Rosanne Cash live at Strathmore in North Bethesda review

Rosanne Cash had a pretty good reason for being in the Washington, DC area this week. A statue of her father, country music legend Johnny Cash, will be unveiled in the United States Capitol’s Statuary Hall on Tuesday. Since they were in town anyway, Cash and her husband John Leventhal led their six-piece band through a rousing hour-and-forty-five minute show at the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, Maryland, about 15 miles north of the Capitol Building.

Cash opened her set with a couple of tunes from 2014's Grammy-winning album The River & the Thread before shifting gears to a much earlier album, 1993’s The Wheel. That album occupies a special place in Cash’s catalog. It was her first album after the dissolution of her marriage to singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell, and many of its songs centered on her fledgling relationship with Leventhal, who she would marry a couple of years later.

Of more immediate importance is the fact that Cash’s agreement with Columbia left the rights to that album with the label for thirty years. Now that those thirty years have passed, she owns it for the first time. She and Leventhal have remixed it and released the new edition through their label Rumblestrip Reconds. Cash celebrated with three songs from The Wheel, including ”You Won’t Let Me In,” “Tears Falling Down,” and the title track, one of Cash’s finest rockers.

Rosanne Cash is still teaching fans lessons about the richness of American music

Cash announced her father’s statue unveiling before playing “The World Unseen,” a cut from her 2006 album Black Cadillac, which was dedicated to Johnny. She was on the verge of tears by the song’s conclusion and had to take a moment to compose herself before continuing.

In the middle of the set, the other four musicians began to exit, eventually leaving Cash and Leventhal alone for a few numbers. First, keyboard player Misty Boyce and bass player Sam Katz left. The remaining four pieces performed a cut from Leventhal’s debut album, “That’s All I Know About Arkansas.”  

In addition to his work with his wife, Leventhal has written for, played with, and produced many of the biggest names in Americana music for more than four decades. He has won six Grammys along the way. Still, as  Cash introduced his song, “It only took him seventy years to release his debut.” Leventhal said he imagined the song as a cross between Malian guitar player Ali Farka Toure and the Stanley Brothers. To my ears, it sounded like some very cool swampy bluegrass funk – if such a thing exists.

After the remaining musicians left, Cash and Leventhal performed three straight covers – “Long Black Veil,” which was on the list of 100 classic country songs her father had given to her to learn, the Don Gibson hit, “Sea of Heartbreak,” which Cash had previously recorded with Bruce Springsteen, and a staggering performance of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” with a fine acoustic opening from Leventhal.

When the full band returned, they played an electric power ballad Cash co-wrote with Sam Phillips, “She Remembers Everything,” and “The Only Thing Worth Fighting For,” the song she co-wrote with T Bone Burnett and Lera Lynn for season two of True Detective. Cash said she loves the song but still has not watched the show because she has heard it is too violent for her tastes.

She acknowledged how talented a songwriter ex-husband Crowell is but tamped down the audience’s applause before playing one of his songs – “When the Master Calls the Roll.”

The highlight of the evening came when Cash and Leventhal were alone on stage in the middle. Their banter was laid back and very funny. But the rest of the band had moments as well. Guitarist Kevin Berry’s pedal steel added a lovely touch to a half dozen of the evening’s numbers, and he and Leventhal provided some thrilling dueling solos on the cover of Johnny Cash’s “Tennessee Flattop Box.”

The full band ended the main set with the fan favorite “Seven Year Ache,” and then returned for an encore of the Bob Dylan song “Farewell Angelina,” initially recorded by Joan Baez almost sixty years ago. Rosanne Cash has written a lot of great songs, but her concerts always pay homage to the rich history of American music. Her father taught her that, and she continues teaching it to the rest of us.

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