Emulating A Template Lived Out

BOOK REVIEW: COMPOSED BY ROSANNE CASH

“I have learned more from songs than I ever did from any teacher in school,” writes Rosanne Cash, in her 2010 memoir, ‘Composed,’ published by Penguin Books.

Arguing that point against the daughter of Country superstar and cultural icon the late Johnny Cash could turn to vanity in a hurry especially in front of a generation whose lives seem perpetually set to a soundtrack.

I used to be one of them discovering the joy of assisting people coping with and experiencing life through music as a teenage discjockey doing a live weekend show among a very small market of my hometown, population 3,300.

I acquired a tremendous depth of understanding how to go about establishing a unique creative license from within my own air-personality and ultimately begin to discover who I was from listening to other disc-jockeys.

I remember one such deejay announcing in morning drive on the first of day school while buses rolled and parents drove kids to class all listening to the radio, “For those of you who feel like school is just a prison here is Johnny Cash and Folsom Prison Blues.” The audacity of that dude. I laughed, then applauded and sang along with Johnny Cash modifying the lyric slightly to personalize my expression, “but I’m stuck in Hardin High School and that train keeps a dragging on down to Garryowen (a local community in my home county).

“If they freed me from this prison, if that railroad train was mine, I bet I’d move it on a little farther down the line, far from Hardin High School is where I want to stay and I’d let that school bell blow my blues away.”

Cash is very much a second generation non-conformist, a trait which empowered her father and his band, the Tennessee Two, to invent a rockabilly beat out of necessity. Cash has benefited from inheriting her father’s tendency to think outside of the Tennessee Flat-Top Box.

Cash describes a child’s anger at her mother as she recognizes a false front and no less towards her father for allowing this to happen. Then she goes on to explain how punitive religion void of love and bearing no acceptance of the human condition can drive a person away from seeking any type of relationship with God.

Cash was raised Catholic but her experience could happen in any denomination, Baptist, Mormon, Muslim or Pentecostal, where what she calls an entitlement mentality causes church members to think of themselves as having an exclusive revelation of divinity accompanied by a sense of superiority over their fellow mankind who don’t share their convictions.

Cash’s eulogy of her late stepmother, June Carter Cash, endears readers to a kind, compassionate lady who viewed everyone she met with grace and makes one wish they had been acquainted with June.

A profound tribute to her father comes early in the book but make no mistake, readers shouldn’t set it aside after getting that far. Cash writes as eloquently as she plays guitar and sings, “… it’s not just the singing you bring home with you. It’s the constant measuring of ideas and words if you are a songwriter. … More than that, it is the effort to straddle two worlds, and the struggle to make the transition from the creative realms to those of daily life and back with grace.”

Cash states her father practiced all these various elements of an artist as a matter of habit providing a living template as a role model for her to emulate how to live with integrity as a musical artist on a daily basis.

Cash writes she never felt closer or more connected to her father than when performing with him on stage in front of a live audience. In that setting all perceived conflicts and animosities are banished. It’s time to get real and Cash is very real in her book.

As a longtime fan of one of Arkansas’ native sons, Johnny Cash, I may be slightly prejudiced reviewing a book by his daughter, Rosanne; yet each reader may decide for themselves.

Check it out — Composed by Rosanne Cash.