Currently touring in support of her critically-acclaimed and Grammy-nominated “Black Cadillac” album, singer/songwriter/author Rosanne Cash has announced that she will cancel her four remaining concerts this year in order to undergo brain surgery at New York Presbyterian Hospital for a rare but benign condition Rosanne is expected to make a full recovery and will return to the studio to complete the recording of her debut for Manhattan Records. Ms. Cash will also resume her live performance schedule in the spring and will complete a new book to be published by Viking in early 2009.I certainly hope and pray that she will be all right. Brain surgery is no minor thing.
She likes to refer to herself as "Mrs. L"; she's married to John Leventhal. Here is a YouTube video of Mrs. L with k.d. lang doing Loretta Lynn's "You Ain't Woman Enough to Take My Man".
I just posted about Shakira's early and little-known recording career. Mrs. L also had a first record that she preferred to not have popularized later.
The following video is labeled as being from a 1978 concert in Czechoslovakia in which Rosanne accompanied her father Johnny from the time she was recording that mystery first album.
It includes her singing "I Don't Have to Crawl", written by Rodney Crowell, who became her first husband. (And who I think is one of our most brilliant popular songwriters.)
I saw her perform once at a bar/nightclub in Santa Cruz, CA called "The Catalyst". She said during that show that her very first solo concert had been there. And that she was petrified, but it came off all right.
She's understably ambiguous about comparisons to her father. But I've noticed after having seen her perform several times that she has a certain kind of charisma on stage that is very similar to what I saw in the one time I heard Johnny perform live. With her and with him, they have a stage presence that says, "I'm somebody who has something to say and you need to listen to me."
I've always felt Mrs. L was a kindred spirit in a lot of ways. She was very much opposed to the Iraq War. As was Johnny in that last year of his life; he died in 2003 just as the war was in its early months. Rosanne said that she thought she had never seen him feel so strongly about a public issue as he did about the Iraq War.
Also, it's not something she emphasizes in her public persona. But her mother, Vivian Liberto, was Latina. That's one of the things that surprised me in the Walk the Line movie, that there was no specific mention that Johnny's first wife was Latina, one of many ways that he felt it necessary to ignore useless and/or bigoted traditions.
Rosanne studied drama at Vanderbilt University and acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute.
I hope we see her back in the swing of things soon.
Tags: kd lang, johnny cash, rosanne cash
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