For Rosanne Cash, death brings a test of faith

NEW YORK -- Shortly after music legend Johnny Cash died in September 2003, his eldest daughter, Rosanne Cash, had what she describes as "a real crash-and-burn of my faith." Having also lost her stepmother, June Carter Cash, the previous May, the second-generation singer/songwriter "was just feeling bitter. I thought, 'Well, that's it; they're in the ground. It's over, lights out.'"

Rather than wallow in despair, Cash asked a friend, the Rev. Roger Ferlo, then the rector of Saint Luke in the Fields, an Episcopal church in Greenwich Village, for a consultation. "I went in and said, 'I just want to know where they are.' And he touched my hand and said, 'I don't know.' It was a beautiful moment, and it changed everything. If he had said, 'Oh, honey, they're in heaven with the angels,' I would have hated that. But he respected me enough to give me permission to explore my own doubts and find my way back to something that I could believe in."

That journey would inform Cash's new collection of songs, Black Cadillac. Released Tuesday, the CD is dedicated to the late Cashes as well as Rosanne's mother, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin, who died May 24, shortly before her daughter completed it. Cash actually wrote the haunted title track while all three were still alive. "We'd had anxiety about my father's health for years," she says. "So the song seemed a clear foreshadowing. My heart sank when I wrote it."

The other songs on Cadillac -- recorded partly in New York with Cash's husband and frequent collaborator, John Leventhal, producing and partly in Los Angeles with roots-pop boardsman Bill Bottrell -- evoke a range of emotions and experiences. "To me it's a map, not only of loss, but also of my own musical past, as well as my ancestral past."

Cash, 50, has mixed feelings about the plethora of tributes and projects that have examined her father's life and legacy. "I've gotten to the point where I have to pick and choose what I let in. Some of it seems exploitative, or shallow. Some of it seems like a blatant attempt to turn him into this icon rather than a full-fledged human being, and I really resist that. But some is genuine and really reaches into his body of work."

Though Cash's sister Kathy was upset by how the biopic Walk the Line, which focused on Johnny and June Carter Cash's romance, depicted their mother, Rosanne "thought it was basically fair. She was portrayed as a woman who wanted to hold her family together, and her home and her marriage. That part was exactly right."

But she adds, "it was painful for us, as his children, to watch (Walk the Line). Two of my sisters chose not to see it. I mean, who wants to see a Hollywood rehashing of their childhood? I loved the movie Ray, but I'll bet that if you talked to Ray Charles' kids, they would go, 'Well, it was a little hard for me,' or, 'That's not quite how I remember it.'"

Cash hasn't yet seen the new stage musical about her father, Ring of Fire, set to open on Broadway in March. "The producer contacted me and seems like a great guy. It previewed and my dad's manager said that it was wonderful and got great reviews, so I'll probably see it."

Cash's future plans also include a tour, though not until her son Jake Leventhal, 7, finishes school for the summer. "My relationship with my kids really deepened after my parents died," says Cash, who also has three children and a stepdaughter by her former husband, Rodney Crowell. "It was good already, but they and my husband really rose to the occasion. I relied on them a lot.

"I had a dream while I was writing this record, where I was the parent who had left, and I was still talking to my children. That was comforting and revealing, because I realized that I would never leave my kids, so my parents would never leave me. A relationship founded on love like that doesn't just end."

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