Rosanne Cash: Black Cadillac

Herald rating: * * * *

If you thought the Johnny Cash video Hurt - in which we saw the singer's life flash before his eyes as he approached The End - was sad and affecting, then you should hear this.

The career of his daughter (by first wife Vivian) has never really escaped the long shadow of The Man in Black, despite some fine albums which have always seemed much more emotionally honest than those of her country contemporaries.

Here she embraces not only the passing of her famous father but of her mother and stepmother. And it's quietly gut-wrenching stuff.

Despite leaning towards slightly roughed-up Nashville in its arrangements, it evokes much about those deaths and the complications of grief and memory and does it without lapsing into obvious sentimentality. Though it is bookended by soundbites from Cash's childhood. And the last track is 71 seconds of silence to mark each year of her father's life.

But on Like Fugitives, she neatly addresses the public perception versus the private reality of being the survivor of an American music dynasty. On Radio Operator she ponders on her father's first job, while House on the Lake and Good Intent offer home movies as poignant as the aforementioned video.

A heart-bruising kind of album, and an elegantly sad and honest reminder that The Man in Black was just somebody's dad, too.Label: Capitol