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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.


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