The textile mill in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, where Crystal Lee Sutton fought to unionize employees in the early 1970s is where Rosanne Cash landed. Sutton’s story was adapted into the 1979 film Norma Rae, which earned Sally Field an Oscar for Best Actress. The tale was revisited and researched by Cash when she began composing the music, along with husband and longtime co-producer and co-writer John Leventhal, for the upcoming Broadway musical Norma Rae six years ago.
“It’s a huge shift because they’re not for me to sing,” Cash tells American Songwriter of the project, while in her home studio with Leventhal in New York City. Researching the history and the music of the times, right down to where the workers lived, the sounds inside the textile mill, the race relations and relationships between men and women, what they would say or not, are all things Cash examined before starting to write the songs for the production, which they hope will be ready between the 2024 or 2025 fall seasons.
“The songs are not for me to sing, so writing in character has been a big shift, and finding a character’s sense of poetry or language that isn’t mine,” Cash says. “Writing in the voice of older Black men in North Carolina in the 1970s, I had to be so careful to find a voice that I had no experience with, and to be respectful, and find what their language was, and John married Sondheim and Appalachia so deftly.”
The musical is one of the dozens of projects Cash and Leventhal have worked on together over the past 30 years. Leventhal’s production and songwriting have spanned work with George Strait, Vince Gill, Patty Loveless, Joe Cocker, and Shawn Colvin, among others. He most recently co-produced the track “Crumble,” featuring Cash, on The National’s second 2023 album, Laugh Track.
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First working with Cash after she had moved to New York City from Nashville, following the release of her 1990 album Interiors, Leventhal came on board for her eighth album, The Wheel, as a co-producer. The Wheel marked a different sound for Cash, as well as a transitory period in her personal life. At the time, Cash’s 13-year marriage to Rodney Crowell was dissolving, while her relationship with Leventhal had just begun.
“I don’t think we understood or appreciated each other in the beginning, as much as we do now,” Cash says of her union with Leventhal. “Thank God, it’s gone that way instead of the reverse direction. I appreciate him more than I ever did musically, or personally. It took a while to find a rhythm of how to work together, instead of it feeling like it was competitive or that we have to be territorial.”
Cash admits there are moments when she is still territorial about her ideas. “Most of the time it’s in service of doing something good instead of just winning,” she says. Leventhal jokingly interjects, “This is a little bit like the ‘Newlywed Game’ because I gave pretty much the same answer.”
Cash jokes that they didn’t even compare notes from Leventhal’s interview on the previous day. “We know each other really well,” Cash adds. “We tend to argue about the same things in the studio. He wants this note sung, but I want to sing this one. He wants me to change this word, then I dig in my heels.”
She adds, “He doesn’t generally write lyrics, but he has strong opinions about the cadence of lyrics, or the the way they scan through his melody. We have strong opinions about what the other is doing but usually something good comes out of it.”
Leventhal and Cash were married in 1995 and have worked on seven albums together. Those albums include Cash’s follow-up to The Wheel, 10 Song Demosin 1996, along with Rules of Travel (2003), Black Cadillac (2006), The River & the Thread (2014)—which earned the couple three Grammy Awards for Best Americana Album, along with Best American Roots Song and Best American Roots Performance for “A Feather’s Not A Bird”—and her most recent release, She Remembers Everything, in 2018.
“For me, Black Cadillac sort of started the process of us getting better,” says Leventhal. “The first few records (The Wheel and 10 Song Demos) I felt were scattered.” At the time, Leventhal says Cash was in a “vortex of record-making.”
Black Cadillac was dedicated to Cash’s mother, Vivian Liberto, her father’s first wife before June Carter. Liberto died in 2005 at 71, the same age as Johnny Cash, who passed away two years earlier, which led Rosanne to close the album on the silent elegy, “0:71,” for her parents.
“Most of those songs I wrote by myself because, for obvious reasons, they were very personal songs,” Cash says of Black Cadillac, which also features four tracks co-written by the two. “John’s right. I can pinpoint the song that started a whole new phase of how we wrote songs together. It was called ‘House on the Lake.’ That just felt like a door opening to me when we wrote that song.”
