ROSANNE CASH BIOGRAPHY

ROSANNE CASH, daughter of country music legend Johnny Cash, may be the crown princess of Nashville, but she doesn't think of herself as a country artist. She is one of her generation's most acclaimed singer-songwriters--in any genre--and she rightly believes that her music defies categorization. ("Besides, I don't know anything about today's country music. I don't listen to country radio. I saw Shania Twain once when I was flipping on the TV. I know that Garth's first record was called something about horses.") Her new album, 10 Song Demo, is another departure from the country mainstream; it's a sparsely recorded work that owes as much to folk as it does country tradition. She is especially delighted to hear that it is drawing comparisons to the work of such alternative artists as P.J. Harvey, Liz Phair, and Tori Amos. ("All of those women I admire very much. P.J. Harvey was a little tough for me to get into. I kind of thought that it was just my age, my upbringing. I respected what she did, but she was harder for me to access than Liz Phair and Tori Amos, who I think are both incredibly wonderful.")

She also admires authors like Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, and Jeanette Winterson, and she has just published her own collection of short stories, entitled Bodies of Water. ("I'd been wanting to write this book since I was nine years old, but I got waylaid into songwriting and this recording career. Actually, I'm glad it's taken this long, because I think my songwriting has given something to my prose writing I wouldn't have gotten otherwise: a lyrical quality, and a subtle sense of melody.")
She believes her fans connect to the honest depiction of "the inner richness of women's lives" in both her fiction and her music. She says they often write to tell her their reactions to her work, and to talk about their lives. ("I am blessed that people seem to trust me, and they are open with me. Most people are in a lot of pain, whether they realize it or not, and it's really heartbreaking to me. It's really moving to be the recipient of their confidences sometimes.")

She has given a lot of thought to her public persona, and tries to make sure that it is not much different from reality. ("If I think that I'm being perceived as something off- kilter to what I am, it causes me anxiety. At the same time, the older I get, the less concerned I am about what people perceive, because I'm just trying to stay honest, no matter what setting I'm in. But I just got asked the question, do I think I'm a showbiz cliché because I seem tortured and miserable, yet on the surface I have this great life! That was surprising.")

She was born May 24, 1955, in Memphis, Tennessee. ("It was a quick birth, like four hours or something, and my father was in the waiting room. Back then, they wouldn't let men in the delivery room with women.")

Her father released his first single, "Cry, Cry, Cry," a month later. She lived in Memphis until she was three years old. ("Then we moved to California. I remember our first house in Encino: it was one of those ranch-style houses with a pool. My parents bought it from Johnny Carson.")

Her father had well-publicized bouts with drugs and assorted other demons while she was growing up. Her mother divorced him when Rosanne was eleven. ("Because he was so famous when I was a child, and there was so much self-destruction attached to it--my parents' marriage and his drug abuse--I just thought that fame was the worst thing that could happen to you.") Her mother, Vivian, has been remarried for twenty-six years. ("She's very active, president of her garden club, a very creative kind of woman.") Her father married singing partner June Carter in 1968, outsold the Beatles in 1969, and has recently enjoyed a resurgence, highlighted by a Grammy Award in 1994. ("He's such a brilliant, great, unique artist. As a child, it was very hard to see that, because it's just dad. But as I grow older, just to see the kind of poet he is, the kind of minstrel, and how timeless those qualities are in him, it's absolutely, incredibly inspiring. We have a wonderful relationship now.")

Her own career--which has included eleven No. 1 hits on the country music charts-- seemed "inevitable," though she spent many years avoiding it. ("When I decided that I wanted to be an interpreter of my own songs, and I was going to take a chance on making records, it was really a strange decision for me. I felt like I was slipping down a drain in some ways. I had to do it at least five years before I kind of acknowledged to myself that I had made the right choice.")
Her first marriage, to country musician Rodney Crowell, ended in a painful, public divorce in 1992. ("The media wants to rake over your whole life as fodder for their machine--without any regard that it's a life, and that there's real feeling in it. I've gotten attention for things that were painful to me. I've been alienated from people I care about because I'm well-known.") She and her second husband, music producer John Leventhal, live in New York City with her three daughters, ages seven, fourteen, and sixteen. She says it's hard to be both a mother and a writer.

She tries to teach her kids the essentials, like good manners, but admits that being a parent is hard work. ("To torture me, they have terrible manners. But I even teach them about the proper way to eat, with the knife in the right hand and the fork in the left, and that you keep them there, and that you put your knife and for together on the plate when you're done eating so the waiter knows that you're finished. I think it'svery important. Linda Ronstadt had a great quote once: she said, 'Without manners you can achieve familiarity, but never intimacy.' I thought that was a beautiful theme.")
Her favorite bagel is poppy seed, and most of the time she eats well. ("I eat salads and vegetables, and I love to eat a lot of rice, pastas, chicken. I don't eat red meat.") She is taken aback when asked if she has ever punched or kicked anyone. ("Punched or kicked a person? You mean other than in jest? No!") She is more comfortable with the topic of dancing--she and her husband do it frequently in the living room, and she thinks she's pretty good, in a free-form kind of way. ("I love it so much. I love to dance. If I could have chosen another life, I think I would have chosen to be a dancer.")

Only in Nashville--where the folk music of the hills has been locked behind studio doors, guarded by the slickest of musicians--could Rosanne Cash's 10 Song Demo be viewed as a radical step. But it is. The official story is that the president of Capitol heard these eleven songs (yes, eleven) and so believed in their purity that he insisted the rough demos be released untouched. That "rough demo" bit is a trifle misleading; Cash is too polished a performer to face a microphone with anything less than full focus. Her voice, accompanied by guitar or piano, gets some gentle support from second guitar parts, soft percussion, and backing vocal lines. What "demo" really means in this context is that the songs haven't been gussied up, or so carefully recorded and performed that Cash's frank honesty is concealed. Unvarnished, then, this is a beautiful, aching, questing collection. Throughout 10 Song Demo, Rosanne Cash proves herself to be as tough and as blunt as P.J. Harvey, Liz Phair, or Tori Amos, though she is more subtle about her work, and more spiritual. That much is clear from the opening "Price of Temptation," and the theme reappears in the lovely "Bells & Roses" ("You don't have to answer now/ But you might learn to pray") and often after.

For the most part, though, 10 Song Demo is a meditation on things lost, from the schoolgirl innocence of "The Summer I Read Colette" to the lovelorn "If I Were a Man." That mood culminates in the tenth song, "Take My Body," a disarmingly beautiful and tangled confessional. "Take my body," she sings calmly, "for you know it's just an open book/ Take my body/ I really don't need it that much anymore/ Every line is a mystery/ Every curve is a clue to my soul." It's a striking performance, especially coming from fourth-generation Nashville royalty, without the help
of her court.