The Musical Box: ‘In performance: Rosanne Cash’
Rosanne Cash. Photo by Pamela Springsteen.
The following is via Walter Tunis at The Musical Box
Early into a Saturday evening performance at Danville’s Norton Center for the Arts full of wonderful intimacy and detail, Rosanne Cash sang of being grounded. Not grounded as in a punishment of immobility, but as a reflection that briefly brushed aside fancy and fantasy to view a life lived in more pragmatic terms.
“If I had wings I’d cut them down,” Cash sang during “Dreams Are Not My Home,” the evening’s lone selection from her 2006 album Black Cadillac. “Live without these dreams so I could learn to love the ground.”
It was a lovely moment, one of many illuminated with a level of clarity both in the performance and in a pristine sound mix that made every syllable of each verse glow. Riding around the confessional singing, perhaps ironically, was the guitarwork of Cash’s longtime husband and collaborator John Leventhal, who peppered the tune with the very sense of flight its lyrics quietly rebelled against.
The 90-minute show was a retrospective in terms of repertoire. Cover tunes, especially those from 2006’s The List, reached back nearly a century (a sterling take on “Bury Me Beneath the Weeping Willow”) while original material from 1993’s The Wheel and 2014’s The River and the Thread shifted from personal renewal to visions of a Southern heritage both sobering and unsettled. There were also faithful nods to Cash’s commercial country past (“Blue Moon with Heartache,” “Seven Year Ache”) and a cheerfully stunning finale nod to her fabled father, Johnny Cash.
Much of the show’s gentle magic, though, came from how all the cumulative career history played out onstage. As mentioned, Cash’s vocals, at age 69, maintained a remarkable clarity of tone dressed in conversational calm. Factor in Leventhal’s playing – a wild, wiry and immensely flexible orchestral component oozing with the blues – and a wonderful balance of restlessness and grace emerged. When the material grew dark, which it did regularly, that combination became even more luminous.
Among the wonderful examples were an unrecorded cover of the Bobbie Gentry classic “Ode to Billie Joe” that further enhanced the song’s haunted backdrop when Cash and Leventhal slowed the final verse and wrapped it in the blues. Same deal for another country ghost story, the immortal “Long Black Veil.” Then there was the show-opening “Modern Blue,” (the first of three songs from The River and the Thread) where the musical and narrative wistfulness expanded beyond Southern roots (“It’s a big wild world with a million shades of modern blue”).
The show made one notable leap from the blue lands when Cash and Leventhal went Brit Pop and uncorked a merry version of the 1966 Beatles gem “And Your Bird Can Sing,” a work mirroring an influence far removed the program’s predominantly Americana/country stride. “But one equally important,” Cash said during the introduction.
In what appeared to be an impromptu choice for an encore (Leventhal remarked, “She’s making me work”), Cash turned to the music of her legendary father – specifically, Johnny Cash’s 1961 saga of a shy South Texas guitar hero, “Tennessee Flat-Top Box.” Daughter Rosanne turned it into a No. 1 country hit in 1988.
The younger Cash delivered the song as if the Norton Center was populated by eager students. She held out her hands, index fingers upward, as if motioning for silence, at the start of each verse before her vocals modestly revealed a storytelling display as giddy as it was comforting – a subtle, but inspirational bit of channeling between two generations of Cash.