Leventhal quips, “She had a very successful commercial country career before I got my hands on her. I couldn’t really help her transform her career out of the milieu of Nashville into the bigger sort of pop world. I don’t care about commercial stuff anymore at all, but at that point, I think I had one foot in commercial music and one foot out.”
To commemorate the first album they worked on together, Cash and Leventhal are releasing the remastered The Wheel 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, the first under their newly launched label RumbleStrip Records. The label will release more of Cash’s reissues, along with Leventhal’s forthcoming debut solo album, Rumblestrip, in early 2024.
Produced by John Jackson and long-time manager Danny Kahn, who will oversee the archival releases and operations at their label, and mastered by Dan Millice, the reissue of The Wheel features the original, remastered album, along with a second live LP, including Cash’s “Austin City Limits” performance from July 26, 1993, and a rare recording of her appearance on the Columbia Records Radio Hour.
“I really resist looking back,” Cash shares, reflecting on The Wheel. “I’m always interested in what’s next and what inspiration is coming. I get a little anxious about looking back and going over things I did because I always hear what I could have done better. I don’t like to revisit those times in my life. I’m excited about what’s next, but having said that, the trajectory of everything that we’ve done together started with that record, and it was a real watershed moment in both of our lives.”
Cash adds, “And that is as important if not more than what we recorded, so it is infused with something much bigger. It’s got a much bigger life, at least in my feeling of our history. I started to think, at my age, it’s time to be proud and claim those things I did, even if they sound outdated to me sometimes, or if I cringe at a lyric and go ‘Oh, that’s so self-serving, or navel-gazing’ or whatever. It’s time to claim those things for what they are.”
The song she wrote that was recorded was “Love Has Lost Again,” which appeared on her father’s 1976 album One Piece At A Time, just two years before she released her eponymous debut. “There’s less navel-gazing, I’m proud to say,” Cash says, laughing, of her earlier work compared to her lyrics now.
“You’re more poetic lyricist now than you were then,” adds Leventhal.
“There’s some specific technical things I do differently,” Cash says. “I’m not as attached to nature metaphors as I used to be. I’m not obsessed with the intricacies of romance as much as I was—even though I still felt just as romantic about him [looks at Leventhal]—but it doesn’t need to be rehashed over and over.”
She continues, “I like writing in voices of characters. I’m more willing to take chances, lyrically. Learning to co-write with [Leventhal] made me less territorial. I think I’m a better songwriter, overall.”
There are more stories she needs to tell and within a stretch of mediums. Along with their forthcoming musical, Cash has also contributed several essays to magazines like The Atlantic, the Oxford American, and the Frick Museum. In 2018, she also released the art and lyric book Bird on a Blade.
On songs, she says, “They have to relate to something within, or it won’t work” and cites her 2021 song “The Killing Fields,” which she wrote following the Black Lives Matter protests. “It was about me, and then it dipped into something that was about the past, and about other people, and then it came back up to be connected with me,” Cash says of the song, which tackles the history of lynchings in America — The dust of men and thunderstorms / The parched and rolling sea / He’s running through the killing fields / Just like a hunted deer.
“It had that trajectory in the lyrics,” Cash adds. “Thinking about how I was going to write that song, I knew what I wanted to say, in general. And I thought, Well, this has to be in a narrative ballad tradition where there’s no chorus. It had to unfold verse by verse, so I had that structure in my mind. I had this idea of the intensity of the story, and then it was a matter of digging ditches, going to work.”
That summer, she and Leventhal also wrote “Crawl Into the Promised Land,” which she says came out of anger around the socio-political climate within the country.
“Everything that’s still happening,” Cash says. “There are also things about me. These lyrics I just sent [Leventhal] today are about my early life as a musician in California, the canyon fires and days in the studio, and parties that went bad. I still remember those things very viscerally.”
All of Cash’s songs, from her self-absorbed youth through her most recent 14th release She Remembers Everything in 2018, have remained stitched in her musical autobiography.
“Even with a painter, it’s all autobiographical,” Cash says. “You bring your full self to something. And there you are.”
