Rosanne Cash (born May 24, 1955) is an American singer and songwriter. Although she is most often classified as a country artist, her music draws on many genres in addition to country, including folk, pop, rock and roll and blues. She is one of the daughters of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin, born shortly before the release of her father's first single. In many ways, her career reflects the changes in country music since the birth of the rock and roll era.
Born in 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, Cash grew up Catholic in southern California, but moved to Nashville after her high school graduation. She worked in her father's road show before setting out on her own. Cash released her first single, a duet with Bobby Bare, in 1979, and two years later had her first country No. 1 (and the biggest hit commercially of her career), "Seven Year Ache" (which also became a top forty pop hit). In 1979 she married Rodney Crowell, who was to produce most of her hit records. Their stormy marriage lasted until 1992; its break-up is chronicled in Cash's Interiors and in Crowell's album Life Is Messy. Cash later married producer John Leventhal, who produced her albums The Wheel (on which many of the songs were also based on her relationship with Crowell) and 10 Song Demo. Although Cash was a prominent country star throughout the '80s, her music was anything but traditional: she topped the charts with songs written not only by herself, but by her father ("Tennessee Flat Top Box"), John Hiatt ("The Way We Make a Broken Heart"), Tom Petty ("Never Be You") and the Beatles ("I Don't Want to Spoil the Party"), as well. "I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me", which won her a Grammy in 1985, and "It's Such a Small World", a 1987 duet with Crowell on his album Diamonds & Dirt, provided further hits. All of these songs and more are included on the compilation Hits 1979-1989.
Cash has had more than twenty top 40 country singles, including eleven chart-toppers, but nothing since 1990, and she has found it necessary to leave Nashville in both spirit and body to pursue her artistic vision. Although she had recorded all of her hits for Columbia Records' Nashville division, she released 10 Song Demo for the pop division of Capitol. She also released a book of short stories, Bodies of Water, in 1996.
Cash resurfaced in 2003 with Rules of Travel. The album features guest appearances by Sheryl Crow and Steve Earle, as well as a tune penned by Joe Henry and the Wallflowers' Jakob Dylan, another artist who knows about life as the offspring of a legend.
Cash's latest album, entitled Black Cadillac, was released in January of 2006 to high critical acclaim. Much of the album addresses the losses (within a 24-month span) of her step-mother, her father, and then finally her mother on Cash's fiftieth birthday.
Cash was portrayed by Hailey Anne Nelson in the Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line.
