Inspired Media

By Aryn Henning Nichols

Music and family. These are the threads that tie Rosanne Cash’s life together.

Not just because her father was the iconic music legend Johnny Cash, or because she works closely with fellow musician, songwriter – and husband of 21 years – John Leventhal, or even because some of her five kids have dabbled in music here and there.

Music lights her soul on fire.

She chats about her 35 years of music-writing and performing from her kitchen in her family’s 1855 brownstone in Chelsea in New York City. The windows look out over a “tiny little postage stamp yard” with a garden filled with hydrangas and hostas.

Cash is currently touring to her three-time Grammy Award-winning latest release, The River and the Thread – a collaboration with her husband, John. The album is about traveling Hwy 61, the “main drag” of the South, and visiting places like the Tallahatchie Bridge and the location where 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in 1955, along with trips to the Historic Dyess Colony during the restoration of the Johnny Cash Boyhood Home.

“We were having all these really soulful experiences – it was hard to not write songs,” Cash says. “After we got a couple of songs in, John said, ‘There’s something here, we could write an album with this.’ So we got to work.”

The song, A Feathers Not a Bird, is written about Cash’s friend, Natalie Chanin, who taught Cash how to sew on one of those trips south. Chanin runs a company called Alabama Chanin (alabamachanin.com). They produce hand-sewn heirloom pieces made from 100 percent organic cotton.

“I loved Natalie’s clothes and I loved Natalie,” Cash says of her desire to learn how to sew at this point in her life. “A couple of my friends were [starting to sew] and I wanted to do something without words and with women – I’m with men all the time with my work. I was ready for something else.”

The first thing Cash made was a skirt. Now, she’s got her own sewing circle. Alabama Chanin sells “kits”, materials and threads are all ready for groups to hand-sew.

“It’s me and five other women – we get together regularly,” she says. “It’s been really enriching.”

It’s likely something Cash’s grandmother might have done in her day. Cash remembers her fondly.

“She was the best Southern cook in my life. She and my father were very close,” she says. “She worked so hard, and her work ethic was passed down to all of us.”

With the amazing number of songs and shows under Rosanne Cash’s belt, that much is certainly clear.

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Inspire(d) had a great time talking on the phone with Cash earlier this fall – check out some of that conversation here, then head over to luther.edu to get your tickets to Cash’s Center Stage Series show at Luther College in Decorah November 12, 2016!

You’re not only a talented and prolific singer and songwriter, but an author of books and essays and columns – has writing always been a part of your life?

Oh yes, always. Since pre-teen, at least.

Is the creative process totally different when you’re writing words for readers vs. writing songs for listeners?

I mean your toolkit’s a little different and the form is a little different – but it all comes from one source. I write a lot of essays…for Oxford American, the New York Times, Rolling Stone…I enjoy it. It’s kind of refreshing – to free myself up from a rhyme scheme. I like the interplay of written song and prose. I’ll write both out sometimes – from prose to song and back – as I try to work it all out.

You’re the mother of five kids – how did your work change after children?

After you have a baby, there’s basically two years where all you do is raise a baby. There were times where I thought, “am I ever going to write again?” But for me, it made sense to carve out time for a baby. I was lucky it worked out that I could do it.

It made me able to write in short spurts, you know, being interrupted every five minutes. And that was actually really useful – not having the luxury to sit down for eight hours to write was good for me. I’ve learned to write from pretty much anywhere.

Johnny Cash, aka dad… I can’t not mention him, of course.

People always say that. Like they can’t ask about my dad, but you can!

Do you ever get sick of talking about Johnny Cash?

Well, no. I love my dad, and I don’t get sick of talking about him. I do start to wonder whether other people my age still get asked about their parents. Really! Do other people have to talk about their parents all the time?! (laughs)

Over the past several years, you’ve worked with Arkansas State University on the restoration of the Johnny Cash Boyhood home in Historic Dyess Colony (dyesscash.astate.edu). Did this open up some new (or renewed) memories for you?

It was a moving project – to go back to a place where your father was raised. And the things I learned about my grandmother…how tough her life was. I’m a modern woman in New York City; I have every amenity available to me, but then you go two generations back to a family of cotton farmers. They didn’t have electricity – my grandmother worked taking care of seven kids all day and still managed to go out and pick cotton.

