Rosanne Cash on Moving Forward by Confronting the Past

For Grammy Award–winning singer and songwriter Rosanne Cash, processing the past is a constant, endless journey. She’d been thinking about race and reparations long before the Movement for Black Lives gained momentum last year, as both racism and African-American ancestry exist in her family history rooted in the American South, where she was born to country music legend Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto, in 1955. Cash channeled her anguish into “The Killing Fields,” a haunting single that reckons with the United States’s legacy of lynchings, and “Crawl into the Promised Land,” a blistering yet optimistic response to the tumultuous events of 2020. Last month, she released both tracks on a seven-inch limited-edition vinyl, the sales from which will benefit the Arkansas Peace and Justice Memorial Movement, a nonprofit that raises awareness about the state’s history of racial injustice.  

Over the last four decades, Cash, who now lives in New York, has established herself as one of the rare voices in popular music who sings from the uncut perspective of a grown woman, fraught with opinions, mixed emotions, and battle scars. With each album she releases (there are 14 to date), she seems to gain a deeper understanding of herself. After earning 11 number one hits on Billboard’s country music chart during the 1980s, Cash released Interiors (1990), a dark, reflective album that marked a departure from her commercial work. While country radio stations and her label all but ignored the record, she’s embraced the honest, deeply personal approach used to make it as her modus operandi ever since. 

Her recent work is increasingly intimate: Cash confronts her Southern roots and grapples with her life as a wife, mother, and former country star in the 2014 album The River and The Thread; her 2018 album She Remembers Everything—released against the backdrop of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings and during the rise of the #MeToo movement—tackles the plight of women in America with songs about divorce, ingrained social hierarchies, and death, including a track about a boy killed by gun violence told from the viewpoint of his mother. She has also written articles for The Atlantic, The Nation, and The New York Times about subjects that matter to her, such as the need for country music artists to speak out in support of gun control. Eschewing any self-righteousness, these efforts, whether singing, songwriting, or prose, are her way of working through the complexities of life. “I have to keep showing up for the things I believe in,” she says, noting that she often feels like a fraud. “That’s part of being an artist. You come up against that, and you still show up, because you have to. The world needs it.” 

On this episode, Cash discusses what it means to reckon with history, talking with Andrew about her long-standing work as an activist, the healing power of music, and continually revisiting the past as a means for personal and artistic evolution.