Rosanne Cash celebrates career, donates artifacts to Country Music Hall and Museum

The Americana Music Association and Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum partnered this week to honor Rosanne Cash's foundational work in roots-based music.

At the event in the museum's Ford Theater, the Grammy-winning artist joined her husband, fellow Grammy-winning songwriter and producer John Leventhal, to discuss their new label, RumbleStrip Records, the 30th-anniversary reissue of Cash's 1993 album, "The Wheel" and Leventhal's upcoming debut solo album.

The duo are no strangers to being feted at the Hall and Museum, as they were featured in 2015 when Rosanne was the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's Artist in Residency.

Cash is a recipient of the Americana Music Association's Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award, plus Song of the Year and Album of the Year honors. She is a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the author of her 2010-released memoir, "Composed," a New York Times bestseller.

Michael Gray, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's vice president of museum services appeared at the event to accept the following items from Cash into the museum's permanent collection:

• A custom-built acoustic guitar made for Rosanne by luthier Danny Ferrington in 1979. Commissioned by Johnny Cash as a birthday gift for Rosanne, the instrument has maple sides and back, a spruce top and her name inlaid in mother-of-pearl on the fretboard.

• Three bomber-style tour jackets made for Rosanne, Johnny and June Carter Cash to commemorate Rosanne's Seven Year Ache tour in 1981. Each jacket is personalized with the wearer's name and a Cherry Bombs patch. The Cherry Bombs — consisting of Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill and other Emmylou Harris's Hot Band members — backed Rosanne on the tour.

Alongside Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams, Cash's 1980s work branded the decade as a moment where emotive pop-crossover country songs, including her 1981 releases "Blue Moon with Heartache" and "Seven Year Ache" were noteworthy.

Couple that with Harris' partnership with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt on the 1987 album "Trio"'s quartet of top-selling country singles ("To Know Him Is to Love Him," "Telling Me Lies," "Those Memories of You" and "Wildflowers") and Williams' self-titled album a year later yielding countrified, blues-inspired material like "I Just Wanted to See You So Bad" and "Passionate Kisses."

The rugged yet intelligent compositions blending a note-perfect addition of blues, country, folk and rock still resonate in Americana's modern, popular circles.

By 1993, Cash's divorce from fellow Americana star Rodney Crowell yielded the previously-mentioned "The Wheel."

"I'm changing like a girl / On the threshold of her life / In love with the whole world," sings Cash on the album's track "You Won't Let Me In." The record achieves standard-creating excellence in blending pastoral yet modern and urban pop-rock style with folk-inspired sounds aided by Mary Chapin Carpenter and Marc Cohn appearing as background vocalists on the album.

For more information on the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's exhibitions and forthcoming events, visit https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Rosanne Cash celebrates career, donates artifacts to Country Music Hall and Museum