Music in her past, present, and future

It should come as no surprise that Rosanne Cash's beautifully observed, often heartbreaking new memoir, Composed (Viking, $26.95), reads in many ways like a song cycle: thematically linked, full of intense emotions and vivid moments of intimacy, of discovery, of pain.

In her introduction, the singer/songwriter, daughter of Johnny Cash and stepdaughter of June Carter, writes about a life circumscribed by music: "I have learned more from songs than I ever did from any teacher in school. They are interwoven and have flowed through the most important relationships in my life - with my parents, my husband, and my children. Songs have unfolded in my living room and under the spotlight. For me music has always involved journeys, both literal and metaphoric."

For Cash, 55, who comes to the Free Library of Philadelphia tonight at 7:30 for a reading and Q&A (to be moderated by her pal, the Philadelphia transplant John Wesley Harding), the process of writing about her life took more than 10 years. She lost both her father, the American music icon, and her mother, Vivian, over the last decade, as well as June Carter Cash, the stepmother who embraced her as her own and whose musical legacy spans generations. 9/11 happened, of course, and Cash, a longtime New Yorker, saw the burning towers from the Greenwich Village sidewalk where her son had just gone into school. And, oh yeah, there was brain surgery.

"It was indeed a decade-long process," Cash says on the phone from her home in Manhattan, laughing a bit ruefully. "But I never had a day where I sat down and decided to write a memoir."

What happened, she explains, is that she wrote an essay, "The Ties That Bind," for the now-defunct Starbucks magazine, Joe. A perfectly honed piece about country music and family, and about the image of a bakery truck pulling up to her Casitas Springs, Calif., home when she was a little girl (a memory that begets a metaphor), the essay was selected for the Da Capo Press anthology Best Music Writing 2000.