Scotland's People

Walking the line back in time

BORN in Memphis, raised in Nashville and California, Rosanne Cash is a living map of America's musical heartland. How could she be otherwise as the eldest daughter of the late Johnny Cash, that 100% proof, oak-matured, granite-carved icon of Americana?

But the princess royal of country music has always looked beyond her homeland too. An avowed Europhile, she spent a significant chunk of her adolescence in London, and has since nurtured an abiding love affair with Paris. Indeed, it is in a smart Parisian hotel that I catch up with her.

And yet, when she dreams, she dreams of Scotland. To be precise, her ancestral homeland in "the Kingdom of Fife, the most beautiful place on earth". A magical realm steeped in Cash family folklore.

"It's a long story," Cash smiles, loosening her scarf as steaming French coffee arrives on our table. Elegantly dressed in uptown boho chic, she could pass for a successful actress. She even looks a little like former Cheers star Kirstie Alley. At 50, she is handsome, sparky and opinionated.

Her Scottish roots go deeper than the usual tartan-clad tourist clichés too. In the late 1970s, Cash's famous father decided to research his ancestral history after a chance encounter with the former laird of Falkland, Major Michael Crichton-Stuart. Having traced his family tree back to 11th-century Fife, Cash Sr became so passionately interested in his ancestors he even filmed a TV special in Falkland Palace in 1981.

In 1998, Rosanne visited Fife for the first time and was shown around Falkland Palace by the major's son, Ninian Crichton-Stuart. Five years later, en route to a Hogmanay TV performance in Glasgow, she returned to Falkland in more sombre mood. Her father had died just weeks before, in September 2003. On one level, she admits, she secretly hoped to find his ghost there. And in a sense she did, when local shop owner Bob Beveridge showed her a snapshot of himself and Johnny Cash taken 22 years before.

"Bob owns the Old Violin Shop at the top of the high street in Falkland," says Cash. "He and I still write to each other. The streets are still named Cash - Easter Cash, Wester Cash, Cash Mill.

"It's really amazing. And they asked me to become a trustee of Falkland Palace."

There is a track on Cash's new album, Black Cadillac, which retraces this epic family journey from Fife to Massachusetts to Arkansas and beyond. It is called 'Good Intent', after the ship that carried the very first Cash from Scotland to New England in 1653.

"I knew William Cash came over on a brigantine called the Good Intent and landed in Salem, Massachusetts," she says. "So then I went on the internet and started researching what happened to the Good Intent. You go into the Salem town records and you can see William Cash was there, and that after his death the Good Intent still existed - several people owned it. Then the family went south to Virginia, Georgia, Arkansas. That's in the second verse of the song."

But the album's Celtic connection does not end with landfall at Salem. There are also nods to the foot-stomping hoedown sounds of the Scottish and Irish settlers who stamped their musical signature on the Appalachian Mountain country of the Deep South. In this way, one enduring branch of American folk music links directly back to Scotland.

"This record is about being part of a musical tradition," says Cash. "My interest in my physical ancestry is as great as my interest in my musical ancestry, and hopefully that comes out. It's like drawing a circle around myself. I can't tell you how much it moves me to be part of this musical ancestry too. That's very important to me."

Black Cadillac is full of such ghostly echoes. It was written and recorded over a dark two-year period during which Cash lost not just her father but also her stepmother, June Carter Cash, and her biological mother, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin.

Partly co-written and co-produced by her second husband, John Leventhal, the album contains many affirmative and tender moments, including two spine-tingling vocal samples of Johnny Cash taken from old family cassettes. But writing 12 songs in the shadow of three deaths must surely have been a gruelling experience.

"And some more," Cash nods. "My stepsister and my aunt also died in that same time period. But it is celebratory - I mean, there are moments of all the most horrible feelings of loss and despair, but also moments of real elegy to me, and real belief that the spirit survives. It's not just venting, because that sounds like you just sort of threw up on the paper. It helped me make sense of it, you know?"

