Rosanne Cash Looks Back To Her Dad and Forward to 70

Finding a change agent

When I was 20, I spent six months in London working for a record company, and it utterly changed my life. I was trying to make myself something different while I was there. That’s harder when you’re older because your habitual way of being is pretty entrenched. Creatively, I’m less afraid of being poetically or spiritually ambiguous now — using images to explain rather than straight lyricism — than I was when I was younger. And personally, well, I have something of a negativity bias, although I try to catch myself now. Like, if I’m on the road in a hotel that’s really depressing, I’ll go, “If I was in the Civil War and I had been crawling through mud for three days, this would be heaven.”

How to channel a song

If it doesn’t sound too self-aggrandizing, I’d say there are songs out in the universe that are complete, and if you’ve gotten to a certain place in your songwriting, you can receive them. I’ve always said you have to put your catcher’s mitt on. Sometimes they come from a kind of murky, deep place.

Johnny Cash and Rosanne Cash in October 1982 after they performed with Rodney Crowell in Atlanta.

Rick Diamond/Getty Images

Embracing your legacy

Through my 30s, I resisted the idea of legacy. As I got older, I started realizing I do belong to the past. It took me living in New York for quite some time to uncover my deep love of the South, of the Mississippi Delta, the music and the rich personality of it, and to acknowledge the suffering and the violence. When the Country Music Hall of Fame asked me to do an exhibition [Rosanne Cash: Time Is a Mirror, through March 2026], I started pulling out lyric books and photographs and clothing, like the green suede jacket that my dad had made for me in Greenwich Village when I was 14. And after he died in 2003, I received the small desk he’d had in his dressing room. I see that desk as a prism where the past and the future, legacy and rebellion, come together. And in a drawer was a patch from his Air Force uniform that said “CASH” in block letters. He’d kept that for more than 50 years. These things are now really precious to me, and I realized that some of the things you push away the hardest when you’re young are the things that you embrace the tightest when you get older.

On immortality and the good book

My dad now has a statue in the Capitol, representing Arkansas along with [civil rights hero] Daisy Bates of the Little Rock Nine. He would be prouder of that than any award he ever got, because that’s touching immortality. It was like an out-of-body experience at the unveiling, like, This isn’t part of normal life. But there was a feeling of sweet grief as well, because my son, Jake, said, “Once he’s in bronze, he’s really gone.” In my speech, I said, “This man was a living redemption story.” When his eyesight was failing, one of the great regrets of his life was that he couldn’t read anymore, because he loved his books so much. So I would read the Psalms to him every morning on the phone. He’d go, “Slow down, slow down,” because he really wanted to take in every word. Once, and I still feel terrible about this, I went up to the country and forgot to take a Bible with me. But I found a book of Shakespeare, and I said, “Dad, I don’t have the Psalms. I have Shakespeare.” And he went, “Shakespeare, huh? I’ll just wait.” [Laughs]

Finding the one

I dreamed about my husband John before I met him. And when I saw him, I knew he was the one. But I also thought, “My life is going to get so complicated,” because I was married to [singer-songwriter] Rodney Crowell, though he and I had already separated once and got back together. So I knew I was going to be with John but I didn’t know how to get there, and it was so painful. I’ve learned as I’ve grown older that you can’t make things happen, but you can put them into the machinery of the universe, and it can happen that way. So I cost myself a lot of grief and suffering. But when John hears me get too flowery about him, he starts to roll his eyes, like, “Oh, my God, please!” He’s a little more earthbound. You know, native New Yorker.

Fine-tuning parenting

Rodney and I raised four daughters [including Rodney’s daughter, Hannah, from his earlier marriage] and then John and I had a son. One of my really big life lessons is that the natural makeup of girls and boys is very different. My girls are all dramatic, and their feelings are out in the open, and everything is big. But Jake taught me to respect his emotional privacy. When he was little, I would want to know everything. And he very firmly, over time, let me know his boundaries. I still have a very powerful sense of privacy myself, so it taught me a lot, and it made me grow as a human being. Something else that I learned is that all my kids take unsolicited advice as criticism. So I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut, even if sometimes I have to bite my tongue.

It isn’t brain surgery — oh wait  ...

In the late ’90s, I had polyps on my vocal cords and couldn’t sing for a couple of years. And then I had debilitating headaches that led to brain surgery in 2007. Pain is a very lonely country, and at some point you just stop talking about it, because that further distances you from people. I remember the helplessness I felt and a kind of despair, like, Is this the rest of my life? But those kind of experiences — and the grief I suffered, the people I lost — gave me more compassion for others in ways that nothing else could have taught me.

I think of the tenacity of my grandmother Carrie Cash raising seven kids on a cotton farm. She gave birth to all of them at home. Jack, the child who died at the age of 14 [after a horrific accident with a table saw], was her hardest delivery. She was in labor for three days, and every day the doctor would come by in a horse and buggy and pull two aspirins out of his pocket. She said it was the same pocket in which he kept his fishing worms. [Laughs] I once said, “Grandma, how did you get through it?” She said, “Why, honey, you just endure it.”

On being 69

I’m turning 70 in May. And I’m nervous about it, in part because both my parents died at 71. And I don’t feel old, but there is no universe in which I can claim to be young anymore. My knees kill me a lot, and I get more tired. It’s clear to me that being on the road is a young person’s game, and I worry about my voice falling apart. I was talking to Elvis Costello about this, and he said he lies in bed and does the math. I do that, too. Can I make it until my grandchildren graduate from high school?

One thing that’s gotten easier with age is the part where you don’t give a damn what people think of you. It’s not gone, but it’s easier. Also, I often think when I’m singing “Blue Moon with Heartache,” which I wrote when I was 23 years old, that there will come a day when the person who wrote this song doesn’t sing it anymore. So I think, “Don’t hold back.”

The importance of coming together

I think about community a lot, because we need it more than ever, given the cultural narcissism that goes on, when it’s all about me, my house, what I want for my kids — not our kids, not our climate, our future. At the end of the show every night, I say, “We’ve created community in two hours. You can spread it out to your town, the rest of the country, the world.” Because people can think differently about everything else, and still meet in music they love. And I do think that every act of kindness and compassion has its own ripple. Every individual has power. Sometimes I see somebody on the street who looks horribly sad, and I say a little prayer for them as I pass by. We don’t have to be so scared of the other, because we are physically, as atoms, connected to each other. That’s not just a new age idea. It’s real. I just hope we can act like it.