When Johnny Cash's eldest daughter, Rosanne was 18, he gave her a list of 100 essential country songs. On October 6th, she will release a cover album based on that list entitled, appropriately, "The List". Among the tracks will be Hank Williams' "Take These Chains from My Heart", and Hank Snow's "I'm Movin' On". Also included will be duets with Bruce Springsteen, Rufus Wainright, Elvis Costello, and Jeff Tweedy.

The following is an interview from Billboard.com in which Rosanne talks about the album and the list.

How did you react when your father first presented you with his list of essential country songs?

 

I
was thrilled. I know people think, "Oh, 18 years old, you wouldn't have
sense enough to know what you were getting." I did, because I had just
started playing guitar. Helen Carter was teaching me all the Carter
Family songs. I was really steeped in rock and pop music but it was a
whole other landscape that I didn't realize existed except for the most
obvious things -- Patsy Cline and Ray Charles and my dad's music.

 

How did you narrow down a list of 100 songs to 13?

 

Some
songs were clearly not suited for me to do -- they were either too
gender-specific or I couldn't do another version of "This Land Is Your
Land." Then there was the vetting of which songs were suited to my
voice. There was also a sonic and emotional balancing so that it wasn't
all "Motherless Children" and "Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow"; it
was also "Heartaches by the Number."

 

What role did your husband, John Leventhal, play in your interpretation of the songs?

 

John
did all the heavy lifting; these are his arrangements. It was a pure
joy for me to get to sing them, but it was a pure joy for him to get to
this. This is the dream project for him that he's been waiting his
whole life to do. He's the only New Yorker I know who has such a deep
and extensive knowledge of roots music and country music.

 

These are some of the best and biggest songs of the last 100 years. Was it intimidating to cut them?

 

"She's
Got You" was a little bit because I knew Patsy Cline's record so well,
and "Girl From the North Country" was because it seemed like a
watershed moment in musical history. I have these pictures of my dad
and Bob [Dylan] together. But John said, "No, we're going to go to
Bob's original version; that's the doorway into the song," and it was.
Bob's original version is a classic folk song. The rest of them, no, I
wasn't intimidated. I've been singing "Silver Wings" in the shower for
30 years.

 

On your blog you wrote that this was the only record you could have made at this point in your life. Why?

 

Because
my parents are dead, and I had a pretty serious face-off with my own
mortality. You think about the things you want to do most of all in the
world. It felt like the perfect and the only thing to do.

 

You
look back at your ancestry. You want to know where you come from, who
you are and what you're going to pass on to your kids, and "The List"
is the perfect cohesion of all of that.

 

Do you feel any connection with today's country music?

 

I
don't listen to country radio but I often hear things that I think are
fun and exciting and good. I don't know who a lot of the young people
are or what they sound like, but the other day I was flipping through
the channels and I saw Taylor Swift. I'd heard so much about her, she's sold millions and millions of records, but I'd never heard her sing. I saw her on a George Strait
tribute and I thought, "Wow, this little girl is really good, she's
really got something." That's always exciting, when you see somebody
who is so young and you can see that spark in them.