ROSANNE CASH // THE LIST

with Bruce Springsteen

 

Bruce Springsteen wirkte auf Rosanne Cashs zwölftem Soloalbum "The List" mit.
Springsteen steuert den Song “Sea of Heartbreak” bei.
 
“Sea of Heartbreak” wurde 1961 von Don Gibson komponiert und unter anderem auf Johnny Cashs Erfolgsalbum “Unchained” (1996) veröffentlicht.
 
Das Album "The List" erschien in Amerika am 6. Oktober 2009. In Deutschland wurde das Werk am 29. Januar 2010 veröffentlicht.
   

Tracklist "The List":

Miss the Mississippi and You
Motherless Children
Sea of Heartbreak (featuring Bruce Springsteen)
Take These Chains from My Heart
I’m Movin’ On
Heartaches by the Number (featuring Elvis Costello)
500 Miles
Long Black Veil (featuring Jeff Tweedy)
She’s Got You
Girl from the North Country
Silver Wings (featuring Rufus Wainwright)
Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow

Songinfo:

SEA OF HEARTBREAK
In a tribute from the Country Music Hall of Fame, Stacey Wolfe wrote that Don Gibson (1928–2003) was responsible "for writing at least three of the most famous songs in country music history, for helping to define the sound and studio style of modern country music, and for releasing more than eighty charted records between 1956 and 1980."

Gibson's remarkable track record makes it ironic that he didn't write "Sea of Heartbreak" – a #2 Country and #21 Pop charter, and the second-biggest pop crossover hit of his long career (after "Oh Lonesome Me"). The song was not a product of Nashville's Music Row in Nashville but the work of New York pop lyricist Hal David (stepping out from his legendary partnership with Burt Bacharach, inaugurated in 1956) and a far less–renowned co–writer, Paul Hampton.

Hal David (born 5/25/1921 in Brooklyn, New York) was both an aspiring writer and a trained violinist: As a journalism student at New York University, he earned extra money playing on the "Borscht Belt" circuit of Catskills hotels. After the end of World War II and his discharge from the Army, Hal returned to civilian life and was encouraged by his older brother Mack David to try his hand at song lyrics. (Nine years Hal's senior, Mack David was an established songwriter whose credits as a lyricist included "I'm Just a Lucky So-and-So," with music by Duke Ellington, and "I Don't Care If The Sun Don't Shine," recorded by Elvis Presley for Sun in 1954.)

Beginning in 1947, Hal David enjoyed modest–to–major success with songs recorded by Sammy Kaye, Guy Lombardo, and Teresa Brewer. One of Hal's first collaborations with Burt Bacharach, "I Cry More," was sung by Alan Dale in the teen exploitation movie Don't Knock The Rock (1956). The team scored even bigger hits with songs for Johnny Mathis, Marty Robbins, Guy Mitchell, and Perry Como; their initial run ended in 1958, when Bacharach accepted Marlene Dietrich's offer to be her musical director for a series of international concert tours.

Hal David soon found new collaborators, and among these was an aspiring singer/actor named Paul Hampton. Sources such as the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) list the Oklahoma City native's birth year as 1945, which would have made the precocious Hampton just 15 years old when he co-wrote "Sea of Heartbreak" with Hal David. The alternate date 1937 is more credible, since other accounts describe Hampton as a sophomore at Dartmouth College in 1957 when Mitch Miller signed him to Columbia as a solo artist and issued his debut single.

"Classy Babe" b/w "Play It Cool" and subsequent releases for Columbia, Top Rank, Dot, Cameo and Warner Bros. all failed to crack the Hot 100, but Paul Hampton founded more lasting success as a songwriter. Hampton wrote songs for the English teen idol Billy Fury ("Like I've Never Been Gone," #3 in the UK in 1963) and for the American singers Johnny Tillotson ("I Rise, I Fall," #36 in 1964) and Gene Pitney ("Donna Means Heart¬break," the flip side of Pitney's #21 hit "True Love Never Runs Smooth" in 1963). The ASCAP composers' database lists some 60 titles written or co-written by Paul Hampton including the theme song for My Mother The Car (NBC, 1965–1966), one of the most critically reviled series in the history of American television. Concurrent with his song¬writing activities, Hampton studied acting in New York and went on to a long career of mostly minor roles in film and especially television.

There are 60 Paul Hampton compositions in the ASCAP database, none more lasting than "Sea of Heartbreak." The song has resurfaced on the soundtracks of several films (including Clint Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge and Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy) and in versions recorded by the Everly Brothers, Merle Haggard, Johnny Rivers, Charley Pride, bluegrass stalwarts the Country Gentlemen, and rockabilly revivalist Robert Gordon. A new generation of listeners was introduced to "Sea of Heartbreak" when Johnny Cash recorded it with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers for his 1996 album Unchained. The singer's second collaboration with producer Rick Rubin, Unchained was named Best Country Album in the 40th annual Grammy Awards.

Live Performance:

15. April 2010 - Page Auditorium, Durham, NC
  

  
Bruce Springsteen war am 15. April 2010 in Durham, North Carolina zu Gast. Gemeinsam mit seiner Tochter Jessica hat Springsteen die örtliche “Duke University” sowie ein Aufnahmestudio in der Innenstadt besucht. Am gleichen Abend trat Bruce Springsteen als Stargast beim Rosanne Cash Konzert im “Page Auditorium” auf. Er sang gemeinsam mit Johnny Cashs ältester Tochter den Song “Sea of Heartbreak”.

