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  I had never been a girl who fantasized about weddings or having babies. Having come of age in the sixties, I thought there was something regressive, and repressive, about the whole idea, and my friends and I were all convinced that after high school we would just stop shaving our legs and move to a commune in Santa Barbara. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to do something transcendent and special with my life. The idea of settling down to the laundry every day and having children and getting together with other bored mothers for recreational activities truly terrified me. I remember a dream I had at age thirteen in which I was playing cards with my mother and grandmother in a small house. I was old and aware that my life was nearly over—a realization that left me desperate with regret. When I woke from that dream, I made a vow to myself, as serious as any vow I would make as an adult, that I would not permit myself to lead an unconscious existence, that I would not become complacent, that I would not allow my life to be defined by the petty and mundane. Even at that early age, I recognized that the card games in my dream represented some form of intellectual atrophy. (In my current life, I have enjoyed plenty of games of poker on the road with the guys in the band without seeming to court imminent spiritual disaster, and sometimes doing laundry is as calming as a Zen meditation. Flexibility is as essential as principle.) It was music that kept the passion for transcendence alive in me in the succeeding years.

  Even when I was only ten years old, though my friends and I all worshipped the Beatles, I was conscious of feeling something more powerful and more adult about the band—a territoriality and identification that didn’t make sense. I couldn’t articulate those feelings to anyone, but I knew that they represented the kind of inner life I wanted—the songwriting, the liberation, the backbeat. My mother must have sensed this fervor in me, and even respected it, however little she might have comprehended it. The night the Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, my mother kept my sisters out of the living room, where I was glued to the television. She shushed them, saying, “Rosanne’s watching the Beatles.” My dad did understand the appeal and the kind of energy they aroused in me, on a lot of levels, and brought autographs of all four Beatles home to all four of his daughters. I still have mine.

  If my commitment to a higher ideal kept me from fantasizing about marriage, it did not preclude fantasies about love. I found it first with Rodney. Marriage started to seem a natural stage in the progression of a romance, and besides that, my parents were eager for me to make our cohabitation legal. We married in 1979, when I was twenty-three years old, and I effectively ended my childhood with him. We were not only perfectly suited to help each other resolve the most egregious character traits left from our difficult childhoods, but we bonded in exhilarating creative and philosophical exploration. Unfortunately, we were both fairly untethered to anything earthbound and, finally, were too similar. While we ruminated dreamily on philosophy and music and metaphysics and art, neither of us knew where to find a post office, or how to change the oil in the car, or whether we even owned a key to the front door of the house. Ultimately, we both had to belatedly grow up, and we recognized that we couldn’t do it together. We had four daughters, and it was excruciating for them, and for us, to split, but today each of the girls has told me on separate occasions, “I can’t believe you and Dad were ever married. You’re so unsuited to each other!”

  I grew up, and into John. We were “in each other all along,” as Rumi says, but we both had to develop to a point where we could fit each other’s lives. He pulled me back down onto the planet, into the world, and into my own body. He was a pragmatist, a truth-teller, and one of the most extraordinarily gifted musicians I had ever known, a native New Yorker with a deep love and vast knowledge of roots and Southern music—and he was incredibly funny. That combination was irresistible to me. I had little pragmatism and a lot of magical thinking. My sense of truth had always been distorted by my idiosyncratic upbringing and by the secrets that were inherent in my father’s drug addiction and how that had played out in our family life. An astrologer friend of mine looked at my and John’s charts shortly after we got together and concluded with a sigh, “The two of you would make one great person.” That assessment used to rankle both of us, as if we had to fill in the other’s blanks, but now I see that relationship as the ultimate in companionship. We revel in the other’s differences now. He is endlessly fascinating to me; unknowable and thrilling, and familiar and safe. I’m always excited to see him at the end of a day.

  We were married by Rabbi Joseph Gelberman, somewhat of a star in mystical Judaism in New York. He showed up only minutes before the ceremony was to take place, leaving John about to come out of his skin with anxiety that he wouldn’t actually appear. As a result, the ceremony started in a slightly unsettled state for everyone but the unruffled rabbi. In our meeting with him a few months earlier, John had made it clear that he did not want to speak Hebrew during the wedding since he had never been bar mitzvahed; his mother was Catholic and his father Jewish, but he had not been raised with any religion. The rabbi had agreed, but during the wedding he slipped into Hebrew and calmly instructed John, “Repeat after me.” For the first and only time in his life, John found himself speaking in Hebrew, and even smashed the glass at the conclusion of the ceremony. My father, who also gave a reading, may have been more thrilled than anyone present that day. When I had told him that John and I were getting married, he said with a sigh of pleasure, “Thank God. I’ve been waiting forty years for one of my daughters to marry a Jew.” Shortly afterward, he wrote John an awkward but loving letter, expressing his satisfaction that “a Jew was finally being brought into his bloodline.”

  After the ceremony, the entire party walked a few blocks to the Puck Building on Lafayette Street for our wedding reception. While I was on the dance floor, my dad came up to me at the end of a song and pulled me aside. Staring at me intently with a mixture of shock and hope, he said, “You’re pregnant!”

