Every Friday around 11 a.m. Central, it’s time for Classic Americana on Radio Heartland. We pull a special track from the archives or from deep in the shelves to spotlight a particular artist or song.

May 24 gets a lot of attention for being Bob Dylan’s birthday, but it’s also the birthday of another very important and highly accomplished artist: Rosanne Cash.

Born on May 24, 1955, Rosanne Cash is the first daughter of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto. Rosanne was born in Memphis and later moved to California with her parents and three sisters, and she grew up in Ventura County, north of Los Angeles.

After she graduated from high school, Rosanne Cash joined her father’s touring company, first working as a wardrobe assistant and later moving to an onstage role as a backing vocalist. Meanwhile, she continued to hone her chops as a songwriter, and in 1976, she and her father recorded a song together that she wrote, “Love Has Lost Again,” that appears on Johnny Cash’s album One Piece at a Time.

Rosanne Cash released her debut self-titled album in 1978, but it was in 1981 she made her commercial breakthrough with the album Seven Year Ache. The title track from that album went to No. 1 in the Billboard Country Chart, and it was also quite a crossover hit, peaking at No. 22 in the Billboard Hot 100. That’s the song we’ll listen to this week.

Of course, Rosanne Cash’s career continues to this day. She has been nominated for 15 Grammy Awards and has won four of them, most spectacularly in 2015, when she won three Grammy awards for Best Americana Album for The River & the Thread, Best American Roots Song with John Leventhal and Best American Roots Performance for "A Feather's Not A Bird." That same year, she was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2018, Rosanne Cash was awarded the Spirit of Americana/Free Speech Award at that year’s Americana Honors & Awards ceremony at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.

In addition to writing songs, Cash also pens stories, essays and books. Her work has been published in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Oxford American and other publications.

This summer, Rosanne Cash and her husband John Leventhal are touring the U.S., U.K. and Ireland, celebrating the re-release of Cash’s 1993 album, The Wheel, which Leventhal produced. The tour is called, appropriately, the Re-inventing the Wheel Tour.

Classic Americana Playlist

External Links

Rosanne Cash – official site