Composed by Rosanne Cash

Rock Cafe in London.
    I turned twenty-one while I was in London but thought it cool and grown-up not to let anyone know. For that weekend I arranged to go to Scotland with some of the people from CBS to stay at the huge manor house of one of our artists, a country singer who also worked the oil rigs in the North Sea. His wife, who was from the American South, made cornbread and black-eyed peas for dinner, dished out with a thick regional accent. Beginning to miss my mother, with whom I had not lived since the day after I graduated from high school, I decided to tell a few people it was my birthday, and they came up with a cake for me. I lay awake a long time in a small guest bedroom that night, thinking of my mother, my sisters, my father, and the fact that no one in my family was there to witness my turning into an adult.

    I saw a lot of bands play in London, including a reunion concert of the Small Faces, which I went to alone. Some sort of reception was held after the show, which I attended mostly because a free buffet was promised. (Under normal circumstances, an evening meal was nonexistent for me unless someone took me out.) At around one a.m. I suddenly found myself in a near-deserted basement room with a pillaged buffet table and not a soul I knew anywhere around. I had counted on getting a ride home from David or Anthea, as I thought they would surely be at the show and the reception, or from someone else I knew who had a car or a bit of money, as I did not have a penny on me. I panicked for a moment, not knowing how I would get home, and I realized that I had no choice but to walk the few miles to Hampstead in the freezing early hours. I gathered my thoughts into a singular point. I banished my fear of being alone on the streets in the middle of the night. I did not allow any other possibility to enter my mind other than a long trudge and a safe arrival. I set out in my very high-heeled boots and marched myself up through Piccadilly, on through Camden Town and Mornington Crescent, up Hampstead Road and along to No. 3 Carlingford Road. It was bitterly cold, and I was tortured by my ill-advised footwear. My entire body screaming in protest, I kept my eyes forward and my anxiety under wraps, and arrived home at around four a.m., where I fell immediately into bed. That walk was the dividing line in my life, marking the boundary between my former unformed, raw, swollen personality and the more emotionally sinuous, urbane girl I became. There would be periods in my future when the old girl would take possession of me for a few weeks or months, but from then on I had the blueprint, devised on the long walk, and the determination, also inaugurated in those few hours, to escape from the inundation of her dark, turgid spirit.

    In the early summer of 1976 I went home to Nashville for a brief visit. The first thing my dad announced after greeting me was, “That’s enough. You need to stay home now. You need to move back to the United States.” I was stunned. He did not say this in a pleading or coercive way, but simply delivered it as an edict. I did not even think to argue with him, his effect was so forceful, but I made a feeble remark about having to go back and pick up my belongings. He dismissed this instantly. He told me to have my girlfriends pack my trunk, and to deal with terminating my sublease by long distance. I called Brenda, who I had gradually grown closer to than Sandy over the past few months, and she and Sandy packed up my trunk with my clothes and records and antique dishes, and shipped it to Nashville. I called Derek and told him I wasn’t coming back. I called the real estate agent and told him I was vacating the flat. I applied to Vanderbilt University for the coming September, found out I was lacking a math credit, and hired a private tutor to teach me trigonometry. I realized much later that Dad was afraid I would disappear from his life; that I would become a permanent expatriate and lose touch