Rosanne Cash
Biography Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash
(born May 24, 1955) is an American singer-songwriter and author. She is the eldest daughter of country music icon Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin.
Although Cash is often classified as a country artist, her music draws on many genres, including folk, pop, rock and blues. In the 1980s, she had a string of chart-topping singles, which crossed musical genres and landed on both C&W and Top 100 charts, the most commercially successful being her 1981 breakthrough hit “Seven Year Ache”, which topped the U.S. country singles charts and reached the Top 30 on the U.S. pop singles charts. In 1990, Cash released Interiors, a spare, introspective album which signaled a break from her pop country past. The following year Cash ended her marriage and moved from Nashville to New York City, where she continues to write, record and perform. Since 1991 she has released five albums, written two books and edited a collection of short stories. Her fiction and essays have been published in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Oxford-American, New York Magazine, and various other periodicals and collections.
She won a Grammy in 1985 for “I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Want Me”, and has received twelve other Grammy nominations. She has had 11 No. 1 country hit singles, 21 Top 40 country singles and two gold records.
She was portrayed, as a child, by Hailey Anne Nelson in Walk the Line, the 2005 Academy-award winning film of her father’s life.
Cash was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1955, just as father Johnny was recording his first tracks at Sun Records. The family moved to California in 1958, first to Los Angeles, then Ventura, where Cash and her sisters were raised by mother Vivian. (Vivian and Johnny separated in the early 1960s and divorced in 1966.) After graduating from high school, she joined her father’s road show for two and a half years, first as a wardrobe assistant, then as a background vocalist and occasional soloist. In 1976, Cash briefly worked for CBS Records in London before returning to Nashville to study English and drama at Vanderbilt University, then relocated to Los Angeles to study at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Hollywood. She recorded a demo in January 1978 with Emmylou Harris’ songwriter/sideman Rodney Crowell, which led to a full album with German label Ariola Records.