15th record in a career that includes 11 No. 1 singles, She Remembers Everything is a deft showcase for Cash’s ever-evolving sound, which has never been easy to pigeonhole.
Kings Record Shop, her acclaimed 1987 recording that included her hit rendition of Tennessee Flat Top Box, which was written and originally sung by her father, is considered today one of the foundations of what became the Americana genre of music.
Cash mixes it up in concert, however, with covers of Lefty Frizzell, Bobbie Gentry and Hank Snow — music she learned growing up at the behest of her father.
She has a style uniquely her own. “It’s really rooted in the Delta, Appalachia and folk [idioms], with some country rock thrown in. I grew up in California, listening to all those bands like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and the Byrds. That influenced me.
“That was a really formative time in my life. Country music was going in by osmosis.”
