Cash Back

"Blood harmony" is the well-documented tendency for family members—whether they be Everlys or Louvins or Eilish/O'Connells—to sing together so closely, it's as if one voice were split in two, if not quite sonically then spiritually, like notes in different ranges on the same instrument.

But what do you call it when a child channels the voice of their parent? On the surface, Rosanne Cash's silvery soprano is so far from her father Johnny's bullfrog bass that it seems insane to speak about any link at all. But I hear a common resolution and stoicism in their vocal styles, a clarity of sound, a feet-on-the-ground solidity but not an impenetrability—there are cracks and imperfections in both voices, and they are very much a part of their beauty.

The affinity was never more clear, naturally, than when Rosanne covered Johnny's 1961 minor hit, "Tennessee Flat Top Box," and took it to #1 on the country charts in 1988. The famous story is that when she recorded it for her great King's Record Shop album, she thought it was a public domain folk song and had no idea it was by her father. The story strains credulity, frankly, but stranger things have happened. And of course, one of the senior Cash's strengths as a writer was an ability to conjure songs that sound like they've always been there—not necessarily such distinctive, could-only-be-him showpieces like "I Walk the Line," "Ring of Fire," or even "Folsom Prison Blues," but such tossed-off classics as "Big River," "Get Rhythm," and "Hey Porter." 

I'd put the deceptively simple "Tennessee Flat Top Box" in that ageless category. A bemused song about a fandom, a sort of proto-Beatlemania in which women of all ages fawn over a quiet young guitar hero playing in a "little cabaret in a South Texas border town," it has a neat, economical division of labor between verse and chorus, each subsisting on just two chords: B-flat and F for the verse, E-flat and B-flat for the chorus. They're linked throughout by a signature Cash four-note walking pick-up, though the first time we hear it in the vocal melody, it's delivered with one of those sneaky time changes you often hear in country and folk tunes. The song starts in 4/4, and then:

Though that walking figure recurs again in each verse, the time change doesn't, and the rest of the song stays in straight 4. But that's not the last of the song's subtle, ear-catching anomalies. The central instrumental break—really the song's chorus, in which the little dark-haired boy shows off his picking handiwork—is built almost monomaniacally on that same walking figure, now in E-flat. But note the odd number of bars for each chord (the break proper starts and ends on the E-flat measures): three of E-flat, four of B-flat, one of E-flat as a turnaround, which sends us back to the B-flat ostinato that is the song's anchor:

Stravinsky it ain't. But such small irregularities are part of what lodges this quietly hypnotic song in my mind, rendering its old-as-the-hills familiarity teasingly strange. And somehow Rosanne's version, with its slight vocal quaver, sounds even more elemental and timeless than the oracular original itself (below). It could be that her gender somehow puts her in closer touch with the song's lyrics about women swooning for a young man. That feels a bit reductive, though; the power of her recording lies in its crystalline refraction or distillation of the song's essence, and I won't be convinced that this doesn't have something to do with family ties.

UPDATE: I sent this post to Rosanne Cash, and she shared this anecdote with me:

There was a famous voice doctor in Nashville, Dr. Ossoff, who my dad saw. I saw him a couple of times myself—he treated all the singers in Nashville. He did a spectrogram on Dad’s voice, and said to him, "Do you think your voice is similar to your daughter’s?" And Dad said, "No, not at all." Dr. Ossoff said, "They’re identical." He had done the same test on me and the readout was the same. OBVIOUSLY octaves apart! Dad told me this, and I’ve never forgotten it. I think about it still.