November 25, 2013 Rosanne Cash Appears at the Library of Congress in Three-Day Residency Dec. 5-7
Project offers concerts, conversations and the premiere of “The River and the Thread”
Press Contact: Erin Allen (202) 707-7302
Public Contact: Anne McLean (202) 707-8432,
Contact: Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ada@loc.gov.
Website: www.loc.gov/concerts/
Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov
Singer, songwriter and author Rosanne Cash premieres her new album “The River and the Thread” during a special residency at the Library of Congress Dec. 5-7. On Thursday, Dec. 5, Cash will premiere the album in a concert with the Rosanne Cash Band, featuring John Leventhal. She hosts a round-robin with fellow songwriters Leventhal, Cory Chisel, Rodney Crowell and Amy Helm on Friday, Dec. 6. On Saturday, Dec. 7, she appears with Natasha Trethewey, the Library’s Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, in a conversation co-presented by the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center.
One of the most compelling figures in popular music, with a body of work encompassing country, rock, roots and pop influences, Rosanne Cash inherited a reverence for song and profound artistry – and an equal duty to find insights of her own. The oldest daughter of country music icon Johnny Cash and stepdaughter of June Carter Cash of the legendary Carter Family, she holds a lineage rooted in the very beginning of American country music, with its deep cultural and historical connections to the South. Over a three-decade career she has responded to this heritage with 15 albums of extraordinary songs that have earned a GRAMMY™ Award and nominations for 12 more, the Americana Honors and Awards’ Album of the Year Award, and 21 top-40 hits, including 11 No. 1 singles. Her four books include the best-selling memoir “Composed.” In recent seasons, Cash has appeared in concerts and talks at the Spoleto Festival, Toronto’s Luminato festival and the Festival of Arts and Ideas, and partnered in programming collaborations with the Minnesota Orchestra, Lincoln Center and San Francisco Jazz.
In “The River and the Thread,” Cash evokes the “bittersweet stories of people and places of the South,” in a kaleidoscopic examination of its geographic, emotional and historic landscape. “I went back to where I was born, and these songs started arriving in me,” she has said. “All these things happened that made me feel a deeper connection to the South than I ever had. We started finding these great stories, and the melodies that went with those experiences … I feel this record ties past and present together through all those people and places in the South I knew and thought I had left behind.”
Written with her longtime collaborator, producer, guitarist and husband John Leventhal, the album reflects journeys through the Southern states, with stops at William Faulkner’s house; Dockery Farms, the plantation where Howlin’ Wolf and Charley Patton worked and sang; her father’s boyhood home in Dyess, Arkansas; the Sun Records Studio in Memphis; and the Mississippi Delta, with its memories of the birth of the Civil Rights era and the haunting gravesite of the great bluesman Robert Johnson.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
Thursday, December 5, 8 p.m. (tickets required)
Rosanne Cash Band, featuring John Leventhal
Coolidge Auditorium, Thomas Jefferson Building
101 Independence Avenue S.E., Washington, D.C.
Friday, December 6, 8 p.m. (tickets required)
Rosanne Cash hosts a round-robin with John Leventhal, Cory Chisel, Rodney Crowell and Amy Helm
Coolidge Auditorium, Thomas Jefferson Building
Saturday. December 7, 7 p.m. (no tickets required)
Rosanne Cash and Natasha Trethewey, Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry
Hosted by Robert Casper, director of the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center
LJ 119, Thomas Jefferson Building
Tickets are available from Ticketmaster (www.Ticketmaster.com) for a nominal service charge. Advance tickets for these events are sold out; however, patrons are encouraged to try for Rush tickets at the door on concert nights, beginning two hours before each event’s start time. Rush tickets are offered on a space-available basis and seats are not guaranteed.
The Library of Congress, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world, holds more than 155 million items in various languages, disciplines and formats. The Library serves the U.S. Congress and the nation both on-site in its reading rooms on Capitol Hill and through its website at www.loc.gov.
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PR 13-210
2013-11-26
ISSN 0731-3527