When I was 18, I was on the road with my dad. One day, we were sitting in the tour bus, talking about songs, and he mentioned a song, and I said, "I don’t know that one." He mentioned another one, and I said, "I don’t know that one, either." Then he started to get alarmed, so he spent the rest of the day making a list on a legal pad, and at the top he put "100 Essential Country Songs." And he handed it to me and he said, "This is your education."
The genesis of Rosanne Cash's remarkable new album, The List, dates back to that day in 1973—to a time before her eleven previous albums, her 1985 Grammy and numerous additional nominations, her twenty-one Top 40 country singles. She had just graduated high school and was starting to write songs of her own when her father, the incomparable Johnny Cash, discovered some gaps in her knowledge of American roots music.
"I think he was alarmed that I might miss something essential about who he was and who I was," says Cash. "He had a deeply intuitive understanding and overview of every critical juncture in Southern music—Appalachian songs, early folk songs, Delta blues, Southern gospel, right up to modern country music."
A handful of truly special guests join her for some of the recordings: Bruce Springsteen ("Sea of Heartbreak"), Elvis Costello ("Heartaches by the Number"), Wilco's Jeff Tweedy ("Long Black Veil"), and Rufus Wainwright (Merle Haggard's "Silver Wings"). — a reflective song cycle about the loss of her father; her mother, Vivian Liberto; and her stepmother, June Carter Cash. She had held on to the original copy of the List for all those years, but had never thought to do anything with it. show, I had recently found the List again, so I wrote about it. And virtually every show, people started asking me. ‘Where’s the List? What about that List?’" , a break from that project's emotional intensity. On tour in Europe, she tentatively added a few songs from the List into her set.
Three dozen years later, Cash has selected twelve songs from the syllabus presented to her by her father and recorded her first album of covers. Still, she remains a songwriter to her core, so she approached each composition—from Jimmie Rodgers' "Miss the Mississippi and You" to Bob Dylan's "Girl from the North Country"—in search of its particular essence.
The result is a glorious range of sounds and moods, as rich and complex as such Cash masterworks as Seven Year Ache, Interiors, and Rules of Travel.
The idea for The List came about while Cash was on tour promoting her 2006 studio album, the widely acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Black Cadillac
'It just didn’t interest me," she says. "I learned all the songs, but then I set on my own course as a songwriter, and set about separating myself from my parents, as you do when you’re young. When I was writing the narratives for the Black Cadillac.
Still, she resisted the idea of recording the classic songs herself. Eventually, though, Cash decided that she needed a change after Black Cadillac
The response was immediate. "People were eating it up, like they were hungry for these songs," she says. "And the import started to sink in—that this was about me and my dad, but it was also about a cultural legacy. These songs are as important as the Civil War to who we are as Americans. Something clicked and I entered it full-bodied then, with all my heart."