  “No, Dad,” I answered, laughing. “But . . . as soon as possible!”

  Dad and June went to London to do some shows a day or so later, and John and I headed to Rome for our honeymoon around the same time. On the morning we arrived, we were sitting in the roof-top café of our hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps, having a coffee and reading the international papers, when I saw an item in the Herald Tribune reporting that Dad had had some kind of attack on the flight to London and, upon arriving at Heathrow, had immediately gotten back on a plane and returned to the States. Sighing, I threw down the paper, knowing full well that he hadn’t had any sort of “attack.” He had left the wedding reception early, and I was aware that he had been taking a lot of pills recently because of excruciating pain from his jaw, which had been broken by a dentist while trying to remove a cyst years earlier and had been causing him intolerable pain since. I had convinced myself that his drug use was under control, and I felt betrayed again by my assumption that Dad was more or less straight, only to discover how seriously out of it he had become. I had spent virtually my entire life in denial about the depth of addiction in so many people I love—Dad being the first, the imprimatur of my denial. It had caused me a lot of anguish, and my default position had always been to interpret the pain as betrayal. I later came to learn that a drug addict betrays no one but himself, and I didn’t have to become an accomplice in anyone’s personal dramas. But at that moment, in early May of 1995, on my honeymoon, I could only feel hurt. I put down the paper and put my feelings about the incident completely aside and turned my attention to the contours of my new life with John. The next day we traveled from Rome to the Amalfi Coast.

  As it turned out, Dad was off by only a week or so in his guess about my pregnancy. I conceived in Ravello that week, but I lost the baby seventeen weeks later, in late August. John was remarkably gentle and solicitous of my feelings and health, but I knew he was in a significant amount of pain himself. I wanted to turn to my parents for comfort. My mother tended not to be at her best in these
situations, as her natural impulse was to withdraw into her own grief, metabolizing the suffering of her children as if it were her own. Dad was much better in dealing with raw grief, having experienced so much himself, and did not possess any inherent need to fix other people or solve their problems. I howled into the phone when I told him of our loss. He listened quietly, only murmuring little grunts of sadness. When I finished, he told me a story about his own mother, kneeling in the fields after the death of Jack, his brother, and how she thought she couldn’t make it through another moment. She would cry out to God to help her, and then that moment was accomplished, and soon another day had passed. And then another. Then he gave me some advice, something he seldom did unless it was specifically solicited. “Cling to John,” he said. “I’ve seen so many couples break up because of the loss of a child.” I took that advice seriously, and it was the clinging to each other that got John and me through that time, and strengthened us, when so much potential for disintegration afflicted us. Later, when we faced other hard times, we had that first, devastating loss to remind us that we could stay together through just about anything. It was so typical of Dad that no matter how strung out he was, if the occasion demanded it, he could reach inside himself to that inextinguishable wisdom and intuition and offer something from it to soothe or enlighten.

  Shortly after our conversation he also wrote me this letter:Aug. 28 ’95

  Bon Aqua TN

  Dear Rosanne

  I was driving down to the farm this afternoon, grieving for you, when suddenly I felt the presence of my mother so strong that it was overwhelming.

  I clearly saw her death again, but it wasn’t painful this time.

  In my mind’s eye I saw several angels come down to each side of her, bear her spirit up and away and out of sight. It was a scene of total silence yet great joy. As I had seen at her death, again there was an “attitude” in the air, saying, “we are simply going about our unearthly business.”

  I’m not trying to get dramatic or otherworldly, Rosanne. This is what I saw and felt.

  I slowed down to a crawl in the right lane of the interstate, because, feeling mama’s presence and the angels so strongly, I shouted aloud, “Don’t go away!” And, thinking of how the angels had ministered spiritual things to my mother as she was dying, I said, “Go to Rosanne and minister to her because she desperately needs you. In the name of the Lord I ask this.”

  So baby, this afternoon I sent my mother’s friends to you. I’m sure that her spirit brought this about. She loved/ loves you so much. And tonight I entreat the holy angels, your grandmother’s friends to stay with you and help bring about your (and John’s) healing. The scars will be deep, but there is power in the spirit here.

  You must start to gain strength now and somehow rise above the pain of all this. Your family loves you very much, and although the days and nights will be hard for a while you will persevere.

  All my love

  Dad

  I signed a new recording contract with Capitol Records, and in the months after the loss of our baby, John and I made a record together called 10 Song Demo, which became an essential way for me to work out my grief. I can’t hear any of that record now without recalling the sadness of that time, and the quiet days spent in John’s basement studio on East Twelfth Street, recording those songs with sparse arrangement and heavy hearts.

  One day in 1988, I was lying on my couch, in a sleepy reverie as the afternoon sun spilled through the huge bay window in the living room of my log house outside Nashville, when it occurred to me, in a sharp, unsettling way, that—

  I was a singer. Not only was I a singer, but I sang for a living, which meant that a lot of people who were strangers to me were familiar with my voice without knowing me personally. They might not even know my name, but they had heard and now could recognize the Voice, a product of my genes and experience: authentic, but extremely personal, in my estimation.

