Rosanne Cash talks about growing up as the child of country legend Johnny Cash, and of her relationships with her mother and her famous stepmother: June Carter Cash. Her memoir Composed is her account of her artistic development, recording her first album, and working her way to success. She talks about her marriages, the country music establishment, taking a new direction in her music, leaving Nashville to move to New York, and her process of songwriting.

"At the heart of all real country music lies family, lies a devotion to exploring the bonds of blood ties, both in performance and in songwriting," Rosanne Cash writes in her new memoir, "Composed." Those themes of bonds of family and blood ties run deep in the book, just as they do in her music.

CHAPTER ONE

I was born in Memphis, Tennessee on May 24, 1955, a month before my dad’s first record, “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 o’clock that evening.  My mother later told me that the loneliest feeling 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 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. 

 

Rosanne Cash talks about growing up as the child of country legend Johnny Cash, and of her relationships with her mother and her famous stepmother: June Carter Cash. Her memoir Composed is her account of her artistic development, recording her first album, and working her way to success. She talks about her marriages, the country music establishment, taking a new direction in her music, leaving Nashville to move to New York, and her process of songwriting.

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From Rosanne Cash’s new album The List (EMI).

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Rosanne Cash Performs her father’s song "Forty Shades of Green" in Studio 360, from his 1963 album Ring of Fire.