February 15, 2005

From Country to Show Tunes

hen was the last time you paid close attention to Eliza Doolittle yowling the Lerner and Loewe song "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" in a Cockney accent? Not recently, I would guess. But did you ever imagine that with the deletion of a single syllable, the "er" in loverly, the squawking daydream from "My Fair Lady" could be made over, like Eliza herself, from a Broadway duckling into a gliding pop-country swan?

That transformation was made by the country-pop singer Rosanne Cash on Thursday evening at the Allen Room of Frederick P. Rose Hall. The performance, which followed her confession that she was a closet fan of show tunes, was the inspired parting gesture of a singer who took her invitation to perform in Lincoln Center's American Songbook seriously enough to make something special out of it.

Earlier, Ms. Cash, who performed with five musicians and a harmony vocalist, defined the great American songbook as spanning everyone from Lerner and Loewe to Steve Earle. Into a survey of her songwriting career, she slipped politically incisive barbs by Bob Dylan ("License to Kill") and John Lennon (a fragment of "God"), as well as John Stewart's "Runaway Train" and her father Johnny's "Tennessee Flat Top Box."

The evening began with Ms. Cash's spoken reflection on her family lineage (her father's side), tracing its evolution from Scottish seafarers into musicians. Restlessness is a defining trait of Ms. Cash's work. Since she released her first album 26 years ago, she has been a wanderer, drifting among rock, country and folk. If her membership in an eminent Nashville dynasty conferred instant country credibility (and the hits to prove it), she vehemently chafes against being pigeonholed. (She now lives in New York.) Yet the same qualities that distinguish her father's songs are embedded, though softened, in her own; her plainspoken tunes, some with country-blues echoes, stay close to the dusty ground.

At the same time, Ms. Cash's literary introspection aligns her with West Coast 70's folk-pop interpreters like Linda Ronstadt. At its sweetest, her voice suggests a blunter, twangier country cousin of Ms. Ronstadt's achy-breaky throb.

Ms. Cash previewed several sturdy new songs from a record in progress, "Black Cadillac." But it was in three of her vintage songs, "Blue Moon With Heartache," "Seven Year Ache" and "The Wheel," that her alchemy of folk, country and soft rock fused into gold.