Rosanne Cash: A unique voice with a powerful legacy

Rosanne Cash must walk the line. That Cash legacy is a powerful thing, a commodity that can be exploited.

"People appropriate my dad's feelings, and use that as a weapon against me," she says. "My activism angers people if they don't agree. 'Your father would be ashamed of you.' 'You're ruining the Cash family name.' "

Well, Johnny Cash was a very complex man. You sometimes have to wonder how easy a fit he ever was. An outspoken critic of the Vietnam War when many of his generation were gung-ho for it. Prison shows and comments on behalf of the incarcerated, in a country that's home to 25 percent of the world's prison population. A man of God, who took dark detours into drug use.

If anyone is likely to understand the Cash family name, it is not an outsider, but Johnny Cash's daughter. She plays Aug. 21 at Geneva's Smith Opera House. A thoughtful, literate Renaissance woman who this summer spoke before Congress on the hefty issue of fair artists' compensation in the Internet era. And she's worked on behalf of gun control. "My daughter was held up at gunpoint," she says, adding that the American Academy of Pediatrics "calls it a public-health crisis. More children have died from guns than measles."

But she also treasures her sewing circle of six women making dresses and embroidering old tablecloths, "because I'm around mostly men all the time." Among those women is Natalie Chanin, a dress designer from Alabama. "Her mission is DIY" — Do It Yourself — "hand-crafted, and these almost-lost female arts," Cash says. "I'm so used to constantly doing something in my head, I'd almost forgotten what it was like to do something with my hands."

That's the line that she walks. A DIY line. Her songs, not her father's. Yet her Cash legacy has never been heard as intensely as it has over her last three albums.

Black Cadillac, released in 2006, was steeped in mourning; her stepmother June Carter Cash, her father and then her mother all died as the songs were being written. It was followed by The List in 2009, a collection of duets whose songs were drawn from a list of essential country songs that her father compiled for his daughter one day while on the tour bus. Rosanne Cash broke into the music industry by doing the tour's laundry, in exchange for a scattering of opening slots. Anyone who thinks they know Johnny Cash and his feelings better than his daughter has probably not folded his underwear.

The List was widely embraced by fans and critics, and she still performs songs like "Long Black Veil." But she may not soon, if ever, return to her father's list. For a while, she even insisted she'd lost it. But now? "I still have it," she confesses. "I don't want to make it public." She doesn't want to create expectations that there will be The List 2.

Instead, she's given us the brilliant The River and the Thread, her songs. "There's so much relief in my heart," she says. "It was sort of discomforting that The List was so popular."

The River and the Thread has the same sense of place as a novel by one of the great southern writers, Eudora Welty, or William Gay. The opening image of "The Sunken Lands" is five cans of paint. "It was the first memory my father had, when he was 3 years old," Cash says. Five cans of paint for a new home in Arkansas, and a hard life to follow. The River and the Thread is a southern travelogue through her grandmother's and father's lives.

Yet, "It's not just past, it's forward as well," she says. "It's not the past as much as recognizing what's always been there. What I'm connected to, geographically and ancestrally. It goes two generations back, to when my family was cotton farmers. I wanted my modern, privileged kids to understand they were connected to this."

Writing The River and the Thread "was like some veils were lifted," she says. "I thought being from Memphis was anecdotal. But I realized it was a moveable feast, that I had taken it with me my whole life."

Cash is an accomplished writer in other ways, her essays most recently having appeared in National Geographic and The Oxford American. She's just finished one for a book on why people stay in New York City. "It's the energy, people working at the top of their game, access," says Cash, who lives in Chelsea. "Like John Lennon said, 'If I lived during Roman times, I would live in Rome.' "

She's written short stories and books as well. And in assembling 2010's Composed: A Memoir, she certainly had the material, from the Cash family to her marriage and divorce from Rodney Crowell to life-threatening brain surgery. It's well-known that Cash didn't like Walk the Line, the film about her father, but her book wasn't about setting straight that record.

"I don't have that impulse to correct anything," she says. "But I do feel like I had a right to tell my own story, before someone decided to appropriate that as well. Which they do anyway."

What's the craziest thing she's heard about herself?

"That I was a lesbian having an affair with my male manager."

Perhaps there's a songwriting idea in there for Kinky Friedman. "Writing a memoir is like unpacking boxes," Cash says. "You discover patterns that repeat, you put something to rest." But she found that exposing herself in a book is much different than writing songs. "With songs, I don't feel as much that I put something to rest as ... things exploded," she says. It's the spontaneous combustion she wants, and that doesn't always happen among the men who dominate her professional life. "The humor is different," Cash says. "There's a lot of gear talk with men. I have to tell them, 'If I have to hear about such and such wah-wah pedal once more, I'm gonna jump.' "

But in the midst of a sewing circle, Chanin said something useful. " 'You have to learn to love the thread,' " Cash says. It became a line in one of the new songs, "A Feather's Not a Bird," and part of the album title. "She was not speaking in metaphors," Cash says. "But I took it that way."

If you go

Who: Rosanne Cash.

When: 8 p.m. Aug. 21.

Where: Smith Opera House, 82 Seneca St., Geneva., Ontario County.

Tickets: $40, available at thesmith.org, (315) 781-5483, (866) 355-5483 and the Smith box office weekdays during business hours.