In pursuit of that legendary Johnny Cash list

BOOK OF THE DAY: Always Been ThereBy Michael Streissguth Da Capo Press, 223pp. £13.99

IN 1973, Johnny Cash gave his 18-year-old daughter Rosanne a list of 100 songs and told her, “these you need to know”.

On the list were grand old country ballads, gospel songs and Appalachian folk tunes, plus songs by Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers and Woodie Guthrie, all drawn from the great American music tradition. Armed with this rich repository of songs, a young musician setting out on the country trail couldn’t fail to find their way.

In 2007, four years after the death of her father and two years after the death of her mother Vivian, Rosanne Cash underwent major brain surgery to correct a rare condition in which part of her brain was pushing down on her spine. Recovering after the operation, she had the idea to dig out the list her dad had given her all those years ago and record a selection of the songs for an album of covers. It would be her way of coming to terms with his legacy, from which she had become a fugitive. Only problem was, she couldn’t find the list.

She searched her Manhattan home, rifled through drawers and sifted through boxes of old letters and tax documents, but this precious scrap of paper with its Hot 100 all-time great country tunes could not be located.

Cash’s ongoing quest to find her dad’s lost list is a constant riff in Michael Streissguth’s portrait of one of America’s leading ladies of country. This is not just a search for a scrap of paper, though: it’s a trip down a yellow brick country road, with Cash as the questing Dorothy looking for her spiritual home and her dad as the towering, forbidding figure of the wizard.

It’s less a straight biography and more a meditation around the making of the album and around Rosanne’s fraught relationship with her father and with country music. Think of it as the album’s sleeve notes in separate book form.

Streissguth sits in on recording sessions, watching Cash and her husband, producer John Leventhal, tease out the nuances of the chosen songs.

He interviews Cash at her home in Manhattan, where she lives with Leventhal, their son, Jakob, and Cash’s youngest daughter Carrie, from her marriage to country music singer Rodney Crowell, and he accompanies her on a low-key tour around Europe, finishing in Scotland, where the Cash family can trace its ancestry.

Rosanne Cash was a hugely successful singer in the 1980s, regularly topping the US country charts and often breaking into the pop charts. But she was also a woman on the run from the shadow of the Man in Black and when she broke away from the traditional Nashville sound and moved to New York, she seemed to be severing the spiritual link with her father. Making The List, she acknowledges, is a chance to repair those familial ties. It was also an unmissable opportunity for her to get such guests as Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Jeff Tweedy from Wilco and Rufus Wainwright into the studio.

Streissguth is a big fan of the Cash clan – he’s also written a biography of Johnny Cash – but there’s something unsatisfying about this sepia-tinged glimpse into a great American music dynasty. What we need is her autobiography, everything in context and not filtered through the self-conscious eye of an unashamed country music buff.

Still, although Streissguth dwells too long on the minutiae, this is an affectionate portrait of an artist in search of her roots.

Does she eventually find the list? That doesn’t really matter. In the end, it seems that Rosanne Cash has found her own form of healing.

Kevin Courtney is an Irish Timesjournalist