Rosanne Cash has come off the road. On Monday her management team posted a short statement to her Instagram account saying the 71-year-old singer and songwriter would postpone her next three concerts because of what it called an unforeseen medical emergency. The first of those shows was due to take place tonight.
The statement is brief, and it is careful. “She is recovering under her doctors’ supervision, who have recommended a temporary restriction on travel and performing,” it reads, before adding that “this restriction is impacting her upcoming Wyoming and Montana shows.” It closes: “Rosanne deeply regrets the cancellation and looks forward to rescheduling appearances.”
What it does not do is say what happened. Neither Cash nor her team has disclosed the nature of the emergency, and the outlets carrying the story — among them Rolling Stone, American Songwriter and EntertainmentNow — have not been able to add to it. That silence is worth respecting rather than filling in.
Three dates, and a statement that hedges itself
The affected shows are Sheridan, Wyoming on September 8; Billings, Montana on September 9; and Bozeman, Montana on September 12. Makeup dates have not been announced.
There is a small inconsistency inside the statement that is worth flagging, because different outlets have leaned on different halves of it. It opens by describing the shows as postponed and closes by calling the same thing a cancellation. Outlets have also transcribed the key phrase two ways: Rolling Stone and American Songwriter report “unforeseen medical emergency”, while EntertainmentNow and AOL render it “unexpected”. The practical meaning is the same either way — the dates are off, and her team expects them back on the calendar.
Cash had been touring with her husband John Leventhal, the Grammy-winning guitarist, producer and songwriter who has shaped most of her records since the late 1980s.
She has been taken off the field before
This is not the first time Cash’s body has interrupted her career, and the earlier episode is the reason the news has landed as heavily as it has with her audience.
In November 2007, at 51, she underwent brain surgery after being diagnosed with a Type I Chiari malformation — a structural condition in which the cerebellum is pushed down into the upper spinal canal, affecting balance among other functions. She had been living with severe headaches, neck pain and difficulty swallowing and breathing. She cancelled concerts, then had the operation at New York-Presbyterian Hospital on November 27, where a surgeon grafted synthetic material onto the membrane covering her brain to relieve the compression. Her label said at the time that she was expected to make a full recovery.
The recovery was neither quick nor easy. “I’ve seen how illness, disability and injury can just sideline someone’s career,” she told Hot Press. “I had vocal polyps twice. I had brain surgery that put me out of commission for a couple of years. I’m well aware of how it feels to be taken off the field.”
She has also said that what got her through it was listening rather than playing — Samuel Barber and Arvo Pärt, The Decemberists, John Prine. “Listening to music is healing no matter what state you’re in,” she told the same interviewer. She later turned that interest into something more formal, working with neuroscientists at the University of Iowa on what music does to the brain.
The first album she made afterwards was The List, released in 2009. It was built from a piece of paper her father handed her when she was eighteen: a hundred songs he considered essential country music, written out for a teenager who at the time was more interested in escaping the family business than joining it. “It was a time in my life where I felt a new perspective, which was gratitude,” she said of making it.
The long argument with the name
Cash is the eldest daughter of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian, and she spent decades refusing to be introduced that way. She had eleven number one country singles of her own in the 1980s, “Seven Year Ache” chief among them, and a career as an author alongside the records. The relationship with the inheritance softened as she got older.
“Through my 30s, I resisted the idea of legacy. As I got older, I started realizing I do belong to the past,” she told AARP. “After my dad died in 2003, I received the small desk he’d had in his dressing room. I see that desk as a prism where the past and the future, legacy and rebellion, come together.” In one of its drawers she found a patch from his Air Force uniform reading CASH in block letters, kept for more than fifty years. “Some of the things you push away the hardest when you’re young are the things that you embrace the tightest when you get older.”
What is still on the calendar
The rest of her schedule is, for now, untouched. Cash is due back on stage on September 19 in Jonesboro, Arkansas. October takes her to Europe for seven shows, followed by a single Nashville date in November. She has December off before three California shows early in the new year.
Her team has given no timeline beyond the three postponed dates and no indication that anything past them is in doubt. Until that changes, the only honest thing to say is that a 71-year-old artist who has been through this once before is at home, under her doctors’ care, and planning to be back in eleven days.
