Music
Over the course of two years, Rosanne Cash lost all three of her parents. Her new album, Black Cadillac, is pointedly dedicated to each: her stepmother, June Carter Cash, who died in May 2003; her father, Johnny, who followed that September; and her mother, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin, who passed away last May.
Cash poured her grief—and the probing questions it raised for her about life and the afterlife—into an enormously moving meditation on death that stands as one of her finest albums. Her rich source material may be an accident of birth, but what she makes of it is no accident. Only a master craftsperson could have marshaled the concrete details of her parents’ lives and deaths to create something so universal.
Her success at this means Black Cadillac isn’t really about the Cash family at all; it’s about everyone’s family. It’s about how each one of us becomes an orphan eventually, about how our ancestry shaped who we were before we were born, and about how the connection between parent and child can never truly be severed by death, whether there is a life beyond the grave or not. Walk the Line was fine (although Rosanne’s depiction of the blossoming romance between her parents is a needed tonic to the movie’s skewed portrait of Vivian), but Black Cadillac rescues these people from the bonds of myth and restores them to humanity.
The sound of Black Cadillac reflects the balance between emotion and intellect in Cash’s words. Half the album was produced by Cash’s husband (and frequent co-writer) John Leventhal and half by Bill Bottrell, best known for his work with Sheryl Crow and Michael Jackson. The tracks alternate one-for-one: Bottrell’s are coiled and edgy, with a hard pop grit that recalls Cash’s classic early-1980s work, while Leventhal’s are more relaxed, dominated by acoustic instruments. The effect is one of tension and release, an inhalation and exhalation that suggests the seesaw between duress and acceptance in the grieving process.
Just as Black Cadillac is musically balanced by its dual producers, it is pulled together conceptually by Cash’s eye for recurring details: the songs are filled with images of flowers and water, and their narrators are frequently disembodied, dead or not yet born. She makes frequent connections between the future and the past, emphasizing the through-line of humanity represented by lineage. The album ends with 71 seconds of silence—her birth parents both died at age 71—but the final song is “Good Intent,” the first verse of which finds the singer reaching all the way back to 1667 to channel William Cash, who brought the bloodline over from Scotland.
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At its other end, Black Cadillac kicks off with the title cut, in which Cash’s father’s car becomes transformed in her mind into the hearse that carried him away. It’s the same artistic feat Johnny Cash performed when he made the train in “Folsom Prison Blues” a dream of freedom and escape; Little Junior Parker did the same thing when he made a funeral procession of the “Mystery Train” (a song passed down from the Carter Family).
Deep-voiced country up-and-comer Josh Turner also performed this trick two years ago with the instant classic “Long Black Train,” which appropriated Johnny Cash’s boom-chicka-boom and turned that old train into a talisman of evil—the devil as engineer, carrying sinners to hell. The single (written by Turner) only made it to No. 13, but inspired such passion in those who embraced it that his Long Black Train album went platinum.
Similarly, the finest track on his follow-up, Your Man, is a vehicular metaphor that roams through country music history in an even more explicit manner. Written by Shawn Camp and Mark Sanders, “Loretta Lynn’s Lincoln” is a hallucinogenic tale that finds Turner dreaming of buying Lynn’s car and joyriding down Demonbreun, picking up Dolly Parton and finally Loretta herself.
The 28-year-old Turner is at his best when he’s boldly asserting such claims on tradition. Just as “Long Black Train” posited him as a young Johnny Cash, the simmering lead single and title track of Your Man offers Turner as Conway Twitty, inviting you into the bedroom to the accompaniment of slip-note piano. The album is embroidered with bluegrass touches, and Turner is comfortable with that music’s history as well; “Me and God” is a sprightly duet with Ralph Stanley that finds the younger singer holding his own with one of the faces on bluegrass’s Mount Rushmore.
Another nervy summit with a musical luminary here is more troublesome. “White Noise” highlights Turner’s greatest weakness: despite the brilliance of “Long Black Train,” his songwriting is still hit-and-miss. “White Noise” was co-written with duet partner John Anderson, and while it’s a treat to hear these two distinctive voices sharing space, the song itself hangs on a painfully awkward hook—the two celebrate “the white noise comin’ from the white boys,” played “where those honkies are a-tonkin.’ ” The bridge strains to fan away the whiff of racism—“It ain’t a thing ’bout black and white / It’s Johnny Cash and Charley Pride”—but the putdown of “hip-hop jive” makes it hard to dispel such concerns.
It’s only a stumble, and Turner remains one of the most promising of the current crop of country singers. Johnny Cash himself made mistakes while struggling to find himself—as did Twitty, Lynn and everyone else in whose footsteps Turner seeks to follow. But for the moment, he might benefit by taking a lesson from Rosanne: a devotion to careful craft that allows you to say what you mean is among the most valuable country traditions.