  This was largely how I felt about my voice—that it was undependable, beyond my control, somewhat embarrassing at times; if not too low, then too high; if not too soft, then too loud, or too harsh, or too wimpy. It was simply not enough, not right, and as such it exposed me far, far more than I could comfortably allow. It presented the perfect conundrum, and therefore an irresistible career choice.

  My ambivalent relationship with my voice certainly had something to do with the fact that, thanks to my father’s profession, our family was exposed to great singers—great singers who were also extraordinary personalities—from an early age. My mother, for her part, was a devoted Patsy Cline fan, and would say her name with slightly pursed lips: “Patsy . . .”—no last name needed, vowels squeezed a little by disapproval, but the tight mouth holding back a barely contained thrill. Patsy was wicked and fabulous when both qualities really meant something, before they became cheap ideas used to market more marginal talents. She was the object of fascination, distrust, and raw, if hidden, admiration. But not judgment: There was nothing to attach judgment to because Patsy did not judge herself. She was too truly and spontaneously alive, too rooted in her body, too in command of a startling sexuality that infused everything and that was the vehicle for a preternaturally affecting voice that both revealed and obscured her essence.

  People who have genuine memories of her have become somewhat revisionist in their collective retelling. She was so great (also in the premarketing sense of the word) that they have felt almost obliged to polish and repair her wild and willful personality to suit the magnitude of her talent, particularly since she was a woman in an era that did not suffer female unaccountability gladly.

  I once asked Mom what she remembered about Patsy—not as someone who would have a professional take (for that I would have called my dad), but as a woman who had been so deeply affected by her. She laughed but didn’t ask why I had posed the question. “I didn’t know her well,” she admitted, “but your daddy and I did have her over to the house not long before she died. She had a mouth like a sailor, and she didn’t put on airs. She was just Patsy, comfortable in her skin. I admired that. But that beautiful voice and body were so different from her . . . roughness.” Mom paused. “I love her singing,” she said passionately, present tense, and after considering the matter a while added, “Well, she was very friendly.”

  I laughed, my revisionist theory confirmed. “Were you disillusioned when you met her, Mom?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want that to be said. She was ahead of her time, that’s all.” There was a quiet pause, then a little sigh. “I never got pictures with her.”

  Patsy Cline’s gifts were extraordinary enough to have become a profound source of inspiration even to those of us without immediate memories of her, those of us whose voices weren’t so full-bodied and fully formed from the beginning and whose values were not so exquisitely self-determined. In my private quandaries about my own voice, it gave me a lot of satisfaction to connect her teeming personality to the gifts she possessed. She lived a life utterly her own, messy and self-defined, and it all fed and merged with that voice.

  At the end of our conversation, I couldn’t help asking, “Mom, was I at that party?”

  “Sure, honey! That was in, let’s see, 1963? All you kids were born then.”

  I sighed wistfully. Somewhere in the blackout of early childhood I had had an encounter with Patsy Cline. I may spend the rest of my life trying to remember it.

  (When I recorded “She’s Got You,” a song Patsy had made famous, for my record The List in 2009, I was nearly paralyzed with intimidation. I could not get her voice out of my head in order to sing the song myself. I finally thought to just ask for her permission, if she didn’t mind, and I felt the pressure lift. The rest of the session went smoothly.)

  The other great touchstone was, of course, Tammy. I first saw her in person in the early seventies at one of my father’s “guitar pulls,” at which a lot of musicians and songwriters would gather in his living room to preview their new work. I was about nineteen yea
rs old at the time, with teenage insouciance to spare, and the honored guests were George Jones and Tammy Wynette. I sat slack-jawed and transfixed as they sang “(We’re Not) The Jet Set,” with Tammy perched on the plush blue antique sofa, hair poufed out to here, with nails, makeup, and outfit perfectly coordinated. She looked like a lotus blossom sitting next to George, a perfect foil, but completely herself. It was the most relaxed I was ever to see her. Tammy was sweet, in the way that only Southern women can be sweet, and a bundle of nerves. I don’t think she ever got over her ascendancy from the beauty parlor. At times it could seem as if she were merely a vehicle for her Voice, which had ambitions of its own, occasionally overreaching her own personal understanding of her goals. I remember driving by Tammy’s house in Nashville and staring at the wrought-iron gates with FIRST LADY ACRES scrolled across the top. I would think of her—proud but not egotistical (a feat in itself), delicate and strong—and of how the world would never again be innocent enough to produce another Tammy Wynette.

  In the early days of my own career I may have spent too much time around Emmylou. Her voice became a template for me, but it was one I could never hope to replicate or even approach. I did not have the high, lonesome, elegiac tone, the pierce and warble, the crystal beauty, the tears under the snow. My own instrument was darker and roomier, damp and yearning, something more untamed and imperfect. It took me a long time to let go of viewing Emmylou as a model and getting down to business with what I had. I remained fiercely critical of my own singing for many years, which wore holes in my confidence and stamina. Content mirrored context.