Cash's 'Black Cadillac': Driving Her Grief Home
By Bill Friskics-Warren
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Rosanne Cash's new "Black Cadillac" is a harrowing album -- forbidding inasmuch as Cash's songs wrestle with feelings of grief and abandonment brought on by the recent deaths of her father, mother and stepmother.
Cash lost all three -- Johnny Cash, Vivian Liberto Distin and June Carter Cash -- within the span of 24 months beginning in the spring of 2003. Everything from her record's elegiac arrangements to the photo on the back of the CD of a vintage black Cadillac at a cemetery -- likely the one her father used to drive -- lends the album a funereal cast.
Yet "Black Cadillac" isn't tormenting just because it's rife with chilling notes of finality. It's harrowing in the more pregnant sense of the word, one that has sadly fallen out of use -- the sense of cultivating soil for planting. With 12 fearlessly unsentimental songs, Cash breaks into and opens up her family's epically fertile but now fallow ground in order to prepare it for new growth and eventual harvest.
"If I had wings I'd cut them down, live without these dreams so I could learn to love the ground," Cash sings, alluding to this painful, sometimes violent process in "Dreams Are Not My Home." Pressing on to urgent notes of ringing electric guitar, she declares, "Because I wanna live inside the world/I wanna act like a real girl/I wanna know I'm not alone/And that dreams are not my home."
As it did in life, her father's shadow looms largest over the proceedings. His fathomless drawl is the first voice you hear as the record begins -- "Rosanne, now come on," he admonishes in an old recording, urging her to get on with things. Her father's voice also opens the final song on the album. This time, he's helping Rosanne, who sounds like she's just a toddler, pronounce the words "bye, bye, bye," just as she's learning to say them anew to each of her parents.
"I love you like a brother, like a father and a son," Cash sings in a loamy alto, referring to her father in the guitar-and-mandolin-flecked "God Is in the Roses." In "The World Unseen," to hymnal strains of piano, she pledges, "I will look for you between the grooves of songs we sang," even as she contemplates a "world without sound" on the album's final number. After that comes a track consisting of 71 seconds of silence, one, apparently, for each year of her father's life.
Not every song on Cash's album focuses entirely on her prodigious father. She sings of her parents' wedding and breakup, for example, in the plaintive "I Was Watching You." Elsewhere there's a scene of her mother waiting back home for a transmission from her father, at the time a radio operator in the Air Force, when he was stationed overseas in the early 1950s.
Meanwhile, to the neo-Appalachian refrains of "House on the Lake," Cash looks back on the years she spent with her father and her stepmother at their rambling home overlooking Old Hickory Lake outside Nashville. "I hear his voice close in my ear, I see her smile and wave," she sings, picturing the couple in her mind; "I blink and while my eyes are closed, both have gone away."
