“A great song lasts forever, right?” Rosanne Cash said on Wednesday, after dueting with her husband on Ode to Billie Joe at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown.
A great show has a long shelf life, too, and memories of this one should resonate for quite some time.
Few artists can glide so effortlessly among genres, or cover as much emotional terrain as Rosanne Cash.
For 90 minutes on Wednesday, the 67-year-old Grammy winning singer-songwriter and her superb five-piece band mourned, reflected, and rocked.
Country fans got Kevin Barry’s twangy lap-steel guitar lines, answered by rocking Telecaster licks from Cash’s husband, John Leventhal.
Matt Beck (keyboards), Zev Katz (bass) and Dan Rieser (drums) rounded out the ensemble.
Deftly, the group left plenty of sonic space for Cash’s evocative vocals and introspective lyrics.
She Remembers Everything, the title song from her 2018 album, might well describe Cash.
Her historical insights were a highlight of Ken Burns’ sprawling Country Music series.
And she is ever re-examining her own past, searching for meaning and redemption in stories of Civil War ancestors who fought on both sides; a complicated relationship with her iconic father, Johnny Cash; and marriages, children, love and loss.
The longtime New York resident has survived brain surgery and penned an acclaimed memoir. A few years ago, she began writing a musical version of the film Norma Rae.
In Money Road, Cash mines the jumble of emotions stirred by a journey through the Mississippi Delta, a place that gave us blues pioneer Robert Johnson, the Tallahatchie Bridge immortalized in Bobbie Gentry’s swampy Ode … and the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, which set the Civil Rights movement in motion.
The movement has a long way to go. Cash wrote The Killing Fields, about America’s ugly history of lynchings, after George Floyd’s killing by police in Minnesota last year.
Particle and Wave, a song exploring “the rainbow of suffering” we all experience, was inspired by a book about quantum physics, Cash told the audience.
Some of the evening’s most powerful moments were the quiet ones, with only Cash, Leventhal and his acoustic guitar sharing the stage.
Lefty Frizzel’s Long Black Veil made the list of 100 essential country songs that her father gave Cash when she was a teenager. It’s really a folk ballad…mournful and chilling on this November night.
Shifting gears, Cash and her crew got feet stomping with a rip-roaring rendition of Tennessee Flat Top Box, her dad’s 1961 hit about a boy’s dream of country stardom.
And she showed off her pop chops on the encore, Seven Year Ache, her breakthrough crossover hit from 1981.
Great songs are forever. Keep ’em coming, Rosanne.