Cash - Composed: a memoir

Table of Contents

Bodies of Water
Penelope Jane: A Fairys Tale
Songs Without Rhyme (editor)

RECORD ALBUMS

Rosanne Cash (Ariola)
Right or Wrong (Columbia)
Seven Year Ache (Columbia)
Somewhere in the Stars (Columbia)
Rhythm and Romance (Columbia)
Kings Record Shop (Columbia)
Hits 1979-1989 (Columbia)
Interiors (Columbia)
The Wheel (Columbia)
Retrospective (Columbia)
Ten Song Demo (Capitol)
Rules of Travel (Capitol)
Black Cadillac (Capitol)
The List (Manhattan)

INTRODUCTION

For my entire life I have been trying to give voice to the rhythms and words that underscore, propel, and inform me. Because my peripheral vision is more acute than my direct powers of observation, and my love of an A-minor chord is more charged and refined than my understanding of my own psyche, I have often attempted to explain my experiences to myself through songs: by writing them, singing them, listening to them, deconstructing them, and letting them fill me like food and water. I have charted my life through not only the songs Ive composed, but the songs Ive discovered, the songs that have been given to me, the songs that are a part of my legacy and ancestry. Through them Ive often found meaning, and relief, while at other times Ive failed to recognize or understand a rhythm or a theme until it became urgent or ingrained and I finally came across a song that captured the experience.

My life has been circumscribed by music. I have learned more from songs than I ever did from any teacher in school. They are interwoven and have flowed through the most important relationships in my lifewith my parents, my husband, and my children. Songs have unfolded in my living room and under the spotlight. For me music has always involved journeys, both literal and metaphoric. Sometimes I took the journey first and found the song waiting at the destination. Some songs have led me to true love. Occasionally a song has been only a faint whisper at the periphery of a larger event, though it was always present. Many of my own songs have taken the long way around, as I circled the edges of an experience, examining the placement of the furniture or the color of the room, the backbeat and the verses, the chord progression and the melody, constantly roaming and constantly curious.

I dream of songs. I dream they fall down through the centuries, from my distant ancestors, and come to me. I dream of lullabies and sea shanties and keening cries and rhythms and stories and back-beats. I dream of the Summer of Love and the British Invasion and the cries of Appalachia and the sound and soul of the Mississippi Delta.

I have resisted, so many times, correcting public misperceptions about me and my lifeout of pride, out of pain, or out of a longing for privacy. But I relish the opportunity to write about my life in this booknot to set any record straight, but to extend the poetry, and to find the more subtle melodies and themes in a life that on reflection seems much longer than the years I have lived. Documenting ones life in the midst of living it is a strange pursuit. I have always wanted to live as a beginner, and writing a memoir in some ways defies that notion, but I consider this book as a first installment in an ongoing story. I dont know why some memories have persisted while others have faded, but I trust tenacity, so those are the memories I have written about. This is not a chronological fact-check of my life, and I am sure my sisters or my husband or my children remember some of these events very differently. I have abandoned my reliance on the external facts to support an individual truth, and everyone is entitled to his or her own.

This is mine: So far, so good. More to come. More is always to come.

I was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on May 24, 1955, a month before my dads first single, Cry, Cry, Cry, was released on Sun Records. My mother had only two dresses that fit her in late pregnancy, she told me, and in her final month, during the most summerlike of the sultry late spring days in East Memphis, she would sit on the steps of the front porch and eat an entire washbasin of cherry tomatoes. It was her one craving. On the afternoon of May 24, my mother went to her regular appointment with her obstetrician, who examined her and told her to go straight to the hospital. This baby is going to be born today, he said. I was born after only four hours of labor, at eight oclock that evening. My mother later told me that the loneliest she had ever felt was when she was wheeled through the double doors of the hospital maternity ward to give birth and looked back to see my dad standing forlornly in the waiting room. He paced and smoked there for the next four hours while she labored alone and chewed on a wet washcloth when the pains overtook her; she always spoke with great resentment about the fact that she was given a damp washcloth to suck and then left alone in a hospital room. She was awake for the entire four hours of labor and given nothing for pain, and then put to sleep for the actual birth. It all sounded like a mean-spirited, medieval exercise in physical endurance and emotional isolation. Her accounts of it were so cinematic and full of emotion that I grew up terrified of the prospect of childbirth. I had very few fantasies about having children or being a mother, because I could not get past the specter of childbirth, which seemed almost a horrible end in itself, with something only vague and indefinable on the other side of it. The fact that I eventually did bear four children, delivered both naturally and with pain medication, never really lessened my fear.

When my mother went back for her six-week checkup after my birth, the doctor informed her that she was pregnant again. My sister Kathy was born ten months and twenty-three days after me. Kathy was a fragile child who had mysterious illnesses and the worst versions of every childhood disease, and I have always felt guilty that I may have taken all the nutrients out of my mothers body when I inhabited her womb, just before Kathys arrival there.

Two years after Kathys birth, my sister Cindy was born, and soon after that we moved from Memphis to Southern California. My sister Tara was born shortly after we settled in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley. My mothers fourth pregnancy and delivery were difficult for her. She carried Tara for ten months and endured a hard sixteen-hour labor. After the birth of her fourth daughter, my mother, in tears, informed my father that she was finished with childbearing, even though she had initially said she wanted six children. My father agreed, although he harbored a secret desire for a son, which he finally got when I was fifteen and he was married to June, not my mother.

My parents bought Johnny Carsons house on Hayvenhurst Avenue in Encino. My most vivid memory of the three years we lived there was of the day a film crew showed up in our living room to tape a show called Heres Hollywood. My mother was extremely nervous, and we children were made to dress up in poufy dresses, white ankle socks, and black patent leather shoes, with our hair pulled tightly back into bows. We had to sit absolutely still and silent on the sofa next to my parents while the camera was trained on us and the interviewer spoke to them. Then we were sent outside while Mom and Dad were interviewed alone. The whole experience was profoundly unsettling to me. It may have been the first time that I registeredat age fivehow it felt to be truly angry. I didnt like how my mother changed for the camera, showing only a social veneer that didnt represent her true self at all, and I didnt like it that my dad had even allowed them in our house. I recognized the falsity, and silently rebelled against the intrusion. Thus began a lifelong wariness of journalists.