Women's Biography, Country Music, Women's Biography, Music Biography

Composed: A Memoir

Name: Composed: A Memoir
Author: Rosanne Cash
ISBN: 9780143119395

by Rosanne Cash

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Overview

A candid and moving memoir from the critically acclaimed singer and songwriter
For thirty years as a musician, Rosanne Cash has enjoyed both critical and commercial success, releasing a series of albums that are as notable for their lyrical intelligence as for their musical excellence.

Now, in her memoir, Cash writes compellingly about her upbringing in Southern California as the child of country legend Johnny Cash, and of her relationships with her mother and her famous stepmother, June Carter Cash. In her account of her development as an artist she shares memories of a hilarious stint as a twenty-year-old working for Columbia Records in London, recording her own first album on a German label, working her way to success, her marriage to Rodney Crowell, a union that made them Nashville's premier couple, her relationship with the country music establishment, taking a new direction in her music and leaving Nashville to move to New York. As well as motherhood, dealing with the deaths of her parents, in part through music, the process of songwriting, and the fulfillment she has found with her current husband and musical collaborator, John Leventhal.

Cash has written an unconventional and compelling memoir that, in the tradition of M. F. K. Fisher's The Gastronomical Me and Frank Conroy's Stop-Time, is a series of linked pieces that combine to form a luminous and brilliant whole.

About the Author, Rosanne Cash

ROSANNE CASH has recorded fourteen albums charting twenty-one Top 40 country singles, 11 of which made it to # 1, and two gold records. She has received ten Grammy nominations—winning in 1985—and was nominated this year for “Sea of Heartbreak,” a duet with Bruce Springsteen on her current CD, The List. Cash achieved the highest chart position of her career with the debut of The List. The album, which Vanity Fair called “superb,” debuted in the Top 5 on the Country Chart, and entered The Billboard 200 at No. 22. Cash is the author of Bodies of Water and the children’s book Penelope Jane: A Fairy’s Tale. Her essays and fiction have been published in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and New York magazine. She lives in New York City with her husband and children.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

As the eldest daughter of legend Johnny Cash, Rosanne Cash could expect some special attention in music circles; but over the past thirty years, this talented singer has done far more than traipse respectfully in her father's footsteps. Versatile, eclectic, and outspoken, she made headlines in 1991 when she left the Nashville country music scene and moved to New York, signaling an important transition in her career. This refreshingly unconventional memoir enacts the changes in Rosanne's life by presenting episodes in linked vignettes. An artful addition to a talented songwriter and singer's repertoire.

Dwight Garner

Composed is a pointillistic memoir about growing up with and without her father, and about how she slid out from under his shadow to become a gifted artist in her own right…Ms. Cash is smart, likable and arrives with stories to tell.
—The New York Times

Jonathan Yardley

…wise, honest and utterly engaging…Rosanne Cash isn't just a writer and performer of songs, she's a writer, period…[a] beautiful and stirring book, of which one thing can be said for sure: Dad would have been proud of it, and her.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

This work is a rare treat, as Cash, firstborn to country music legend Johnny Cash, is not only a hereditary celebrity musician, having made scores of albums and #1 singles, but a terrific writer in her own right. Indeed, her memoir is an intensely reflective, carefully hewn chronicle of her coming-into-her-own as a writer. Born in 1955 to Johnny Cash's littleknown first wife, Vivian, just at the breakthrough of her father's music career with the hit "Cry, Cry, Cry," Cash describes herself as a "pudgy, withdrawn girl" already aware that she was "a counterfeit with a strange, hidden life." That included an anxious mother, three younger sisters, and a father who was frequently absent and erratic, due to his abuse at the time of amphetamines and barbiturates. From growing up in Southern California to visits to her father's house in Hendersonville, Tenn., Cash idolized her father and rarely questioned his authority, such as sending her off to work at CBS Records in London at age 20. At Vanderbilt University, she studied with Walter Sullivan; toyed with Method acting in L.A.; then recorded four demos in Munich, Germany, for Ariola Records, away from the scrutiny of comparison with her father. Cash depicts pensively her early delight in analogue recording and honing her writing craft. Despite an inordinate preponderance of funeral eulogies and some odd structuring toward the end, Cash's memoir sheds clear light on her talent and drive. (Aug.)

Kirkus Reviews

Beautifully written meditations on love, death, family and redemption from the celebrated songwriter. As the title alludes, this is very much a "portrait of the artist" memoir, in which the author shows not the slightest interest in dishing dirt or settling scores. A country hitmaker who has received considerable critical acclaim, Cash is also a previously published author of the short-story collection Bodies of Water (1996). Yet for some she will always be foremost the daughter of Johnny Cash. Here she leaves no question that the father she knew was quite different than the legend portrayed in the 2005 film, Walk the Line, which she calls "an egregious oversimplification of our family's private pain, writ large and Hollywood-style." By contrast, intimate vignettes writ small fill this account, which illuminates her close, complicated relationships with both her mother and her father-whom she remembers as "strange, dark, and intensely distracted" when she was the young daughter of a dissolving marriage, yet a pillar of support and inspiration through the majority of her life. The tension at the center of both her career and her memoir is her realization that "I wanted success, certainly, but I wanted it without the merciless exposure of a public life." Unflinchingly honest and incisive on matters she chooses to address, Cash provides little detail about her marriage to and divorce from country artist Rodney Crowell, whose collaboration with her proved pivotal in the careers of both. A generosity of spirit informs her portraits of friends from decades past, fellow musicians, husband and collaborator John Leventhal and the children who have enriched the life of their mother. Despite the spate of recent deaths she has mourned, and the traumas of brain surgery, miscarriage and a mysterious loss of voice that she recounts in these pages, warmth and humor characterize the resilience of the author's spirit. An excellent memoir that ends on an encouraging note: "More to come."Agent: Merrilee Heifetz/Writers House