And I thought, ‘I couldn’t do that.’ The things she went through – there’s really gotta be some tenacity there. I just hope I inherited some of it.

I adored my grandmother. When I was pregnant with my first baby – I heard horror stories of how labor could go and I asked my grandma, ‘So, Grandma, how do you get through it?’ And she said, ‘Honey, you just endure it.’ And that really stuck with me.

There were so many things she just endured.

What do you miss most about having your dad around?

I miss both my parents. You know, they were my parents, and you miss both your parents. I miss the things all people miss about their parents. I wish I’d taken their advice. I wish had asked for advice. I wish I had asked things about their early lives. You just don’t think about it when you’re young and raising your own kids.

You work with your husband, fellow musician John Leventhal, all the time. What’s the best and worst thing about working with your spouse on projects?

The best thing, I think, is the depth of the conversation you can get to about what you’re doing. The lack of self-consciousness with things that you might not show to anyone else. The honest feedback…

And those are also the worst things. You feel free to criticize. It can turn personal, although I think we’ve learned to avoid that over the years. We still get into arguments over the some things, but generally in service to the song. It’s always for the song.

Do you have a favorite show in memory?

Yeah, well, there are many. It happens unexpectedly. You’ll be in some town in the Midwest in some renovated theatre and you never expect the audience to be so there with you and connected to what you’re doing.

And then there are the shows that you expect to be great, and they live up to those expectations and more. For me, that was Carnegie Hall in February (2016). It felt like a culmination of almost 40 years of work – that I had earned this moment. I felt like our souls were on fire the whole show.

You’re definitely one to stand up for yourself and other artists, even in the political arena – you even testified for the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property in 2014. With everything that’s going on right now in our country, we here at Inspire(d) feel it’s important to stay positive. From your most optimistic side, what is an exciting thing you see coming up for America?

I feel like congress is listening. Sometimes artists have to give up, sometimes because they can’t make enough money at it, and that’s heartbreaking to me. That’s why I advocate for artists rights and intellectual copyrights. We need to protect artists – care for them – and it feels like congress is on board.

And even though there is so much tension and conflict and bad behaviors in this election – that’s the negative part – the good part is that people really care. They are involved in the democratic process. And I hope the voting poll numbers swell this November.

John Beard

If anyone can attest to the power of a single vote, it’s Decorah-based welder John Beard.

Four years ago, Beard, who currently sits on the Winneshiek County Board of Supervisors, lost a hotly contested race for the District 28 Seat in the Iowa State Senate by a razor-thin margin – just 17 votes out of more than 29,000 cast separated him from the eventual victor, Michael Breitbach of Strawberry Point.

“Every vote counts, absolutely,” he says, reflecting on that outcome. “We can never forget the importance of a single vote and the power of public opinion.”

Beard, a Decorah native who spent much of his childhood in New Jersey, grew up discussing politics over the family dinner table. But it wasn’t until 2002 – when Decorah was embroiled in a heated debate over whether to renovate or tear down its historic East Side School­ – that he mounted his first political campaign. While he lost his bid for a seat on the local school board that year, he emerged from the experience convinced that he had contributed positively to the public discourse.

“I really tried to help people think and act more respectfully, and I was given recognition for that from both sides,” says Beard. “That, coupled with a great experience serving as president of Winneshiek Pheasants Forever, made me believe that I could have a positive effect in public office if given a chance.”

Area voters gave him that chance in 2008, when they elected him to serve a two-year term in the Iowa House of Representatives. Beard worked hard to cultivate positive relationships with peers in both parties but nonetheless lost his bid for reelection two years later. “I was definitely hoping to build on those relationships to do more,” he says. “We have a great democratic process, but that process does require cooperation, compromise, and respect for one another in order to function at its best.”

In 2014, Beard threw his hat into the ring yet again, this time landing a four-year seat on the five-person Winneshiek County Board of Supervisors, the county’s policy-making body. “We have a function in all aspects of county government and entities that work with county government,” he says, likening the work to running a big business. “We oversee the budget for things like secondary roads and public health, respond to our constituents’ concerns, and plan proactively to ensure that our transportation and utilities are adequate, that our green areas are protected.”

