Pattern Performances series kicks off season with Rossane Cash at UTC Fine Arts Center. FRIDAY
Rosanne Cash may be the progeny of country music royalty, but the prolific hitmaker stands in no one’s shadow — not even one cast as big as her late father’s, Johnny Cash.
Although Rosanne Cash is also often classified as a country artist, her music taps into multiple genres, including folk, pop, rock, blues and Americana. Her biggest commercial success came in the 1980s with a string of chart-topping, genre-crossing pop/country singles. Her landmark 2009 album, “The List,” won the Americana Music Album of the Year award.
Her golden streak of hit singles started in 1981 with three consecutive No. 1’s: “Seven Year Ache,” “My Baby Thinks He’s a Train” and “Blue Moon With Heartache.” Continued in 1985 with “Never Be You” and the Grammy-winning “I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Want Me.” And concluded with five more in 1987-88: “The Way We Make a Broken Heart,” “Tennessee Flat Top Box,” “If You Change Your Mind,” “Runaway Train” and “I Don’t Want To Spoil the Party.” She also hit No. 1 with a duet with then-husband Rodney Crowell with “It’s Such a Small World.”
All told, she has charted 21 Top 40 hits, won four Grammy Awards and received nominations for 11 more.
Though known as a songwriter, her writing talent lends itself to longer forms. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Oxford American and The Nation, among others. Her four books include the best-selling memoir “Composed,” which the Chicago Tribune called “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read.”
In 2014, she was awarded the SAG/AFTRA Lifetime Achievement award for Sound Recordings and received the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award in the Performing Arts. In 2015, she was chosen as a Perspective Series artist at Carnegie Hall, served as artist-in-residence at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville and was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Her latest release, “The River & The Thread,” is a collaboration with husband/co-writer/producer/ arranger John Leventhal in which she examines the musical topography of the American South.
Critics have lauded it as “a captivating and sometimes haunting album that’s among the finest of her career” (USA Today), “her masterpiece” (Uncut) and “the best music of her career” (The Oxford American). Said fellow singer Elton John: “It’s inconceivable that there will be a more beautiful album than this in 2014.”
It won her three of her four Grammy Awards: Best Americana Album as well as Best American Roots Performance and Best American Roots Song for “A Feather’s Not a Bird.”