The Center for the Arts at Monmouth University has announced that tickets are now on sale for an Oct. 21 concert featuring the standard bearer for one of the greatest legacies in American music: multiple Grammy winner Rosanne Cash.
Part of the 2016-2017 Performing Arts Series, the 8 p.m. concert is one of several Fall 2016 events presented under a special partnership between Monmouth University and the LA-based Grammy Museum. Hosted inside the recently renovated Pollak Theatre, the show finds the celebrated vocalist and songwriter joined on the newly enlarged Pollak Theatre stage by husband, musical director and guitarist John Leventhal and their full band, in a set that draws from the artist’s rich catalog of recordings, with a spotlight on the triple-Grammy album The River and the Thread.
Boasting eleven Cash-Leventhal originals, The River and the Thread marked an exciting new evolution in the long-playing career of a performer who made her first big splash with the 1981 mega-hit “Seven Year Ache” (and who netted her first Grammy in 1985). A cycle of portraits in story and song, the album sketches the lives of Southern people – from the thoughts of a soldier gone off to fight in the war between the states, to the struggles of a contemporary Alabama couple – with a paint box of Delta blues, Appalachian folk, Nashville country, gospel, and the myriad other styles that sprang from the fertile soil of Cash’s native Southland.
At the same time, the record speaks to the soul of the artist whose starkly compelling 1990 LP “Interiors” signaled both an emotional and physical move from music-row Nashville to New York City, and whose storytelling skills have been honed over the past quarter of a century via the publication of an acclaimed memoir, a children’s book, an edited collection of “Prose by Celebrated Songwriters,” as well as numerous contributions to The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker.
Garnering three major awards at the 2015 Grammy ceremony — for Best Americana Album, as well as for Best American Roots Performance and Song for “A Feather’s Not a Bird” — the all-original River and the Thread serves as a fine complement to the award winning 2009 release “The List,” in which Cash and a cast of guest performers (including our own Bruce Springsteen) interpreted a dozen classic country selections by other composers — all of them drawn from a list of 100 essential country songs that her father, Johnny Cash, provided to the aspiring performer as a way of better understanding the deeply rooted soul of the music.
While never turning her back on her frankly awesome pedigree, through heartfelt covers of “Tennessee Flat Top Box” and other songs by her famous father, the eldest daughter of Johnny Cash quickly emerged from the formidable shadow of “The Man in Black” as a composer and performer of rare eloquence and chart-topping dexterity, as witness her eleven number one singles (among them the Grammy winner “I Don’t Know Know Why You Don’t Want Me”). From her successful early collaborations with first husband Rodney Crowell, to the introspective and confessional moods of her mature later work, Cash remains that most special of musical messengers — a continuously evolving crafter of stories and caster of spells.
Attendees at the Oct. 21 date will also have the opportunity to view “Bob Dylan: Photographs by Daniel Kramer,” a Grammy Museum-curated exhibit on the walls of the building’s Pollak Theatre Gallery. Collecting more than 40 candid images of the ascendant musical game-changer taken between 1964 and 1965, the Dylan exhibit remains on display through Dec. 20.
Tickets for the Oct. 21 appearance by Cash are priced at $45 and $60 (with a Gold Circle seating option available for $75), and can be reserved through the Monmouth University Performing Arts Box Office at 732-263-6889, or online at www.monmouth.edu/arts. Tickets for other upcoming performing arts events, including a Nov. 11 concert starring Arlo Guthrie and his band, presented in partnership with the Grammy Museum, are also on sale now. To schedule interviews, please contact Kelly Barratt at 732-263-5114.
IMAGE COURTESY of Monmouth University Center for the Arts
