Ghosts in the Family, the Helpful Sort, on Call
By NATE CHINEN
Published: October 11, 2009
During the final moments of her sold-out concert at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn on Friday night, Rosanne Cash stood beneath an image of her with her father, Johnny Cash. It was a photograph projected on a backdrop, and it faded soon enough to feel like a mirage. Given that Ms. Cash had just sung “Sweet Memories,” a country ballad of haunted remembrance, that apparitional suggestion was on the mark.
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Michael Nagle for The New York Times
Rosanne Cash performing at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.
In another sense, her father, who died in 2003, had been present throughout the show. Ms. Cash was inaugurating the 30th-anniversary season of St. Ann’s Warehouse with a program inspired by her new album, “The List” (Manhattan). It’s an object lesson in inheritance: in 1973, when Ms. Cash was a teenager on the road with her father, he drew up a list of 100 essential country songs she should seek out and absorb. The album features a dozen of them, performed with loving humility by Ms. Cash and a handful of guests, including Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello.
On Friday she worked without any outside help. (“Is Bruce here?” she quipped, looking around. “I think Bruce is playing a larger venue tonight,” she added, alluding to Giants Stadium.) She was more than capable of carrying the material herself, backed by a precise and flexible band. Her husband, John Leventhal, who produced the album, doubled as lead guitarist and musical director.
Ms. Cash has a voice both dark and sweet, with a gentle but reliable vibrato, and she knows how to convey the quiet sting of heartache. She made “Motherless Children,” a traditional song, feel hard and unsparing; her take on “Long Black Veil,” which she described as the album’s centerpiece, was chilling in its tranquillity. Before singing “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow,” a Carter Family song, she recalled how Helen Carter had helped her learn to play guitar, backstage over the course of a tour. (Ms. Cash is the stepdaughter of June Carter Cash, Helen’s sister.)
A serious songwriter herself, Ms. Cash took a well-considered detour at the concert’s midpoint, lighting on the title tracks of two acclaimed albums, “Seven Year Ache” (1981) and “The Wheel” (1993). But she allowed the shadow of her father to creep into even some of the originals, like “Radio Operator,” a rockabilly vignette inspired by the courtship of her parents. Written with Mr. Leventhal, it appears on her 2006 album, “Black Cadillac” (Capitol), which she presented at St. Ann’s Warehouse that year.
Another “Black Cadillac” selection, “The World Unseen,” came about as close as possible to illuminating the evening’s purpose. Over a bittersweet country-rock groove, Ms. Cash created an evocative scene: an empty room, a night sky, the distant sound of a guitar. “So I will look for you,” she sighed, “between the grooves of songs we sing.”
