Rosanne Cash Discovers a Mirror in New Exhibit: 'To Be Seen Is the Most Beautiful Thing' (Exclusive)

When the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum contacted Rosanne Cash a few months ago, telling her she would be the subject of a new exhibit, she says her first reaction was shock.

“I said, ‘Me? Are you sure?’” Cash, 69, tells PEOPLE. “I didn’t understand why they wanted to do that.”

For decades, the former country singer was a stranger to the genre’s charts as well as the Nashville outlet, opting instead to forge her own path as a New York-based singer-songwriter. Still, Cash, of course, knew better than to turn down the attention of the Nashville museum, and she opened her heart, as well as her store of memories, to the process.

The exhibition has just opened, and on Wednesday Cash herself revealed how skillfully she answered her question: Why her?

In the sweep of its semicircular space, artifacts, images and words vividly tell the story of a fascinating musical pioneer who first challenged the commercial conventions of country in the 1980s. With a fresh sound that blended LA country and soft rock, she topped the charts with two albums and 11 singles, including signature songs like “Seven Year Ache” and “Blue Moon with Heartache”; In 1988 she was Billboard’s top singles artist.

Then, in the early 1990s, she bravely escaped convention entirely, reinventing herself in New York as a singer-songwriter of deep introspection, turning into a founder of what became the Americana movement. Her inventiveness continued over the years with such seminal albums as wheel, List and Grammy winner River and thread.

Through it all, Cash has been both burdened and encouraged by her legacy, because there’s no getting away from the fact that she’s the daughter of country cornerstone Johnny Cash.

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The Rosanna Cash Show at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on December 4, 2024 in Nashville.

Nancy Bread

She herself tried to escape her heritage early in her career. “At 23, I thought I was completely original, cut off from the past, from my legacy,” she said in her remarks to a crowd of friends, family and industry insiders who gathered at the museum for a private reception on Wednesday. “Today, I appreciate that heritage and the tradition I was founded on… The experiences I thought I had nothing to learn are the ones that left the deepest mark.”

Her father’s presence, as well as his deep love for his daughter, runs through the exhibit, though the now-legendary list of 100 country and roots songs he considered essential to her musical education is missing. It was given to her when she was 18 years old, and she drew 12 songs from it on her 2009 album. Listbut she never disclosed in full.

Although he says he intends for it to eventually remain in the museum’s archives, access to the exhibition was prohibited. “I didn’t want to share something so personal,” she explains to PEOPLE. As for that, she adds, now she is also forbidden.

“It’s in my file somewhere,” she says. “I hid it from myself for a moment.”

Museum writer-editor RJ Smith, who was one of the exhibit’s curators, doesn’t mind its exclusion: “It’s almost more powerful because it’s unavailable to us.”

In addition, there are so many other surprising and revealing treasures in the story that unfolds from early childhood onwards. Cash was happy to share another personal playlist, created by her mother, Vivian Liberto, of her favorite love songs, including Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind” and Frank Sinatra’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

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Johnny Cash’s Correspondence on Display at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum December 4, 2024.

Nancy Bread

Samples of her father’s handwritten correspondence are also on display. In one, from 1984, he admits his pain and guilt at leaving her after divorcing her mother in 1967, and also affirms: “Where you stand with me is in my mind as an equal. I have a love for you that knows no bounds.”

Standing in front of the exhibit, Rosanne Cash stares at three pages, torn from a spiral notebook, now behind glass for all to see.

“Oh,” she says with a sigh. “So sweet. It’s just a father’s unconditional love.”

But as poignant as that letter was, the part of the exhibit that Cash says brought her to tears is the centerpiece, a writing desk her father gave her. It features a skillful plaster cast of her hands — her own writing “tool” — and an expressive drawing of Cash’s silhouette that inspired one of her album covers.

Above the desk hangs a poster describing the dream that changed her life one night in the late 1980s, the impetus that made her rethink everything about her commercial career. Behind it hangs a curtain of cloth strips, perhaps signifying the uncharted musical wilderness she was about to enter at that stage in her timeline.

“Everything changed after this,” Cash says.

Rosanna Cash’s desk at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on December 4, 2024 in Nashville.

Nancy Bread

As described in the exhibit, her 12-year marriage to key musical collaborator Rodney Crowell soon ended, and she and their four daughters moved to New York. She also moved her label home, from Nashville to New York, and found a new collaborator, musician-songwriter-producer John Leventhal, whom she married in 1995. Four years later, their son was born.

The dramatic life change, Smith says, keeps Cash relevant to this day “as a symbol of being true to yourself, making honest careers and artistic choices. When she left Nashville, she moved away from country music and became more of a singer-songwriter. That was brave and it was a big bridge to walk. She owns those choices and has made great music out of them.”

Artifacts illustrating her last three decades attest to her creative freedom, fluidity and activism: a copy of her 1996 collection of short stories. Water surfacesthe first of her four books; the powerful poetry in the samples of her scribbled lyrics; American Ingenuity Award from Smithsonian magazine; Free Speech Award from the Americana Music Association.

Rosanne Cash at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on December 4, 2024 in Nashville.

Brett Carlsen/Getty

The title of the exhibit is “Time Is a Mirror,” taken from the lyrics of her 2018 song “Nothing but the Truth,” but Cash indicated in her remarks at the reception that the exhibit is also a mirror. All the memories she saved over the years, she said, turned out to be “a story I didn’t know how to tell.”

Smith and co-curator Mick Buck, Cash tells PEOPLE, “I realized who I am, and being seen is the most beautiful thing. That’s what we all want, right? To be seen. And accepted.”

During her speech, Cash expressed her gratitude to the museum, as well as several key people in attendance, including Crowell. “I learned so much from him – from the most technical to the most creative,” she said. “Mostly Rodney and I helped each other growing up and we have these four beautiful daughters.”

Longtime friends Vince Gill and Emmylou Harris, both Hall of Famers, were also present. Acknowledging their presence, Cash laughingly told Gill, “I’ve always wanted my voice to sound like yours and Emmylou’s together.”

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Rosanne Cash Trophy at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on December 4, 2024 in Nashville.

Nancy Bread

Cash just realized she’d made music history — after all, it’s now in a museum — but that realization comes with mixed feelings.

“I don’t like to think that way because the danger is that you say ‘I’m done,'” she says. “I want to feel like I’m still a beginner. I want to keep working and being in the trenches.”

She is only two years shy of her parents’ life expectancy – each died at the age of 71 – and, she says, that fact weighed heavily on her. “I feel the urgency, the urgency of the years,” she says. “Like what else do I want to do?”

Currently, she says, she is working on her next album, and she and her husband continue to collaborate. One work in progress is a musical based on the film Norma Rae.

Even on the day she would face her life at the museum, Cash says, something else, more urgent, still captured her sharp and fertile mind.

“I’m dwelling on the lyrics of the song I’m writing now,” she says with a self-aware laugh. “Seriously, that’s what I woke up thinking.”

“Time Is a Mirror” runs through March 2026 at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and is included with museum admission. The opening of the exhibition coincides with the digital edition The Essential Collectiona new set of 40 songs drawn from Cash’s 15 albums.

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Source: HIS Education