The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum will examine the groundbreaking, influential career of Rosanne Cash in its newest exhibition. Rosanne Cash: Time Is a Mirror will explore Cash’s more than 40-year journey as an artist, songwriter and storyteller, and how she has embodied both tradition and innovation across her musical career. The exhibit, which opens Thursday, Dec. 5, and runs through March 2026, is included with museum admission.
Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present day, Cash has staked out a distinctive place in American music. Her songs have drawn on rockabilly rhythms, the truth-telling of folk-rock songwriters, West Coast country-rock energy, new wave flash and deeply rooted country music. A four-time Grammy winner, her hits include “Seven Year Ache,” “Blue Moon with Heartache,” “I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Want Me,” “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party,” “It Hasn’t Happened Yet,” “Tennessee Flat Top Box, “No Memories Hangin’ Round” and “Never Be You,” among others. Throughout her career, she has maintained an unwavering artistic spirit and vision. In 2021, Cash became the first female composer to receive the MacDowell Medal, awarded since 1960 to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to American culture.
“Rosanne Cash has been called ‘a musical mystic’ and a ‘songwriting time traveler,'” said Kyle Young, chief executive officer for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “Her music moves across genres and legacies, looking backward and forward in time. While she works within musical traditions that shaped her, the way she has turned those traditions in fresh and unexpected directions has defined her.”
“I never expected to be embraced and honored by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in this way,” said Cash. “I’m sincerely humbled, as I have so much respect for the mission of the museum and the dedicated team who are so superb in preservation and education. It’s been a thrill to sort through the artifacts of my life and career with the curators and find that these things are valued beyond just my own memories. I have thought about my children a lot while sorting items, listening to songs, and discussing the exhibit, and one of the best things about this honor is anticipating sharing the experience with them. I’m extraordinarily grateful to be given this tribute, and the opportunity to deepen my relationship with the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.”
The exhibit will include stage wear, song manuscripts, instruments, photographs, videos and more. Some artifacts on display will include:
- The handwritten lyrics by Cash for her song “The Real Me,” from her 1987 album, King’s Record Shop.
- Cash’s red velvet shawl worn in the 1988 music video for “It’s a Such a Small World,” written by Rodney Crowell. A #1 country hit, her duet with Crowell was included on his 1988 album, Diamonds & Dust.
- A modest desk used by Johnny Cash when writing at his small, private office at home. Rosanne, who inherited the desk after her father’s death, thinks of it as a prism where the past and the future, legacy and rebellion, come together.
- The 1964 Gibson Dove guitar acquired by Cash’s husband John Leventhal in the 1990s. It became her primary performance guitar for many years. Leventhal also played the instrument extensively on Cash’s 2003 album, Rules of Travel, and presented it to Rosanne’s daughter Carrie Crowell and her husband, musician and producer Dan Knobler, as a wedding gift in 2014.
- Cash’s Martin OM-28M Rosanne Cash Signature Edition model guitar, which she used extensively. The instrument is the first of 48 of her signature guitars built, with a rose inlay on the headstock and “CASH” inlaid in mother-of-pearl at the final fret on the fingerboard
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- Cash’s handwritten lyrics for her song “Closer Than I Appear,” from her 2003 album, Rules of Travel.
- Carmen Marc Valvo–designed laser-cut leather duster worn by Cash at appearances in 2006, including Austin’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference, her concert at Carnegie Hall and the “Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
- Cash’s Libertine plaid jacket worn on the cover of her 2009 album, The List.
- Cash’s Alabama Chanin suede jacket, embellished with gold beads, worn when she was inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame in 2017. During the ceremony at Austin’s ACL Live at the Moody Theatre, Cash and John Leventhal were joined by Ry Cooder, Neko Case, and Elvis Costello for a performance of Cash’s 1981 breakthrough hit, “Seven Year Ache.”
