Linkmeister

"The List"

I've recently become a fan of Rosanne Cash and her music, so I was pleased to hear she'd soon have a new album out. There's a twist, though: instead of writing the songs on this one, she's interpreting twelve songs from a list of one hundred that her father considered essential to a knowledge of country music.

How did that list come about?

"When I was 18 years old, I went on the road with my dad after I graduated from high school. And we were riding on the tour bus one day, kind of rolling through the South, and he mentioned a song," Cash says. "We started talking about songs, and he mentioned one, and I said I don't know that one. And he mentioned another. I said, 'I don't know that one either, Dad,' and he became very alarmed that I didn't know what he considered my own musical genealogy. So he spent the rest of the afternoon making a list for me, and at the end of the day, he said, 'This is your education.' And across the top of the page, he wrote '100 Essential Country Songs.'"

Here's an opportunity to hear the entire album from NPR's First Listen.

She was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air today, too, talking about the album. She said a lot of funny things, but one of the best had to be this (paraphrasing): "I haven't published it [the list] to the Internet or anywhere else because I want to do Volume Two, and I don't want anyone else to do it first."

Now that's honesty!

Posted by Linkmeister at October 5, 2009 02:50 PM | TrackBack