Songs and stories are at the heart of the work of The Glimmerglass Festival. The operas, musicals, concerts, readings, and conversations that fill our summer calendar are all different expressions of the storytelling and song— those fundamental human impulses. This summer, we welcome Rosanne Cash, joined by John Leventhal on guitar, for a one-night-only performance of songs and stories on June 23.
With 15 albums and four books to her credit, Cash is a master storyteller. Even as a child, she felt the power of language: “I would ask my mother to read me every sign, every paper, every milk carton, and package I saw,” she writes in Composed, her 2010 memoir. “I insisted she tell me every word and what it meant, nearly driving her crazy in the process, and then I tried to memorize their spellings and meanings. On learning that Europe was a place across the ocean, I asked her if ‘European’ was a real word. She made a joke about going to the bathroom along the lines of ‘You’re peeing’ and refused to say whether it was a real word, which made me furious with her. She didn’t take my intense need to learn about language seriously, and I was desperate for someone who understood my hunger.”
Rosanne Cash began traveling with her father, Johnny Cash, when she was a teenager. As the daughter of a country music legend, she benefited from a musical education like no other, and she went on to develop her own singular voice, on stage and in print. Although she lived briefly in Nashville, she grew up mostly in California, and has been a New Yorker for more than two decades.
Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Oxford-American, The NationaI, and many more print and online publications. In addition to continual touring, Cash has partnered in programming collaborations with Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, San Francisco Jazz, Minnesota Orchestra, and the Library of Congress. She was awarded the SAG/ AFTRA Lifetime Achievement award for Sound Recordings in 2012 and received the 2014 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award in the Performing Arts. She was chosen as a Perspective Series artist at Carnegie Hall and hosted four concerts (including a major show of her own in February 2016) during their 2015/16 season. She continues her association with Carnegie Hall as a Creative Partner. She also served as 2015 Artist-in-Residence at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. On October 11, 2015, she was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters’ Hall of Fame.