Review: Rosanne Cash, St George’s

Rosanne Cash’s 2014 album, The River and the Thread, received three Grammy Awards and was loudly critically lauded in all the right places. She arrived at St Georges to co-headline the River Town Festival having completed its follow up, She Remembers Everything, only a few weeks ago. Three songs from this new album are aired tonight. From the show stopping piano ballad Everyone But Me In Particular, there is every reason to think she has fashioned another extraordinary set of songs.

As daughter of the late, great Johnny and step daughter of country royalty June Carter Cash, family and heritage could be heavy yokes. Cash must have grown up all too aware of how family and history inform our every turn. The young Rosanne decided at an early stage that she wanted to stay in the family trade. She has taken this backstory and uses her heritage to find threads through family, community and the geography of the places she grew up in to inform her extraordinary later, mature work which defines tonight’s performance.

Her songs reflect the complexity of adult friendships and love affairs. Her writing reflects on those relationships that have survived and those that had to be cut, fractured by darkness and loss. The writing of William Faulkner ghosts its way through these tunes of the American South. The Civil War, Depression-era poverty, religion and the ever present Mississippi river inhabit her writing.

She is joined on stage by her collaborator/husband/co-writer/producer/arranger, John Leventhal. He is a sublime musician and an understated accompanist. Cash is visibly moved by his playing on at least one occasion tonight. Always seeming to play just enough to support each song, his playing reflects the widest palette of Americana: swampy Delta blues, gospel, Appalachian folk, country and rock. His playing reminding (and, dear reader, this is the highest compliment in the guitar players’ manual) of the similarly British- and American-folk informed Richard Thompson.

Cash’s voice is clear and emotive, with no operatic histrionics, and suits the narrative nature of many of the songs. Alongside her own work, she delivers a musical skip through the history of the American folk tradition. They move from an Appalachian folk ballad she learnt whilst touring with the Carter Family as a young woman, through country music history with Movin’ On, Long Black Veil, Ode to Billie Joe and her father’s Tennessee Flat Top Box. More contemporary American songwriters are also visited, via a John Hiatt tune and an obscure pluck from Bob Dylan’s back pages, Farewell Angelina.

It is her contemporary writing that provides the core of tonight’s show. It feels that she has become a conduit for the heritage of her family, her community and the history of her music. As she enters her sixties she is in a remarkable place. This is popular music at its most adult. She is writing beautiful, contemporary songs of experience. Tonight’s rendition of When the Master Calls the Rolls from The River and the Thread leaves the audience on its feet, warmly applauding a wonderful performance.