Rating 3.5 stars (out of 4)  

In the final decade of his life, Johnny Cash revived his career by collaborating with producer Rick Rubin on a series of recordings that yielded five studio albums and a box set – one of the great final chapters authored by any pop icon in the last half-century.

Now, more than six years after Cash’s death in 2003, 10 more songs from those sessions have been collected on “American VI: Ain’t No Grave” (American Recordings/Lost Highway). Skepticism would be in order, given that the legacies of artists from Elvis Presley to Tupac Shakur have been marred by countless ill-considered, posthumous releases.

That is not the case with “VI.” Cash was determined to record as much as possible soon after the love of his life, June Carter Cash, died in May 2003. Over the next four months until his own death in September, the singer hunkered down with Rubin at Cash’s home studio in Tennessee, working feverishly against time and his own declining health. Rubin helped make Cash relevant again in the ‘90s by serving as a low-key cheerleader and facilitator; he helped pick the songs and the musicians for each of Cash’s “American” recordings. He recorded Cash in small-group settings, an approach that only enhanced the singer’s gravelly conviction.

    Rosanne Cash had a few laughs with her husband, John Leventhal, on the stage Friday of the Harris Theatre, mostly over how to tune a guitar. It seemed like a set-up: What? They couldn’t afford a guitar tech? How about bringing along an extra guitar or two?
   
    The quarreling couple’s light-hearted repartee not only enhanced the air of intimacy, but provided a necessary balance to a 95-minute, 19-song performance brimming with longing, heartache and death.

    Cash will always be referred to as the daughter of a legend, Johnny Cash. But her 30-year career is also a work of art, marked by her acutely detailed songwriting. On Friday, however, nearly half the concert was devoted to a list of songs her father gave her when she was 18, mostly country classics that served as her introduction to a deeper, darker world than the one she was experiencing on American pop radio, circa 1973.

    Accompanied only by Leventhal’s sparse, trebly guitar playing, Cash played curator rather than diva. Her subtle, nuanced performances put the image-rich stories center-stage. Clearly, her mission was to get out of the way of these songs, to present them with as little window-dressing as possible. At times, she could’ve stood to be a touch more assertive, but mostly her instincts were correct.

        On “Long Black Veil” she created minimalist aural cinema by keeping the focus squarely on the voice-from-the-grave narrative. She played Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” with a stately, Elizabethan restraint, allowing the song’s innate beauty to emerge. And she brought out the alternately sultry and queasy twists and turns of Bobby Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe” by keeping things lightly simmered, just like the matter-of-fact dinner-table conversation in the lyrics.

        The concert also demonstrated that Cash isn’t done growing as an artist. She always had a small but pretty voice. Now she is taking it places that it couldn’t go in the ‘80s, when she was a country hitmaker. It’s a voice that sneaks up on you, especially when she started stretching notes during an a cappella passage in “Radio Operator,” a song she wrote about her parents’ courtship. On the finger-snapping swing of Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On,” she discovered her inner Billie Holiday.
       
        She two-stepped through “Tennessee Flat Top Box,” a rare upbeat number, and Leventhal’s percussive guitar playing brought a rock intensity to her devastating “Dreams are not my Home.” But mostly, Cash and Leventhal kept things lean and understated. This is a couple who may not know how to tune a guitar efficiently, but they sure don’t waste any time or notes finding the heart of a song.

greg@gregkot.com

Rosanne Cash set list Friday at the Harris Theatre

1. I'm Movin' On (Hank Snow)
2. Miss the Mississippi and You (William Heagney)
3. Long Black Veil (Danny Dill & Marijohn Wilkin
4. Sea of Heartbreak (Hal David & Paul Hampton)
5. Motherless Children (Traditional)
6. Heartaches by the Number (Harlan Howard)
7. Runaway Train (John Stewart)
8. Black Cadillac (Rosanne Cash)
9. Radio Operator (R. Cash, John Leventhal)
10. The World Unseen (Rosanne Cash)
11. Dreams are not My Home (Rosanne Cash)
12. Tennessee Flat Top Box (Johnny Cash) 
13. Ode to Billy Joe (Bobby Gentry)
14. Girl from the North Country (Bob Dylan)
15. Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow (A.P. Carter)
16. Seven Year Ache (Rosanne Cash)

Encore
17. If I Were a Man (Rosanne Cash)
18. Blue Moon with Heartache (Rosanne Cash)
19. The Wheel (Rosanne Cash)

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    Rosanne Cash was 18 years old when her father, Johnny Cash, shared something that would change her life. Rosanne was already a big fan of the Beatles and California singer-songwriters, but her father felt she needed a broader education in American roots, folk and country music. So he handed her a list of 100 essential songs, encompassing everyone from Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family to Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard.

    “He wasn’t worried that I had bad taste, because he loved that music as well,” she says. “He brought me a Beatles autograph when I was 11 years old. My dad was one of the original rock ‘n’ roll artists himself. But he thought I was missing the other half of it.”

    Not every 18-year-old is particularly receptive to what their parents have to say, but Rosanne Cash says she was ready. “If he’d given it to me two years earlier, I would have rolled my eyes like teenagers do,” she says. “But I was 18 and he had invited me on the road with him. The Carter Family and Carl Perkins were traveling with him on the bus. I was learning guitar and Helen Carter was teaching me the Carter Family catalog.”

        “The List” (Manhattan), the title of Cash’s latest album, pays homage to that turning-point moment by covering 12 of those songs, including duets with Bruce Springsteen (on “Sea of Heartbreak”), Elvis Costello (“Heartaches by the Number”) and Jeff Tweedy (“Long Black Veil”).
       
        “I would hate these songs just to be museum pieces, they deserve to be kept alive and performed,” Cash says. “When I first heard them, I was floored. These were songs with a cinematic quality and a narrative arc different from the pop songs I was listening to. As a budding songwriter at the time, this was a template for excellence.”