Rosanne Cash schreibt:

"When I was 18, I was on the road with my dad. One day, we were sitting in the tour bus, talking about songs, and he mentioned a song, and I said, "I don’t know that one." He mentioned another one, and I said, "I don’t know that one, either." Then he started to get alarmed, so he spent the rest of the day making a list on a legal pad, and at the top he put "100 Essential Country Songs." And he handed it to me and he said, "This is your education."

The genesis of Rosanne Cash's remarkable new album, The List, dates back to that day in 1973-to a time before her eleven previous albums, her 1985 Grammy and numerous additional nominations, her twenty-one Top 40 country singles. She had just graduated high school and was starting to write songs of her own when her father, the incomparable Johnny Cash, discovered some gaps in her knowledge of American roots music.

"I think he was alarmed that I might miss something essential about who he was and who I was," says Cash. "He had a deeply intuitive understanding and overview of every critical juncture in Southern music-Appalachian songs, early folk songs, Delta blues, Southern gospel, right up to modern country music."

Three dozen years later, Cash has selected twelve songs from the syllabus presented to her by her father and recorded her first album of covers. Still, she remains a songwriter to her core, so she approached each composition-from Jimmie Rodgers' "Miss the Mississippi and You" to Bob Dylan's "Girl from the North Country"-in search of its particular essence.

The result is a glorious range of sounds and moods, as rich and complex as such Cash masterworks as Seven Year Ache, Interiors, and Rules of Travel. A handful of truly special guests join her for some of the recordings: Bruce Springsteen ("Sea of Heartbreak"), Elvis Costello ("Heartaches by the Number"), Wilco's Jeff Tweedy ("Long Black Veil"), and Rufus Wainwright (Merle Haggard's "Silver Wings").

The idea for The List came about while Cash was on tour promoting her 2006 studio album, the widely acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Black Cadillac-a reflective song cycle about the loss of her father; her mother, Vivian Liberto; and her stepmother, June Carter Cash. She had held on to the original copy of the List for all those years, but had never thought to do anything with it.

'It just didn't interest me," she says. "I learned all the songs, but then I set on my own course as a songwriter, and set about separating myself from my parents, as you do when you're young. When I was writing the narratives for the Black Cadillac show, I had recently found the List again, so I wrote about it. And virtually every show, people started asking me. ‘Where's the List? What about that List?'"

Still, she resisted the idea of recording the classic songs herself. Eventually, though, Cash decided that she needed a change after Black Cadillac, a break from that project's emotional intensity. On tour in Europe, she tentatively added a few songs from the List into her set.

The response was immediate. "People were eating it up, like they were hungry for these songs," she says. "And the import started to sink in-that this was about me and my dad, but it was also about a cultural legacy. These songs are as important as the Civil War to who we are as Americans. Something clicked and I entered it full-bodied then, with all my heart."

To complicate matters further, however, in 2007 Cash underwent surgery for a benign brain condition. After a full recovery, she and her husband, Grammy-nominated producer John Leventhal, got down to the business of culling through the songs on the List and choosing the ones that best fit her voice and her sensibility, and that added up to the most complete story. Songs were attempted and scrapped; others were in, then out, then back in again.

Some of the selections were straightforward. ("I've loved 'Silver Wings' and 'Long Black Veil' since I was a kid," she says.) Others proved more difficult for the singer to find her own point of entry. Patsy Cline's recording of "She's Got You" is so iconic that Cash was intimidated to take it on, before ultimately creating her own glorious take. "Heartaches by the Number" felt structured and fixed, but bringing in Elvis Costello helped her find a way to loosen it up.

"Girl from the North Country" had its own meanings, and its own challenges, for Cash. "That song was so much about my dad," she says. "I have those images of him singing it with Bob seared into my mind, and I was afraid of it. I had to go back to Bob's original version, which I actually don't know as well, and then approach it as a folk song."

All of the thought, research, and experimentation that went into each performance is immediately evident on The List. The revelation of this album is hearing Rosanne Cash, for the first time, purely as an interpreter. "I've never done a record just as a singer before, so that was a bit jarring to me," she says. "But John kept pounding home that that's what this record is really about. So then I kind of got into it, and it was liberating-like 'OK, these aren't my songs, I can just have fun and play with them.'"

Leventhal crafted a sound for The List that is surprising without being self-conscious, familiar but not obvious. "This was the record John has been waiting his whole life to make," says Cash. "He has such extensive knowledge about roots music, and a deep, deep love of Southern music. So writing these arrangements was a dream job for him."

All of the couple's knowledge and talent was required for the timeless blues "Motherless Children." They listened to dozens of versions, recorded by everyone from Eric Clapton to obscure bluegrass musicians. "We started putting lyrics together from different versions until it was a bit more linear," she says. "We had to make a definitive version of that song, and I think we did."

The closing song on The List, the Carter Family's "Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow," may be the most personal choice of all for Rosanne Cash. "Helen Carter was incredibly important to my growth as a songwriter," she says. "In fact, she and Maybelle taught me to play the guitar. So that song had a lot of emotional resonance for me because of them-and June, too. I learned so much from them and I had a real love for all of them, so that song is really kind of a tribute to them."

With this ambitious project behind her, Cash says that, while she has started writing songs of her own again, she hopes to do a second volume of songs from her father's List at some point, and then make sure that the full 100 songs are archived properly. She also points out, though, that while she hadn't fully explored this priceless gift from a father to a daughter, the songs on the List had always been important to her own work. Rather than a break from her own career, she looks at The List as something she needed to grow into over time.

"It's not like I didn't know these songs before," she says, "so their standard of excellence has been in the back of my mind all along. That standard is something I'm always trying to reach."

  

Mehr Infos gibt es auf der offiziellen Rosanne Cash Homepage: http://rosannecash.com