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The eldest child of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto, Rosanne Cash was born in Memphis, Tennessee on May 24, 1955. After her parents separated she and her three sisters grew up in California.

At 18 she joined The Johnny Cash Show, further absorbing his influence along with that of his legendary touring show partners Carl Perkins and the Carter Family. The Carter Family's June Carter later became Rosanne's stepmother when she married Cash in 1968.

Rosanne went on to study drama at Nashville's Vanderbilt University and at the Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles before focusing on her music. In the 30 years since she has released 12 albums including Right or Wrong, Seven Year Ache,Somewhere in the Stars, Rhythm and Romance, King's Record Shop, Interiors, The Wheel, 10 Song Demo, Rules of Travel, Black Cadillac, and most recently, The List. She has also recorded 11 No. 1 singles, blurring the genres of country, rock, roots and pop. In 1985 she won the Grammy Award for Best Country Vocal Performance, Female, for her hit "I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me," and has received nine other nominations.

Her highly personal yet universally appealing writing style is also manifest in her parallel prose career. Rosanne published a collection of short stories, Bodies of Water, in 1995, and a children's book, Penelope Jane: A Fairy's Tale, in 2000. Composed, her long-awaited memoir, was published in 2010. Additionally, her essays and fiction have appeared in various collections and publications, including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Time Magazine, The Oxford American and New York Magazine.

The mother of five children, Rosanne lives in New York City with her husband, producer and guitarist John Leventhal, and her youngest child.

For more:  Rosanne's Wikipedia entry

Links

rosannecash.com



Following

October 15, 2009
One more Scottish connection:  this is a photo of me with Ninian Crichton-Stuart, the hereditary keeper of Falkland Palace in Falkland, Fife, Scotland.  Ninian’s father, Michael Crichton-Stuart, who was the hereditary keeper before him, met my father on an airplane in the 1970’s, and that is how my father discovered our Scottish ancestry, through Michael’s information about our family name, and how it was scattered in so many places in this area.  It led my father to get our genealogy researched back to the 11th century.  In the early 1990’s, I went to Falkland Palace, and I met Ninian for the first time, and he gave me and my husband a tour of the Palace, and recounted the filming of a Christmas television special my dad did at Falkland in the early 1980’s.  This picture was taken in 2006, after both our father’s had passed away, and after Ninian and I had begun discussions about how I might serve him at the Falkland Trust, which maintains the grounds of the Palace and estate.  I began by signing a guitar for him to auction off to help raise money. It’s so strange how a chance encounter on an airplane between our fathers led to this moment over thirty years later, and how our relationship continues, because of our deep love for this area of Fife and the Falkland Palace and estate, the very spot my family ancestry began, and the place entrusted to Ninian through generations of loyal service as keeper of the Palace.

One more Scottish connection:  this is a photo of me with Ninian Crichton-Stuart, the hereditary keeper of Falkland Palace in Falkland, Fife, Scotland.  Ninian’s father, Michael Crichton-Stuart, who was the hereditary keeper before him, met my father on an airplane in the 1970’s, and that is how my father discovered our Scottish ancestry, through Michael’s information about our family name, and how it was scattered in so many places in this area.  It led my father to get our genealogy researched back to the 11th century.  In the early 1990’s, I went to Falkland Palace, and I met Ninian for the first time, and he gave me and my husband a tour of the Palace, and recounted the filming of a Christmas television special my dad did at Falkland in the early 1980’s.  This picture was taken in 2006, after both our father’s had passed away, and after Ninian and I had begun discussions about how I might serve him at the Falkland Trust, which maintains the grounds of the Palace and estate.  I began by signing a guitar for him to auction off to help raise money.

It’s so strange how a chance encounter on an airplane between our fathers led to this moment over thirty years later, and how our relationship continues, because of our deep love for this area of Fife and the Falkland Palace and estate, the very spot my family ancestry began, and the place entrusted to Ninian through generations of loyal service as keeper of the Palace.

October 2, 2009

The first photo is a monument to the legendary Black Watch regiment, in Aberfeldy, Scotland.  My ancestry on my father’s side begins in Scotland, as part of the Clan McDonald, not too far from Aberfeldy, in what is lovingly called The Kingdom of Fife.  I visited Aberfeldy in February, 2009, for the first time.  I had been to Fife and the surrounding area many times, as well as Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, but never to this part of Perthshire.  I filmed a couple of episodes of “Transatlantic Sessions” at a beautiful estate, inside an ancient barn, near Aberfeldy, in Fortingall.

The second photo is of the filming in the barn, with my friends and great musicians Phil Cunningham, Aly Bain, Jerry Douglas and several other superb musicians.  I found out something very strange during the filming.  In the year 1692,  there was a bloody massacre called the Massacre of Glencoe,  in which the men from the Campbell clan murdered 38 unarmed McDonalds in one horrible night.  I found out that the very estate where we were filming “Transatlantic Sessions” was where the plan for the massacre hatched, and just over a little hill from the place where

38 unarmed McDonalds were killed in this infamous raid, which is still memorialized every year in Scotland. I looked around the barn where we were playing, which was in existence during the massacre, and I walked the very grounds where the massacre was put in motion.  I thought about the fact that I, with my Clan McDonald ancestry, was making music with men with Campbell ancestry, on a night over three hundred years after those distant ancestors met in mortal combat, in the very same spot.  It was a transcendent moment, and a very potent reminder that music is the great connector. No matter how profound our differences, even those that are part of our DNA, even those differences that somehow merit memorials and rituals and centuries of bitterness, can be dissolved very quickly with an A minor chord, a piano, a guitar and a violin.  This knowledge, and the music, is perhaps the most important thing I have received as a legacy.

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