Rosanne Cash 'The River and The Thread' - Album Review

I feel privileged to have experienced the 1980s when women dominated country music radio and billboard music charts. And it just wasn’t a handful of female artists such as those being played on those same such stations today. There was a talented group who enjoyed a regular radio spin rotation: singers such as Juice Newton, Janie Fricke, Crystal Gayle, Reba McEntire, the Judds, Dottie West, K.T. Olsin and the lesser known names of Charly McClain and Holly Dunn.

Radio back then was a completely different beast than it is now. Luckily in those days country music meant more substantive lyrics, not that Girl in the Truck, Aw Naw, Gonna Get Me Some material currently pervading major market stations. One artist that always delivered substance was Rosanne Cash.

Cash writes in her memoir ‘Composed’ that “modern country music speaks less of such desperate loss, and has become shiny and rich and rather shallow as a result.” Perhaps this sentiment was the impetus behind the artist writing ‘The River and The Thread’, her first album of original material in eight years. She seems at ease with the final result, saying: “If I never make another album I will be content, because I made this one.”

In ‘The River and The Thread’ Cash explores her family’s connection to the deep American south, which were all influences she “pushed away for so long. I didn’t feel at home here,” she told CBS Sunday Monday in a January 2014 interview. “I wanted a bigger world.”

What Cash would ultimately discover in writing the album is that her past was still very much part of her present.

The Grammy-award winning artist is the eldest of three daughters born to Johnny Cash and his first wife Vivian Liberto. While she was born in Memphis, the family moved to California, where the young girl spent a lot of her time finding a way to make music on her own terms, running from her family’s famous name. She ran to London as a teen to work for a record label, ran to Germany to make her first album in the late 1970s, and then ran to New York, from the Nashville mainstream after her marriage to Rodney Crowell dissolved in 1992. While there she met her soulmate in fellow musical collaborator, musician and producer John Leventhal. The two celebrate their 20thwedding anniversary this year.

Cash had eluded my list of concert experiences, so when a show was announced at Parker, Colorado’s new state-of-the-art 500-seat PACE Center, I jumped at the chance to hear her live in such a personal setting. Would her songs resonate with me today, as they had done when ‘Blue Moon and Heartache’ came through on that farm truck radio 30 years ago?

The daughter of the famous Man In Black would not disappoint. From Leventhal’s very first haunting southern twang intro of ‘A Feather’s Not A Bird’, to the full 67-minute first set of music, played in order as they appear on the album, Cash and company set the stage for a night of musical story-telling.

I’m going down to Florence, gonna wear a pretty dressI’ll sit atop the magic wall with the voices in my headThen we’ll drive on through to Memphis, past the strongest shoalsThen on to Arkansas just to touch the gumbo soul

The massive fabric back drop that projected powerful images of the Delta landscape helped Cash in paying homage to her family’s southern roots. A simple introduction of each song provided context to the album’s written original material. In 2008 the artist had become involved with the Arkansas State University’s (ASU) restoration of the Cash family home in Dyess, AK. As stated on the ASU website, “The Dyess Colony was created in 1934 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to aid in the nation’s economic recovery from the Great Depression. As a federal agricultural resettlement community, it provided a fresh start for nearly 500 impoverished Arkansas farm families, including the family of music legend Johnny Cash.”

That project slowly saw Cash reconnecting with people from her past, such as Marshall Grant, her father’s long-time bass-player from the Tennessee Two. ‘Etta’s Tune’ is the story of Marshall and Etta’s 65-year marriage. In an interview with Radio.com Cash said Etta had told her “’We’d wake up every morning of our lives and say, ‘What’s the temperature darling?'” And I thought, what a practical, solid way to start the day. On all levels, metaphorical and practically. And John said, ‘Oh my god, that’s a great first line for a song.'”

“After we wrote that one we said, this is what we’re going to do; this is going to be a record about the South, and these people, and these characters, these places, the sense of time travel, the peculiarities of the South,” Cash said to Roger Caitlin of Songfacts.

Cash said she and Leventhal continued their southern state road trips, writing a song called ‘The Sunken Lands’ about a geographical area known as New Madrid. Some of the strongest earthquakes in US history hit an area that encompasses the borders of Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee. From December, 1811 to February of 1812, massive quakes measured 7.2 and 8.1 on the Richter scale. Cash said the song was inspired by her grandmother Carrie in Arkansas, who “raised seven children, picked cotton and was married to a man who wasn’t kind.” She also spoke of recognizing a gospel heritage in ‘Tell Heaven’, a story about the South’s comfort in Christianity.

‘Money Road’ references blues legend Robert Johnson, as well as Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy who dared to flirt with a white woman at the Money, Mississippi grocery store in 1955. Some say the story sparked the Civil Rights Movement in the south. The boy was found murdered in the Tallahatchie River. “Literature, violence and redemption all happened off Money Road,” Cash told the audience.

A lonesome boy in a foreign land(Out on Money Road)And a voice we’ll never understand(Out on Money Road)One lies in the Zion yardAnd one sleeps on the river barNeither one got very farOut on Money Road

The most memorable moment of the evening came when the band exited the stage, leaving just Cash and Leventhal (playing an acoustic guitar). The audience was immediately transported to Choctaw Ridge and the Tallahatchie River, as the duo sang a stunning version of Bobby Gentry’s massive number one single ‘Ode to Billie Joe’. That led into other songs of Cash’s personal history: ‘Tennessee Flat Top Box’ (her father’s number one hit), ‘Black Cadillac’ (a song penned by Cash about her father’s death) and Don Gibson’s ‘Sea of Heartbreak’, (one of the many from ‘The List’ of 100 essential country songs her father encouraged her, as an 18-year-old girl, to learn if she was going to stay in country music).

“When we started forming the idea for this record,” said Cash of ‘The River and The Thread’, “it felt like it was going to be the third part of a trilogy—with Black Cadillac mapping out a territory of mourning and loss and then The List, celebrating my family’s musical legacy. 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.”

After pushing the south away for most of her life, Cash brings her legacy to the forefront with this record. She has masterfully worked through her own trials and tribulations and from that woven meaning to who she is and how she got there. And she explains it all in ‘The Long Way Home’”:

You thought you’d left it all behindYou thought you’d up and goneBut all you did was figure outHow to take the long way home

Thankfully Rosanne Cash found her history and her voice are one of the same in ‘The River and The Thread’. I would think her Daddy would be proud.

You just won’t hear her on country radio. And that’s a shame.