Rosanne Cash -Composed: A Memoir

By Rosanne Cash

Rosanne Cash is the eldest of four daughters of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto. She was born to the impoverished young couple in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1955, one month before the release of her father’s first single, “Cry, Cry, Cry.” They moved to Los Angeles several years later, after Johnny’s music made him a household name and shortly before the birth of the fourth Cash daughter. Composed: A Memoir provides Rosanne’s impressions of growing up in the Cash household and the evolution of her own career. (She scored 11 number-one Billboard hits in the 1980s, including “Seven Year Ache” and “Tennessee Flat Top Box.”)

Rosanne recalls a family interview in 1960, when a television film crew came to the house, making her mother extremely nervous. The four little girls were dressed in poufy dresses and black patent leather shoes and told to sit quietly on the sofa, next to their parents, while the camera recorded the interview. “The whole experience was profoundly unsettling to me,” Rosanne writes. “It may have been the first time that I registered–at age five–how it felt to be truly angry. I didn’t 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 life-long wariness of journalists.”

The Cash family then moved northwest of Los Angeles, close to Ventura, where the girls grew up and their parents’ marriage fell apart. Rosanne was 12 when Johnny and Vivian divorced and both immediately remarried. The girls then spent summers in Nashville, at Johnny’s house on Old Hickory Lake. “He was physically a wreck that first summer, gaunt and hollow eyed, but by the next one he was whole and healthy and gaining weight,” Rosanne recalls. The change in her drug-addicted father resulted from the influence of his new wife, June Carter Cash.

After high school graduation, Rosanne toured with The Johnny Cash Show for two and a half years. Feeling the need for independence, she moved to London at age 20. Johnny arranged a job for her at his label, CBS Records. She acknowledges her position as “Johnny Cash’s kid on a lark in London” and marvels at her acceptance there. Referring to her crush on a co-worker, she writes, “I spent so much time in his office that it’s hard to believe I didn’t get him fired. I myself could not be fired, as I did not have a real job.”

Composed: A Memoir discusses Rosanne’s emotions and experiences, with facts and chronology used only as supporting material. She talks about coming to terms with the issues in her life–celebrity, divorce, parenting, brain tumor, songwriting, singing, and so forth. Her artistic view of life comes through in moments such as when she mentions sister Kathy, born ten months after Rosanne and often ill during childhood: “I have always felt guilty that I may have taken all the nutrients out of my mother’s body when I inhabited her womb.”

Rodney Crowell is discussed mostly in context of being her record producer and a fellow artist. Rosanne describes becoming attracted to him, mentions his wife and baby, and says she married him. Her role in the break-up of his marriage and why he obtained custody of his daughter go unexplained.

They divorced after 13 years of marriage. She says they “bonded in exhilarating creative and philosophical exploration” but “were both fairly untethered to anything earthbound.” Neither knew where to find a post office or whether they owned a key to their house. “Ultimately,” she writes, “we both had to belatedly grow up, and we recognized that we couldn’t do it together. We had four daughters, and it was excruciating for them, and for us, to split.”

Readers familiar with the lives in the Cash circle will appreciate the insider information about this famous family. Rosanne includes opinions and attitudes of her parents and step-mother on several topics. Given her reticence to say anything negative in Composed: A Memoir, she might not have spoken so freely if they were still alive. She talks about their deaths, describes the outfits she wore to their funerals, and reproduces the three eulogies she gave.

Her sense of humor comes through, also. She describes her guitar–a gift from her father–being stolen on a 1979 flight to Hawaii. “Somewhere, someone has my guitar and knows damn well it belongs to me,” Rosanne writes. She holds “an illogical but certain belief” it will be returned before her death, and says, “If my dad, from his perch in the other world, wanted to do something really great for me, he might hasten its return. I’m sure he knows where it is by now.”

In 1995, Rosanne married again, this time to record producer John Leventhal. They have a son together and are continuing her music career. She sounds happy. Composed: A Memoir ends optimistically with, “More to come.”