- Stella McCartney–designed jacket, embellished with rhinestones and embroidered birds, worn by Cash at the Americana Honors & Awards ceremony at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in 2018.
Opening weekend program
In support of the exhibit’s opening, Cash will participate in a conversation and performance in the museum’s CMA Theater on Sunday, Dec. 8, at 2:30 p.m. The interview will be illustrated with archival photos, audio recordings and video clips. Cash will also perform during the program. Tickets will be available here on Friday, Oct. 18, beginning at noon Central.
About Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1955. Three years later, she and her parents moved to Southern California. Vivian Liberto, Cash’s mother, was a stay-at-home mother to Rosanne and her three sisters, and her father, Johnny Cash, was a rising country star with charisma and a string of hits.
Cash loved to read and was primarily drawn to the sounds of rock and folk music growing up. Her U.S. album debut, Right or Wrong, was recorded for Columbia Records in Los Angeles in 1979. The album, which featured Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill and other groundbreaking players, helped launch a new era of country music, featuring a roster of musicians who were redefining country for a new audience. She and Crowell also married in 1979.
Then the 1980 album Seven Year Ache was a breakthrough, the title song a pop crossover, her first country #1, and one of the album’s three hit singles. Something larger was coalescing, a sound and a cadre of musicians coming out of this scene led to ideas and sounds that would influence country music throughout the 1980s.
She received her first Grammy award in 1985 for “I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Want Me.” She created strong records that bridged country music and contemporary rock sounds — all made while also raising four daughters with Crowell. Demands and expectations grew in the wake of King’s Record Shop, with four #1 singles that made her Billboard’s top singles artist of the year.
The 1990 album Interiors was her first self-produced record, and it signaled the moment when Cash said she found herself as a songwriter. It was a new beginning. This exhumation of a relationship’s final stages came with more new beginnings: in 1991, Cash moved to New York City and entered a new musical collaboration and relationship with producer John Leventhal, whom she married in 1995. Cash’s The Wheel (1993), an album about fresh starts, marked another turning point in her career. She and Leventhal also welcomed a son in 1999.
A health crisis triggered by polyps on her vocal cords left Cash unable to sing for years. 2003’s Rules of Travel, her first full-on album in ten years, included “September When It Comes,” a duet with her father, who was unwell at the time it was recorded. Her 2006 album Black Cadillac featured songs in a mood of grief following the deaths of her mother, her father and stepmother June Carter Cash. What emerged was a coming to terms with country music and family legacies, including her album The List (2009), which featured songs from a list her father made for her years ago of essential, mostly country songs he wanted her to know. The album was nominated for a Grammy and won the Americana Music Honors & Awards’ Album of the Year in 2010.
The nascent genre of Americana rightfully claimed her as a founding mother, while Cash has continued to push musical boundaries and employ her writer’s voice — authoring books, essays and articles. Her 2010 memoir “Composed“ landed on the New York Times’ bestseller list, with the Chicago Tribune calling it “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read.” Her next album, The River & the Thread (2014), earned her three Grammys for its blending of impassioned blues, gospel and country music.
Cash has collaborated with a wide assortment of musicians — Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Jeff Tweedy, Kris Kristofferson, T Bone Burnett and the National, among others. In addition to regular touring, she has partnered in programming collaborations with Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, SFJAZZ, the Minnesota Orchestra and the Library of Congress.
Cash’s recent years have also been marked by a wave of activism, ranging from testifying before Congress on raising musicians’ royalty rates to joining the Daughters of the American Revolution (Knickerbocker Chapter) to collaborating with her husband Leventhal on a score for a theatrical version of “Norma Rae,” a 1979 film about a textile union organizer. She has also been a longtime activist for gun control, as well as deeply involved in the restoration of her father’s spartan childhood home in Dyess Colony, Arkansas.
Cash has been inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame. She also served as the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Artist-in-Residence in 2015. Other honors include a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award, Americana: Free Speech Award and election as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