During her Parisian stopover, Cash attended an art exhibition tracing the creative depiction of melancholy across the centuries. It gave her comfort that she was not alone in trying to address grief and pain through her music.

Black Cadillac is certainly not a depressive, self-pitying album. Cash insists it is more of a personal exploration of her own sense of loss than a solemn epitaph to her late parents. More of a catharsis than a wake. "It was all-consuming, I didn't have a choice," she says. "But I've been a writer for almost 30 years, so it was a natural place for all of this source material to go. I never had to force myself. I mean, given the choice, who would want to have to write about these things?"

One track on the album, 'Like Fugitives', stands out for its acerbic attack on cynical lawyers who feed on the dead and dying. "That is the most bitter song on the record," says Cash. "I don't live with those feelings all the time, but when I wrote that song I was very angry."

Cash confirms the song's implicit suggestion that there has been bitter legal wrangling over her father's estate. "Oh yes, there still is," she says. "Not amongst the children, it's just that my father led a complicated life and left a lot of properties. There was a lot to deal with. The estate's not settled yet."

One aspect of her father's legacy that clearly troubles Cash is James Mangold's acclaimed big-screen biography Walk the Line, which depicts Johnny Cash's 1966 divorce from Vivian Liberto and stormy second marriage to singer June Carter Cash. The film has been a critical smash, with co-stars Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon tipped for Academy Awards.

Johnny and June Carter Cash gave the project their blessing before their deaths in 2003. All the same, Rosanne Cash's younger sister Kathy has slammed Walk the Line for portraying their mother Vivian as a "mad little psycho" who tried to stifle Cash's musical ambitions. Cash herself seems reluctant to openly attack the picture, but admits it brings up troubling memories.

"It's not for me and my sisters, this movie, it's for other people," she says. "This is not reality, this is not my life. The actors are very good, it's a monumental version of a story that was very complex, but the themes are obviously painful to me. It's my childhood."

As a defence mechanism, Rosanne draws a clear distinction between the iconic, public Johnny Cash and the private man she knew as her father.

"The mythical image of him is not something I am interested in participating in," she says. "I have my memories of my dad, the world will always have his body of work, and for me that's enough. But to now start a myth-making machine around him? I'm so not interested. And neither was he - he was a working artist. Believe me, people try to get me to participate in the myth-making machine all the time."

There have clearly been times in the past when Rosanne's famous name has been a weight around her neck. As a child she was teased by schoolfriends over her father's pill-popping, stage-wrecking antics. Later, as a professional musician, her songs were frequently held up for unfair comparison with his.

But nowadays, she feels more blessed than cursed by the Cash name. "It's all a blessing," she says. "I don't consider it a burden. The public can be burdensome sometimes in how they want to intrude or co-opt, but I'm very good at keeping the circle closed around myself. I've learned that. I'm good at keeping the boundaries"

After her parents divorced in 1966, Cash and her two sisters were raised by their mother in Southern California. Fortunately, the split was relatively free of rancour, and her father remained a consistent presence and guiding spirit in her life.

"Oh yes, my father came to my high school graduation and went to the dinner with us," she says. "My parents would always be at family events with each other. They were very cordial and kind to each other. My mother would never have said a bad thing about my father in her life, ever."

Born into a strictly religious Italian family, Vivian Liberto attempted to raise her daughters as good Catholics, but inevitably came up against the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. Hitting her teens at the height of the flower power era, Cash began drinking at 13 and taking drugs at 14. As strong-willed and stubborn as her father, she became the classic Catholic schoolgirl rebel.

Naturally, her mother was not pleased when she left home to tour with Johnny Cash's band on the day after her high school graduation at the tender age of 18. "She was very worried," Cash says. "She thought, 'Oh, my daughter's going to do drugs, she's going to get divorced' - all true! Ha ha!"

