Rosanne Cash Plays the Harris Center Tonight

Grammy-winning country-rock singer/songwriter Rosanne Cash returns to Harris Center for the Arts to perform live from her 13th record, The River & The Thread. Cash won the hearts of her audience when she appeared here in spring of 2011.

With The River and the Thread, Cash has added the next chapter to a remarkable period of creativity. Her last two albums, Black Cadillac (2006) and The List (2009), were both nominated for Grammy Awards; The List-an exploration of essential songs as selected and given to Rosanne by her father, Johnny Cash-was also named Album of the Year by the Americana Music Association. In addition, her best-selling 2010 memoir, Composed, was described by the Chicago Tribune as "one of the best accounts of an American life you will likely ever read."

In May Rosanne Cash received a trio of Americana Honors & Awards; 2014 nominations for Album of the Year (for The River & The Thread), Artist of the Year and Song of the Year (for "A Feather's Not A Bird"). The Grammy-winning artist is also nominated for Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Rosanne Cash will perform tonight, October 3, 2014 at 8:00 pm. Tickets are priced at $39-$55; Premium $65. Tickets are available online at www.harriscenter.net or from Harris Center Ticket Office at 916-608-6888 from 10 am to 6 pm, Monday through Saturday, and two hours before show time. Parking is included in the price of the ticket. Harris Center is located on the west side of Folsom Lake College campus in Folsom, CA, facing East Bidwell Street.

Coinciding with her Harris Center concert is the dedication of The Johnny Cash Trail by the city of Folsom, on Saturday, October 4 at 10 am on the northwest corner of E. Natoma Street and Folsom Lake Crossing Road. Rosanne Cash will be in attendance at the dedication ceremony.

One of the most compelling figures in popular music, with a body of work encompassing country, rock, roots and pop influences, Rosanne Cash inherited a reverence for song and profound artistry - and an equal duty to find insights of her own. The oldest daughter of country music icon Johnny Cash and stepdaughter of June Carter Cash of the legendary Carter Family, she holds a lineage rooted in the very beginning of American country music, with its deep cultural and historical connections to the South.

Over a three-decade career she has responded to this heritage with 15 albums of extraordinary songs that have earned a Grammy Award and nominations for 12 more, the Americana Honors and Awards' Album of the Year Award, and 21 top-40 hits, including 11 No. 1 singles. In recent seasons, Cash has appeared in concerts and talks at the Spoleto Festival, Toronto's Luminato festival and the Festival of Arts and Ideas, and partnered in programming collaborations with the Minnesota Orchestra, Lincoln Center and San Francisco Jazz.

The River & The Thread (Blue Note Records) debuted in January 2014 at No. 11 on The Billboard 200 (becoming Cash's highest-charting album yet) and at No. 1 on the Folk Albums chart. Cash wrote the album's 11 original songs with her husband John Leventhal, who also served as producer, arranger and guitarist. The River & The Thread topped the Americana radio chart for 11 weeks and was hailed as "the work of a lifetime" by Newsweek.

"[The River & The Thread] paints a beautiful and complex portrait of the American South, seen through the eyes of a prodigal daughter come home," said TIME. "Cash comes full circle as a storyteller and singer of exceptional grace and grit. It's among her finest work in a 35-year career, assured and at ease, and one of 2014's first great albums," observed The Boston Globe. USA Today awarded The River & The Thread four stars while Associated Press noted, "the 11 songs blend Tennessee flattop twang with gospel, the blues, and even hints of jazz while building a bridge from Dust Bowl ballads to Dusty Springfield pop."

With The River & The Thread, Cash turns her attention to other American lives and locations. The album richly evokes the Southern landscape - physical, musical, emotional - and examines the indelible impressions it has made on our own collective culture and on Cash.

The River & The Thread is sweeping in its breadth, capturing a unique, multi-generational cast of characters - from a Civil War soldier off to fight in Virginia to a New Deal-era farmer in Arkansas to a contemporary Mobile, AL couple. While Cash and Leventhal found inspiration in the many musical styles associated with the South - swampy Delta blues, gospel, Appalachian folk, country and rock, to name a few - this is a completely contemporary collection. Cash's crystalline voice and Leventhal's compelling guitar work are at the heart of the album, and they bring in additional instrumentation to suit the tone of each particular song - from the delicate orchestral passages of "Night School," (which nods to Stephen Foster, who also had a deep affection for the South) to the ghostly keyboards of album closer "Money Road."

Rosanne Cash acknowledges that, even with fifteen albums and four books behind her, it was difficult to start writing songs again after spending several years immersed in the masterful compositions featured on The List. "You cannot keep that in your mind, except as an inspiration, a standard to aspire to," she says. "To say, 'I'm going to write a song as great as "Take These Chains"'-you're not! So the only way to not get dismantled by that is to stay connected to your own muse, and immerse yourself completely in what you're doing so it can be as rich and authentic as it can possibly be. That's all you can hope for."

With The River and the Thread, she has risen to that challenge-and emerged with a beautiful and haunting album, one of the finest works in an extraordinary career.

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