Rosanne Cash – The List

Rosanne Cash’s The List comes with its own back story, one that nearly guarantees a very high level of quality, to say nothing of a built-in sense of prestige. As the story goes, a young Cash was handed a list of the hundred greatest songs ever written, by none other than her esteemed father; the songs contained therein provided the foundation for young Rose’s musical education, and now, years later, she’s whittled them down to a dozen favorites and recorded them for an album that says as much about her as it does the history of American popular song.

Now, this is a promising premise for a record, for a couple of reasons. For one, these songs are all hand-picked by Johnny Cash—obviously, a man who knew a good song when he heard one—and, because of the formative position they’ve played in the singer’s life, they’re obviously songs that she’s going to tackle with love and care. But even more obviously, these are some of the greatest songs ever written—songs so sturdily-constructed and time-tested, it seems nearly impossible that they could ever make for anything less than a very fine LP.

But the thing that makes The List a fairly masterful recording has, to some extent, been lost amidst the telling and re-telling of its back story. Plenty of music blogs and magazines have picked up on the story, of course—this is the Cash dynasty we’re talking about, after all—but many of them have claimed that these songs were presented to young Rosanne as some of the greatest country songs ever written; how Johnny characterized them, of course, is lost to history, but to call The List a collection of country songs it not entirely true; for the most part, these songs hail from an era of American song when genre distinctions were blurry, a mere matter of inflection in the singer’s voice being the only thing that distinguished country from, say, jazz or blues.

That spirit is very much reflected in this recording, which is a country album in spirit but not always a country album in its form: Certainly, there’s ample heartache and crying—to say nothing of murder and betrayal—to make this one a fine soundtrack to a night at the honky tonk, but the music itself is more diverse and less easy to pin down than one might suspect. For one thing, though there are songs here by Hank Williams and Merle Haggard, there are also tunes by Bob Dylan and Gary Davis—not exactly a couple of honky tonkers. And as far as the performances, Cash turns in a slinky blues reading of Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On,” a reverential, gospel-tinged take on “500 Miles,” and a swaying, soulful version of “She’s Got You,” where she channels the spirit of Patsy Cline without sounding like she’s doing an imitation.

By the way, there are some special guests on the album: An album with ace material and a winsome back story like this one doesn’t exactly need a star-studded roster to generate interest, but Cash nevertheless enlists famous friends Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Rufus Wainwright, and Jeff Tweedy to sing with her on a few of these songs. But these singers clearly share Cash’s high esteem for this material; rather than ham it up or hog the spotlight, they each turn in uncharacteristically restrained performances, The Boss adopting a Tunnel of Love-era croon instead of his full-throated roar and Costello affecting a very passable country twang for his background harmonies.

Those are fitting flourishes for an album that is nothing if not tasteful: There is truly nothing flamboyant or overly-adorned about this very classy album, which is in many ways a very different record from Cash’s previous album, Black Cadillac. Where that album was relatively glossy, this one is graceful, elegant, and restrained, to the point that it initially seems a bit sleepy, but reveals its beauty over time: These are simple arrangements, performed with small-group chemistry and emotional directness, keeping the emphasis always on the songs. The production slyly draws our attention to the eclecticism of the material—listen to the shuffling percussion on “I’m Movin’ On,” or how a harmonica break on Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” subtly reminds us of just how country the song really is—and only occasionally departs from its small, organic aesthetic; but when it does, as on the swelling string-and-vocal backdrop of “Silver Wings,” the results are majestic.

But Cash doesn’t add to these songs any more than she needs to, which, of course, isn’t much at all: These are all wonderful songs, teeming with life and rich in love and despair, fidelity and loneliness. They’re songs that transcend not just genre, but time and circumstance as well, and in Cash they have a wonderful singer who preserves what’s great about them, letting the nooks and crannies speak for themselves instead of filling them with needless noise. And that, more than the backstory or the guest list, makes The List a terrific record, one destined to outgrow its rather modest stature and outshine its lofty premise, the stellar songcraft the only thing left lingering in the listener’s mind.

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Tagged as: Country, Los Angeles

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