Rosanne Cash, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall. July 2015. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

The sound of a thousand silent pins dropping onto the patterned listed carpet could not have distracted the audience inside the Philharmonic Hall as the sight of time playing one of the cards in which memories are made and connections through history are enhanced.

Even the added sizzle of excitement that was seized upon by the elusive beast that Time runs with could not have wished for more as the Cash family legacy walked on stage inside the Philharmonic Hall and the time played tricks with loving affection on the audience.

Alongside her husband John Leventhal, Rosanne Cash came on stage and proceeded to take the Sunday night crowd through both her own illustrious work and through some of the stories that surrounded them; all the while the legacy and ghost of the much missed Johnny Cash never seemed to be too far from the stage door looking on with pride and emotion.

If writing is a form of cathartic expression, if it is the best way to exorcise ghosts and to lay rest past energies then the sound of tales of the Delta, of the proud history and the tremendous effect that one such area can have on a family is to be relished in and not let go. If exorcising ghosts is the point then reliving the images is to keep them fresh and throughout the superb evening’s entertainment by Ms. Cash and John Leventhal, that freshness was more in keeping that forgetting anything that acts an inspiration and sheer beauty.

The music is timeless and bountiful, that is to be expected when it comes to the daughter of one of the most respected musicians to have ever come out of post-war America but it is also heartfelt and full of a compassion for a long gone era that nostalgia alone cannot bear to leave it caged. It is the ability to tell a story from any perspective that makes Rosanne Cash’s music so gloriously vivid and in songs such as Modern Blue, The Sunken Lands, Ella’s Tune, The Long Way Home, 50,000 Watts of Common Prayer and When The Master Calls The Roll that sense of imagery, of playing with time back in the Delta and the crossroads that led Johnny Cash to find his way out of his father’s dominant hand all show how the past can also dominate the present, the greatest trick that Time can play.

As Rosanne Cash though herself was to muse, without the same radio stations that inspired her father to pick up a guitar and play, she would never have discovered the music that Liverpool gave to the world via the Beatles and as the sun began to set on perhaps one of the most spiritually fulfilling evenings at the Philharmonic Hall this year, that sense of completed circle was not missed by a single crowd member as they stood as one to applaud not just the richness of the evening, but for the legacy that such talent is capable of producing.

A night of raw but beautiful balance, Rosanne Cash is every inch the performer in which to spend the evening with.

Ian D. Hall