It’s work he thoroughly enjoys.

“What I find so refreshing about working with this group is that there is not even a whiff of partisanship in the board room, “says Beard, the District One representative to the board, which meets Monday mornings year-round. “We have spirited disagreements about things, but they are not along political or ideological lines, and in the end we always get something done, and almost always with a unanimous vote.”

Ask Beard what he loves most about Winneshiek County, and he’s unable to cite just one thing. It’s spending time with his family, including his wife, RoJene; his son, Chance; and his siblings, Daniel and Barbara. It’s exploring the area’s bountiful natural beauty, including the Upper Iowa River and the surrounding bluffs. And it’s learning from the area’s residents ­– in other words, his constituents. “I have traveled throughout the United States, and I have found that some of the best read and most cosmopolitan people live here,” he says. “There’s an open-mindedness, a healthy intellectual curiosity, and I am very much drawn to that.”

Chuck Gipp

It makes sense that current Iowa DNR director Chuck Gipp thought he “knew a lot of people” when, in 1990, he declared his candidacy for the District 16 seat in the Iowa House of Representatives.

He was, after all, a Decorah native, a Luther College graduate, an established Winneshiek County dairy farmer, and the chair of the county’s solid waste agency.

But, more than 25 years later, Gipp still vividly recalls the lesson he learned while sitting at his kitchen table, strategizing his inaugural campaign with a political mentor.

“He asked me to take out my local phone book and start reading the names,” he recalls. “Then he said that if I could identify every 10th name, I knew a lot of people…I didn’t get any further than the B’s before I realized I really didn’t know that many people at all.”

Today, Gipp knows considerably more people in Decorah and throughout Iowa. After winning that first campaign, he continued on to claim victory in his next eight. Gipp served a total of 18 years in the Iowa House – including four as majority leader – before deciding not to seek reelection in 2008.

Composed of 100 members, the Iowa House – the “lower house” of the Iowa General Assembly, which also includes the 50-member Iowa Senate – debates and votes on legislation introduced by its members or submitted by the governor, and builds the state’s budget. Members also serve on several standing committees. (Gipp’s top choice of committee assignment when he was first elected? Environmental protection.)

“You must stay connected to your constituents,” he says of his recipe for success. “And part of that is explaining your decision-making process to the people you represent – they still may not always agree with your decisions, but, in my experience, they almost always respect that you thought through the possible choices.”

It was a KOEL radio report about potentially carcinogenic industrial waste being shipped to a Northeast Iowa landfill that set his political career in motion back in 1980.

“The landfill turned out to be the (then privately owned) Winneshiek County landfill, which was just a mile from our farm,” recalls Gipp, who, at that time, was a young farmer raising two small kids, Barrett and Alison, with his wife, Ranae. “Both Ranae and I became very concerned when we heard that news, and we realized that if we didn’t get involved, probably no one else would.”

While leading his neighbors in a successful fight to better monitor the landfill, Gipp assumed chairmanship of the county’s solid waste agency. Soon state lawmakers were urging him to run for office. “If you think you can do the job, and do it well, then you owe it to yourself and your community to step up,” he says of answering that call again and again over the next 18 years.

In 2008, Gipp answered the call (literally) once again when Bill Northey, Iowa Secretary of Agriculture, phoned to see if he might be interested in directing the state’s Division of Soil Conservation. He held that position for three years before Governor Terry Branstad appointed him deputy director of the Iowa DNR (in 2011) and then director of the 1,100-employee agency the following year. The agency oversees the state’s treasured natural resources ­– including its eight fish hatcheries and 87 state parks – and is charged with the sometimes difficult work of enforcing environmental regulations created by lawmakers.

“If you inform people what the rules are ahead of time, you can often avoid environmental damage,” says Gipp. “We work hard to let people know what their responsibilities are and proactively work with them to meet them.”

With his 69th birthday on the horizon, this dedicated public servant has no plans to discontinue that work anytime soon.

“I truly enjoy the people I work with and the work I do,” says Gipp, who continues to live in Decorah and commute weekly between his hometown and Des Moines. “The DNR touches more people’s lives than almost any other state agency, and it’s rewarding to be a part of that.”