Rosanne Cash, Neko Case and Ann Powers at Old School Farm for The Porch’s Rhythm & Rhapsody event, 5/8/2026
Friday night at Old School Farm, singer-songwriters Rosanne Cash and Neko Case joined Nashville music critic Ann Powers for an evening of conversation about craft and community. The occasion was the annual Rhythm & Rhapsody fundraiser, an event that traditionally fuses musical talent and literary voices benefiting Nashville literary nonprofit The Porch.
The Porch reaches more than 5,000 people annually through more than 250 workshops. Introducing the event, Porch co-founder Susannah Felts told the crowd that the women were selected because “both have had fabulous artistic careers that have spanned decades, and they show no sign of dropping the beat. They are also unafraid to take creative risks.”
Powers, author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, moderated the conversation, noting that the boundaries of categorizing songwriters separate from other writers are unnecessary. “These two are also incredible writers of poetry and prose,” she said of Cash and Case. In addition to their music, both songsmiths are authors. Cash published her memoir Composed in 2010, and among other projects has contributed essays to books about The Beatles and women in country music. Case’s memoir The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You was published last year.
Leaning into the night’s Rhythm & Rhapsody theme, Powers started by asking the songwriters what rhythm is to them.
“I feel that singer-songwriters aren’t asked about rhythm enough,” Powers said. “You’re not asked about the bottom of your music, the foundation of your music. And yet there is no music without the beat, without rhythm, without that structuring element.”
“Rhythm is breathing and heartbeat, and it is a skeleton for the words or the thoughts,” Case responded. “It is the circulatory system that gets the blood and the oxygen to all the words. I started out as a drummer. For that reason, now that I play guitar, I play drums on the guitar. But at the end of the day, it’s just the nice skeleton with the circulatory system of the moving animal that you’re creating.”
Cash agreed, marking the first of several times throughout the evening when she noted her answers were in line with Case’s. “I like to look for rhythm in prose,” Cash said. “It’s like, James Joyce's rhythm is not like Margaret Renkl’s rhythm. You can recognize the way someone moves through their words, how they touch language, mold it, and the beat of a sentence. I love it when you can recognize a certain writer's writing without knowing who that person is.”
The conversation ran more than 45 minutes, during which the women explored their process of writing and examined the place in the world that their worlds have created. While their talk wasn’t necessarily prescriptive or pedagogical, they were speaking to a sold-out room of writers, aspiring and established, so some observations sounded like advice. Cash’s comment, “to stay curious is to stay alive,” was one of the most reposted summaries on Saturday morning.
Melissa Jean reads a poem to the sold-out audience at Old School Farm for The Porch’s Rhythm & Rhapsody event, 5/8/2026
The two talked about avoiding clichés in their lyrics and how time has made them bolder and more outspoken. Case thanked menopause, which she called a “second adolescence,” for helping her grow into the voice she is today. Neither said they felt they were good at writing protest songs, but that doesn’t stop them from using their voices to speak up when they deem necessary.
“Devotion to the arts is an act of resistance,” Cash said. “Every show I do, at the end of the night, I say, ‘We just created community in two hours. We can take it out to the world.’”
The schedule called for the evening to end with the conversation, but the women surprised the crowd (and the organizers) by picking up their guitars. Case and Cash each played a song solo, then performed a duet on the civil rights anthem “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round,” in the style of Mavis Staples, urging the audience to sing along. “There’s nothing more beautiful than a whole group of people singing together,” Case said.
As the duet neared its end, Cash added a new timely verse, which was a crowd favorite: “Ain't gonna let no gerrymandering turn me around.”
