Rosanne Cash’s Black Cadillac begins with an old family tape. Before a single guitar comes in, you hear a young Johnny Cash coaxing his baby daughter to make a sound: “Rosanne… come on.” Near the end, his voice returns one last time. Then come 71 seconds of silence.
Johnny Cash died at 71. Rosanne’s mother, Vivian Liberto, died at 71 too. Black Cadillac, released on Capitol in January 2006, is the album Rosanne made in the middle of losing them.
The Song She Wrote Before Anyone Died
The title song came first. Rosanne Cash finished writing “Black Cadillac” in the spring of 2003. It is about a loved one’s coffin being driven away in a black Cadillac, the same kind of car her father used to drive. At that point, nobody had died yet.
She told Rolling Stone she knew what she had done the moment she finished it:
“I was really aware of what I had just written, and what it meant. It wasn’t pleasant.”
Her father’s health had been, as she put it to NPR, “the background anxiety” of her family’s life for about ten years. That spring, she said, she started to feel that losing him was close.
Three Losses in Two Years
June Carter Cash, her stepmother, died in May 2003. Johnny Cash followed on September 12, 2003, at 71.
Rosanne Cash began recording the album late in 2004. In the middle of those sessions, her mother died. Vivian Liberto passed away on May 24, 2005, at 71. It was Rosanne’s 50th birthday.
In the same stretch, she told NPR, an aunt and a stepsister died as well. She described grief as something far more tangled than sadness: loss “is not just one thing,” she said. “It’s also anger, and it’s also liberation.”
Finishing Black Cadillac became what she called “a near-obsession.” As she told Rolling Stone, “I couldn’t have abandoned it.” Some of the first songs she wrote were very dark, she said, but she could see the album would not be “a dark, dark tunnel.”
A Voice at the Start, a Voice at the End
The opening tape dates from the 1950s, when Rosanne was very small and her father was a young man at the start of his career. Reviewers heard it different ways. Some heard a patient dad trying to get his toddler to say something. Others heard a father calling his daughter to come along.
The family tape returns on the last real song, “The Good Intent.” It is named for the ship that brought the Cash family’s ancestors from Scotland to America, and Rosanne Cash called this hopeful song a turning point for the album. It opens with another snippet of the old recording. As the PopMatters reviewer heard it, young Johnny is telling his little girl, “bye, bye, bye.”
So the album that starts with him calling her name ends with him saying goodbye.
Seventy-One Seconds
After “The Good Intent” comes track 13, titled “0:71.” There is no music on it and no words. It is simply 71 seconds of silence.
When the album came out, many reviewers took it as one second for every year Johnny Cash lived. But 71 was her mother’s age too, and both of her parents were gone by the time she finished the record. Black Cadillac went on to earn a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk Album.
The Number She Carried
That number stayed with her. Early in 2025, before her 70th birthday, Rosanne Cash told AARP she was nervous about turning 70, “in part because both my parents died at 71.”
On May 24, 2026, she turned 71 herself.