There was no special treatment for daddy's girl on the road, and Cash initially worked as a general backstage dogsbody. To earn her stripes as a backing singer, her father gave her 100 standard country songs to learn in short order. Thus the seeds were sown for her budding ambitions to become a songwriter in her own right.

In the meantime, she spent six months working as a "country music expert" in the London office of her father's record label, CBS. It was, she concedes, a shameless piece of nepotism. Sometimes having a famous family name can work in your favour.

"I had my 21st birthday in London," Cash recalls with a smile. "It was the punk era, so it was fantastic. The music was great. I was a very shy, retiring girl, but I went to see a lot of bands.

"It was a good six-month sojourn, and I think every American should do that, spend six months outside of the United States. Because, for the rest of your life, it gives you a wider perspective on your homeland."

Signed to the Nashville arm of CBS Records in 1978, Rosanne became one of the rising stars of the New Country generation, who specialised in stripping away the syrupy kitsch from American roots music and reworking it in a modern context. Styled and packaged like Madonna or Cyndi Lauper, she scored an impressive 11 number one singles in the country charts and won a Grammy Award.

In 1979, Rosanne married fellow musician Rodney Crowell, who produced most of her early albums. Before long they had three young daughters - and a raging shared drug problem. They even moved to Nashville in 1981 to escape the cocaine chic of Los Angeles, but the drug addiction persisted. "That's an interesting topic which would require a whole other interview," says Cash. "After a while it stopped being recreational and became part of my personality. It stunts your emotional growth." Finally, in 1984, she checked herself into rehab in Atlanta. She has been drug-free ever since. "It's not even part of my radar now," she says.

Cash's relationship with Nashville, and with Crowell, disintegrated in the early 1990s. She now lives in New York City with John Leventhal. Almost 30 years after her debut release, she seems slightly baffled that she was ever labelled a country artist at all.

"Certainly not in comparison to what passes for country music today," she says. "But my sister and brother still live in Nashville, and two of my children are living there. I go down to see my kids maybe three times a year."

For various reasons, Cash's musical output has slowed in recent years. A polyp on her vocal cords silenced her for much of the last decade. She took time out to raise her youngest son, Jake, who is now six. Meanwhile, she busied herself writing short stories and joining political causes. Like her father, she fiercely opposed the invasion of Iraq, campaigning for Musicians United to Win Without War.

"I just hated how they tried to link 9/11 with the invasion of Iraq," says Cash, who witnessed the Twin Towers attack first hand from her daughter's school barely 10 blocks away. "I thought it was morally reprehensible, and I still do. Should we pull out of Iraq? Absolutely, without question. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe there has to be a timetable for it, but it has to happen."

Raised by famously liberal parents, Cash campaigned for the radical Democrat presidential hopeful George McGovern before she was even old enough to vote. Like her famously outspoken father, she is a patriotic American with progressive views.

"Right-wingers and Republicans assumed that, because my dad was a great American, he was on their side," she says. "Everyone wanted to claim him. But he was an individual; he never aligned himself with a party or a line."

Johnny Cash's eldest daughter turned 50 on May 24 last year, the very day her mother died. It was the end of the saddest, darkest chapter in her life so far. And yet, she insists, she has never been happier than she is now.

"Absolutely, no question," she says. "Why am I happier? Because I love my work, love my family, love where I live. I feel incredibly blessed, so lucky that I get to do this with my life. That I have five children. That I have a really happy, stable marriage, you know? What else could I possibly want?"

Rosanne cannot envisage living anywhere but New York City now. She has found her spiritual home. But if she ever feels an overwhelming urge to complete the circle by reversing the Atlantic crossing of her distant ancestors, one thing is clear: she will always be welcome in the Kingdom of Fife, the most beautiful place on earth.

Black Cadillac is released on January 29; Walk the Line is released on February 3

This article: http://heritage.scotsman.com/people.cfm?id=66542006

Last updated: 15-Jan-06 01:18 BST