Since the new movie about the late singer, Johnny Cash, “I Walk the Line,” is in the national spotlight, so is his family. Particularly in the limelight is Roseann Cash, the eldest of three daughters by Cash’ s first wife, Vivian Leberto, and a singer in her own right. In a recent interview on Television’s “Sunday Morning”, she spoke of how she didn’t want to sing in her early life. She had a negative association with both singing and being famous as her father, who was both, had a drug problem. Fame translated in her young mind as a bad thing.
The oldest of their three daughters, Roseann was only eleven years of age when her parents divorced. At the age of 18 she went out on the road with her famous Dad and learned how to play the guitar. “I learned and saw his essence, the way he worked with an audience,” she said proudly.
At the age of 24, she produced her first album, and she has had eleven number one country hits. The years 1979-1989 were blessed times for her, as her children were born during this span, and she learned the most important thing in life, “how to be a good mother.”
Still her career rocks and on her own terms. Her newest release, “Black Cadillac,” is a musical memoir of mortality, loss and redemption. Roseann admitted that she would not have written it if her mother, stepmother and father were still alive, and yet she expressed the wish they could somehow hear it. She claimed the songs were useful to her in that they helped her make sense of the three losses she sustained in the last two years and to transform her grief into something positive.
When asked her opinion about the film chronicling her father’s affair and subsequent marriage to June Carter, she admitted that she couldn’t be objective. She said that their relationship was a wonderful one for both of them even it came at a very sad time in her own life.
Roseann is 50 years old and lives with her husband, musical collaborator and author, John Leventhal, and their children in New York City.
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