Recently I listened to the Garden & Gun magazine podcast Whole Hog. It was episode 3 of season 2 and was entitled "Rosanne Cash's Arrow to the South" and host John Huey speaks with Cash about storytelling; the influence of her father, Johnny Cash; speaking up politically; and the ability of songs to mean something different to each listener. They also discussed her memoir, Composed, so I checked it out at the library.

I'm a faithful listener of this podcast. Frankly, I could listen to John Huey, Former editor-in-chief, Time Inc., read the back of a shampoo bottle. I love his voice. But more importantly, I love the questions he asks of guests with a way of opening a dialogue that makes you realize you never thought of something that way before.

I follow Rosanne on Twitter. I've read her New York Times opinion piece and am totally in agreement with her dislike of Trump. Is hatred of him too strong a word? I don't think so. I also read the two articles in Rolling Stone magazine about the use of her dad's name on a tee shirt worn by a Neo-Nazi and a white nationalist radio show. I applaud her for standing up for that nonsense.

There was some of the book that I didn't really know a lot about what she was talking about in regards to the music industry such as mixing music, being in the studio, etc. But that didn't matter much. I enjoyed reading about her life in trying to be independent of the large effect her father's life and influence had on her.

But, If I'm honest I'll tell you that I never really listened to that much of Roseanne's music. Oh, I remember her hits from the 80s and 90s and liked them and have them downloaded to my iPhone but I'm talking about her other music. The music she writes about that changed her life in her book. That's the music I haven't heard. Those are the lyrics that haven't spoken to me as they spoken to her. But now, after reading her memoir, I want to listen. I want to hear the words that made her write so eloquently in her book that moved me to tears. Words that hit me in my heart such as the ones quoted below. Words that I could have sworn I wrote myself.

"It was never too late to undo who you had become."

"I have taken every sorrow in my life to the ocean - the deaths of my parents, my grandparent, my aunts and uncles, friends who died untimely deaths, my stepsister Rosey, and my best friend from eighth grade, the baby that never came to term, the broken relationships, divorce, the terror of the addictions of those I love - I have taken all of it to the sea. I have performed many rituals of release while immersed in salt water or walking on the shore. The ocean, for me, is what those in a twelve-step programs call a Higher Power."

"We all need art and music like we need blood and oxygen. The more exploitative, numbing, and assaulting popular culture become, the more we need the truth of a beautifully phrased song, dredged from a real person's depth of experience, delivered in an honest voice, the more we need the simplicity of paint on canvas, or the arc of a lonely body in the air, or the photographer's unflinching eye. Art, in the larger sense, is the lifeline to which I cling to in a confusing, unfair, sometimes dehumanizing world. In my childhood, the nuns and priests insisted, sometimes in a shrill and punitive tone, that religion was where God resided and where I might find transcendence. I was afraid that they were correct for so many years, and that I was the one at fault for not being able to navigate the circuitry of dogma and ritual. For me, it turned out to be a decoy, a mirage framed in sound and fury. Art and music have proven to be more expansive, more forgiving, and more immediately alive. For me, art is a more trust-worthy expression of God than religion." ( )

Wow. Even if you are not a fan of Roseanne (although I can't quite imagine that), this is a wonderfully profound book. It is personal, but more than that and ever so much more thoughtful than a lot of what passes for writing these days. On a par with the best of Annie Dillard. ( )

I'm only a tangential fan of Roseanne Cash, as I didn't start listening to country music until the mid-2000s, and never have gotten into it deep. I've never heard the songs she refers to as her hits, and didn't realize that Cash was as famous as she apparently is. Nevertheless someone I respect greatly recommended this as a great music memoir, and so I sought it out. I found it to be a brave but ultimately so-so memoir of a remarkable person.

A great failing of the book is that Cash makes little attempt to draw portraits of the people who matter most to her. With the notable exception of her mother, who gets more attention in this book than anyone except for Cash herself, most people are mentioned only in passing: her two husbands, her mentors, bandmates and producers, and even her children, whom she does lavish a couple of pages on in the tones of a proud parent in a college admissions meeting. There are several amusing anecdotes and moving hospital scenes involving her famous father, whom she obviously loved deeply, but we don't get a fuller picture of the man than we could get from a competent 60-minute TV documentary. When she's had conflict in her life, she mentions it without explaining it and moves quickly on.

She tells us that she's never enjoyed life as a public figure, so it's understandable that she would draw a veil of privacy over her family and friends, but reticence is the death of reminiscence. Her reluctance to speak much of things outside her own interior life also tends to make her sound self-involved, which may be far from the case. For this reason, I was greatly frustrated by the first half of the book. In the second half, we learn of some life events that would shake any of us to our foundations, and I gained new respect for her. So I recommend this book to any fan of hers, and (with reservations) to fans of musician memoirs. But I can't recommend it to people who want a new perspective on Johnny Cash, to those who want to learn about how great songs get made, or to those who want the feeling of being present at the events of an interesting life. Reading this book is like attending a speech. You go because you admire the speaker, you listen attentively, and you're rewarded with some interesting stories. But the illusion of intimacy, so vital to a memoir, is never there, and you go home not much wiser than you were before. ( )

Not a lot to say about Cash's book. I am a fan of her music, and that of the Rodney Crowell. Johnny Cash, and to a lesser extent the Carter Family. It's an interesting road Cash has taken, and I was pleased to hear about her formative experiences as a musician, and about the dynamic of this well known family. I somehow came away from this wanting more information about all of it. Her family, her time in England, her marriage to Crowell. Though she is very up front about what happened in her life, there is not a lot about repercussions for her or her family (other than the death of her father, she is frank about the fallout from that.) I am no stalker, I don't like tell-alls, but there was an emotional remove to this that made it hard to love. So this was good, and recommended, but ultimately not as satisfying as I had hoped. ( )

Rosanne is a bit of a navel gazer. But that intense self-examination is part of the creation of her self and music and has always been so it seems. Her songs are very introspective creations - I like her music quite a bit but some of it does have a dark side and inhabits places that I don't always need or want to go to. This memoir published in 2010 gives us the first 55 years of Rosanne's life. Cash's songs never lacked for angst, and neither do many of the stories within this book.

There are a few parts in here that are very good. Some subjects she will touch on deeply, and others get a soft touch. Pieces of the story seem to be missing, but overall there is a lot to see here as an artist tries to figure out who she is and where life takes her and her family. The latter part of the book dealing with the deaths of family, 9/11 and her own rather major health crises has some intensely personal things. ( )