Singer/Songwriter Rosanne Cash Reflects on Her 70 Years

She and I were born 2 months apart, and while Johnny's little girl has some thoughts, I've been having questions. Could I have the "Seventy Year Ache"?

“Ray Charles said that singers were better at 50 than at 25, because a whole life showed up in the voice at 50, but John Lennon was nine days shy of turning 24 years old when he recorded ‘No Reply.’ Just this once, Ray was wrong.”

-Rosanne Cash, 2018

I love telling new people I meet I was born the same year as rock’n’roll and Disneyland; most will guess 1955 as the correct answer. That means I was alive during Kennedy’s early-’60s White House turn, the 1969 moon landing, and, most momentous for me, The Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

I was 8 on February 9, 1964, 5 weeks away from my 9th birthday.

Rosanne Cash was alive for all that, too. As it happens, Ms. Cash, on May 24, will turn the magic 7-0 some 9 weeks after I will in mid-March (Lord willin’ and the crick don’t rise….and, even if it does)!

While, indeed, Rosanne may have seen that groundbreaking Sullivan Show, we know this for a fact: “I heard ‘No Reply’ for the first time when I was 10 years old,” she told AARP Magazine in July 2018. “I got the album, Beatles ’65 [as it was known on Capitol Records in the U.S.], and played it on my little record player with its tweed case, in my bedroom in Casitas Springs, California” [Ventura County, an hour WNW of L.A.].

“It’s a song about betrayal. He saw her walk in the door with another man. He’s been watching her, but it’s not creepy — it’s heartbreaking. He is so full of desire that he can’t help himself. The shock of finding that you aren’t loved is the deepest cut.

“The subtext of my own life,” Rosanne revealed, “was the same as the one in ‘No Reply’: One of disappointment and longing. I knocked on my parents’ door and no one answered. My mother and father were not at home. Just like the song: ‘When I came to your door / No reply.’

“Perhaps it’s only now, a half-century later, that I realize why those eight words held such power: They embodied shame and desperation. And the shame of desperation. Why is there no reply from the woman behind the door, who apparently once loved the singer? Why is there no reply from my parents? There is a terrible reason: Someone else is in the house.”

Rosanne continues: “Romantic betrayal is a sophisticated concept for a 10-year-old. What do promises mean if they are nullified by sexual restlessness? This was beyond my understanding in 1965. The song was mysterious. Betrayal was incomprehensible, but thrilling and dark. There was a roiling inner world behind the stoic facades, and that world could be the doorway to art and music.”

It might be a door I could walk through.

The First of Four Daughters

1956: Rosanne is one, here, in Daddy’s lap in Memphis, Tennessee, where she was born…the first of four daughters. Johnny had just recorded his first stuff-of-legend Sun Records sides. Rosanne’s mother was Vivian Cash (née Liberto), known to be of maternal Irish, German, and African-American ancestry. With Johnny Cash’s increasing success in country music, he moved the family from Memphis to California, first to Los Angeles, in 1958. He later bought a farm in fairly remote Ventura, 68 miles WNW of Los Angeles proper.

Rosanne (far right) sits with her father, Johnny Cash, and her sisters, Kathy (middle) and Cindy (left) circa 1960.📸courtesy of Rosanne Cash/AARP Magazine

Hitting the Road