Singer, songwriter and Grammy award winning country artist Rosanne Cash plays the HFAC Friday, April 24thbeginning at 7pm. Joined on stage by John Leventhal, her longtime collaborator, producer, guitarist and husband the evening will celebrate the duo’s most recent Grammy winning album, “The River and the Thread” which won; Best Americana album, Best American roots song and performance for “A Feather’s Not a Bird”.
One of the most compelling figures in popular music, with a body of work encompassing country, rock, roots and pop influences, Rosanne Cash inherited a reverence for song and profound artistry – and an equal duty to find insights of her own. The oldest daughter of country music icon Johnny Cash and stepdaughter of June Carter Cash of the legendary Carter Family, she holds a lineage rooted in the very beginning of American country music, with its deep cultural and historical connections to the South. Over a three-decade career she has responded to this heritage with 15 albums of extraordinary songs that have earned a GRAMMY Award and nominations for 12 more, the Americana Honors and Awards’ Album of the Year Award, and 21 top-40 hits, including 11 No. 1 singles. Her four books include the best-selling memoir “Composed.” In recent seasons, Cash has appeared in concerts and talks at the Spoleto Festival, Toronto’s Luminato festival and the Festival of Arts and Ideas, and partnered in programming collaborations with the Minnesota Orchestra, Lincoln Center and San Francisco Jazz.
In “The River and the Thread,” Cash evokes the “bittersweet stories of people and places of the South,” in a kaleidoscopic examination of its geographic, emotional and historic landscape. “I went back to where I was born, and these songs started arriving in me,” she has said. “All these things happened that made me feel a deeper connection to the South than I ever had. We started finding these great stories, and the melodies that went with those experiences. I feel this record ties past and present together through all those people and places in the South I knew and thought I had left behind.”
The album reflects journeys through the Southern states, with stops at William Faulkner’s house; Dockery Farms, the plantation where Howlin’ Wolf and Charley Patton worked and sang; her father’s boyhood home in Dyess, Arkansas; the Sun Records Studio in Memphis; and the Mississippi Delta, with its memories of the birth of the Civil Rights era and the haunting gravesite of the great bluesman Robert Johnson.
With The River and the Thread, Cash has added the next chapter to a remarkable period of creativity. Her last two albums, Black Cadillac (2006) and The List (2009), were both nominated for Grammy Awards; The List—an exploration of essential songs as selected and given to Rosanne by her father, Johnny Cash—was also named Album of the Year by the Americana Music Association. In addition, her best-selling 2010 memoir, Composed, was described by the Chicago Tribune as “one of the best accounts of an American life you will likely ever read.”
“THE SOUL AND RICHNESS OF THE PEOPLE AND THE MUSIC OF THE SOUTH RESONATES IN A PARTICULAR WAY FOR ALL OF US. IT’S A DEEP CONNECTION,” says Rosanne.
Rosanne Cash acknowledges that, even with fifteen albums and four books behind her, it was difficult to start writing songs again after spending several years immersed in the masterful compositions featured on The List. “You cannot keep that in your mind, except as an inspiration, a standard to aspire to,” she says. “To say, ‘I’m going to write a song as great as “Take These Chains”‘—you’re not! So the only way to not get dismantled by that is to stay connected to your own muse, and immerse yourself completely in what you’re doing so it can be as rich and authentic as it can possibly be. That’s all you can hope for.”
With The River and the Thread, she has risen to that challenge—and emerged with a beautiful and haunting album, one of the finest works in an extraordinary career.
Join us Friday, April 24th 7pm at the Henderson Fine Arts Center for an evening of Grammy award-winning music by Rosanne Cash. Tickets are available 270.831.9800, or haaa.org/tickets.
Show sponsors include; Brenntag-Mid South, Field & Main Bank, Myriad CPA Group