By Dwight Garner
Published: August 10, 2010
COMPOSED
A Memoir
By Rosanne Cash
245 pages. Viking. $26.95.
In his memoir “Chronicles: Volume One,” Bob Dylan described what it was like, after he became famous, to have people know where he lived. “My house was being battered,” he wrote, “ravens constantly croaking ill omens at our door.”
The singer and songwriter Rosanne Cash — her father was Johnny Cash — heard similar croaks from the time she was born. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ms. Cash writes in her new memoir, “Composed,” a knock at her family’s front door usually meant that some kind of crazy drama was about to burst into being.
It might be a folk singer standing outside, drunk out of his mind and begging for “salvation and inspiration.” Sometimes the knocks came from “addicts, preachers or the occasional sex kitten.” Everyone wanted a piece of Johnny Cash, who was mostly out of town, playing music, getting into trouble. No one wanted a piece of him more than Ms. Cash, his eldest daughter, did.
“Composed” is a pointillistic memoir about growing up with and without her father, and about how she slid out from under his shadow to become a gifted artist in her own right. It neatly charts the arc of Ms. Cash’s career, which has seen her move from being a canny Nashville hitmaker — her 1987 LP “King’s Record Shop” is her best from this period — to become the deliverer of sparer, folkier records like the ruminative “Interiors,” from 1990.
Full review at NYT.
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