Month: September 2009

Unless you’ve spent the last 50 years cryogenically frozen in deep space, you may have heard of Rosanne Cash‘s father, Johnny Cash. When Rosanne locked in on becoming a successful country singer/songwriter, she had a formidable set of footsteps to follow. But she isn’t one to duck a challenge. Twenty of her singles cracked the top 20 in the country charts from 1979 to 1990, with 11 reaching the number-one spot. Her new album, The List (out next week on EMI/Manhattan), is a terrific reworking of country classics, handpicked from a list of indispensable songs her dad made for her 36 years ago. Having Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Jeff Tweedy and Rufus Wainwright appear as guest artists on the record is a nice fit. Rosanne will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week long. Read our Q&A with her.

Cash: This is my favorite stretch of coastline in the world. Napeague is on the east end of Long Island, in between Amagansett and Montauk. It is a very narrow spit of land, with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and Gardiners Bay on the other. You can easily walk between the ocean and the bay. In 1938, a great hurricane washed the ocean all the way over the beach, the road, the wetlands and the houses, right into the bay. Napeague was completely covered in water. It was also right here 101 years earlier that my ancestor, William Cash, a whaler who lived in Nantucket, shipwrecked right off the Napeague shore. He swam ashore as his ship was burning on the reef. He and three other young men survived. It didn’t thwart his ambition to be a whaler, however, as he went on many more voyages and became a captain. I have a photo of him, from his obituary in the Nantucket paper in the late 1800s, and he looks uncannily like my father. I go to Napeague quite often. I love the dunes and the white sand and the quality of the light. The sun sets just to the right and slightly behind you in the summer if you are facing out to sea, and it can be quite magnificent. It has a lonely quality, or at least I imagine it does. When I think about the storms and the shipwreck and the urgency of survival and the moment when my own bloodline was in danger of obliteration, it makes the light and the water feel so immediate and so important. It is a world away from the trendy beaches of East Hampton, just a few miles up the road, or the surfing community of Montauk, a few miles in the other direction. I feel territorial about Napeague, and I worry about future hurricanes that might cover it up again. In the meantime, here is a photograph of me, on my favorite stretch of coastline, with a cameraman who was filming the visit for a documentary called Mariners & Musicians.

—photo by Danny Kahn