Rosanne Cash

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Rosanne Cash from the back cover of Rhythm & Romance (1985). Original photograph by Gary Heery.

Rosanne Cash (born May 24, 1955) is an American singer and songwriter. Although she is most often classified as a country artist, her music draws on many genres in addition to country, including folk, pop, rock and roll and blues. She is one of the daughters of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin, born shortly before the release of her father's first single. In many ways, her career reflects the changes in country music since the birth of the rock and roll era.

Born in 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, Cash grew up Catholic in southern California, but moved to Nashville after her high school graduation. She worked in her father's road show before setting out on her own. Cash released her first single, a duet with Bobby Bare, in 1979, and two years later had her first country No. 1 (and the biggest hit commercially of her career), "Seven Year Ache" (which also became a top forty pop hit). In 1979 she married Rodney Crowell, who was to produce most of her hit records. Their stormy marriage lasted until 1992; its break-up is chronicled in Cash's Interiors and in Crowell's album Life Is Messy. Cash later married producer John Leventhal, who produced her albums The Wheel (on which many of the songs were also based on her relationship with Crowell) and 10 Song Demo. Although Cash was a prominent country star throughout the '80s, her music was anything but traditional: she topped the charts with songs written not only by herself, but by her father ("Tennessee Flat Top Box"), John Hiatt ("The Way We Make a Broken Heart"), Tom Petty ("Never Be You") and the Beatles ("I Don't Want to Spoil the Party"), as well. "I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me", which won her a Grammy in 1985, and "It's Such a Small World", a 1987 duet with Crowell on his album Diamonds & Dirt, provided further hits. All of these songs and more are included on the compilation Hits 1979-1989.

Cash has had more than twenty top 40 country singles, including eleven chart-toppers, but nothing since 1990, and she has found it necessary to leave Nashville in both spirit and body to pursue her artistic vision. Although she had recorded all of her hits for Columbia Records' Nashville division, she released 10 Song Demo for the pop division of Capitol. Cash resurfaced in 2003 with Rules of Travel. The album features guest appearances by Sheryl Crow and Steve Earle, as well as a tune penned by Joe Henry and the Wallflowers' Jakob Dylan, another artist who knows about life as the offspring of a legend. Cash's latest album, entitled Black Cadillac, was released in January of 2006 to high critical acclaim. Much of the album addresses the losses (within a 24-month span) of her step-mother, her father, her step-sister (Rosey Nix Adams, nee Carter) and then finally her mother on Cash's fiftieth birthday.

In addition to her own recordings, she has made guest appearances on albums by Johnny Cash, Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark, Vince Gill, Lyle Lovett, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Marc Cohn, The Chieftains, and others, as well as children's albums by Larry Kirwan, Tom Chapin, and Dan Zanes and Friends. She has also appeared on tribute albums to Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, Tammy Wynette, Doc Pomus, Laura Nyro, Yoko Ono, and Jimi Hendrix.

In 1996, Cash released a book of short stories entitled Bodies of Water. This was followed in 2000 by a children's book entitled Penelope Jane: A Fairy's Tale, which included an exclusive CD single, and in 2001 she edited the collection Songs Without Rhyme: Prose By Celebrated Songwriters. She is also an amateur painter whose work is featured in the booklet for her Interiors album. Her version of the John Hiatt song "It Hasn't Happened Yet" inspired the short story "No One's a Mystery" by writer Elizabeth Tallent. She has publicly expressed support for environmental causes and opposition to the Iraq War. Cash now lives in the Chelsea neighborhood in downtown Manhattan.