Rosanne Cash

Although Cash is often classified as a country artist, her music draws from many genres, including folk, pop, rock, blues and, most notably, Americana. In the 1980s, she had a string of genre-crossing singles that entered both the country and pop charts, the most commercially successful being her 1981 breakthrough hit "Seven Year Ache". It topped the U.S. country singles chart and reached the Top 30 on the U.S. pop chart.


In 1990, Cash released Interiors, a spare, introspective album which signaled a break from her pop country past.^[2] The following year she ended her marriage to songwriter Rodney Crowell.


She moved from Nashville to New York City. She has continued to write, record, and perform, having since released six albums, written three books, and edited a collection of short stories. Her fiction and essays have been published in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Oxford American, New York Magazine, and other periodicals and collections.


Cash won a Grammy Award in 1985 for "I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me" and has received 12 other Grammy nominations.^[3] She has had 11 No. 1 country hit singles, 21 Top 40 country singles, and two gold records. Cash was the 2014 recipient of Smithsonian magazine's American Ingenuity Award, in the Performing Arts category.


On February 8, 2015, Cash won three Grammy awards: for Best Americana Album for The River & the Thread, Best American Roots Song, with John Leventhal; and Best American Roots Performance for her album A Feather's Not A Bird.^[4] Cash was honored further in October that year, when she was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.^[5]

Early life[edit]

Cash was born in 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, to Vivian and Johnny Cash, when Johnny was recording his first tracks at Sun Records. She is the first of four daughters.^[6][7] Cash's mother was Vivian Cash (née Liberto), known to be of maternal Irish and German ancestry, and paternal Sicilian. She grew up Catholic and her paternal Liberto grandparents were immigrants from Cefalù, Palermo.^[8][9]


The Cash couple married in San Antonio, Texas, where Vivian was born and raised. They later lived in Memphis, Tennessee. Vivian attracted attention as Johnny Cash became a star because some observers believed her appearance reflected African-American ancestry, and interracial marriage was illegal in the South. She grew up in Sicilian-American culture in San Antonio, went to white schools in the segregated state, and was registered as white on her marriage license, among other documentation of her family's racial status as white.


With Johnny Cash's increasing success in country music, in 1958 he moved the family from Memphis to California, first to Los Angeles. He later bought a farm in Ventura. Her parents separated in 1962, and Cash and her sisters were raised by their mother Vivian in the isolated, rural location.^[10] and divorced six years later.


After graduating from St. Bonaventure High School about 1973,^[11] Rosanne Cash joined her father's road show for two and a half years. She first worked as a wardrobe assistant,^[12] then as a background vocalist and occasional soloist.^[13] Rosanne Cash made her studio recording debut on Johnny Cash's 1974 album The Junkie and the Juicehead Minus Me, singing lead vocal on a version of Kris Kristofferson's "Broken Freedom Song".


In 1976, Johnny Cash recorded Rosanne's song, "Love Has Lost Again",^[14] on his album One Piece At A Time. This was Rosanne Cash's first professionally recorded work as a songwriter.


That same year, she briefly worked for CBS Records in London before returning to Nashville to study English and drama at Vanderbilt University.^[6] She relocated to Los Angeles to study at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Hollywood.^[15] She recorded a demo in January 1978 with Emmylou Harris's songwriter/sideman Rodney Crowell, which led to a full album with German label Ariola Records.^[15]