Cashing In

Here's an interesting father strategy. Don't tell your kid what you know, tell them what they should know and wait to see what happens.

Singer/songwriter Johnny Cash was a tad unsatisfied with his daughter Roseanne's musical knowledge of classic country. He gave her a list of 100 songs she ought to know ("really know") if she was going to be a musician. The result, other than the influences found in her music, will be on display in the fall as she releases "The List," what she learned from her father's suggestion distilled into 12 songs. As she put it in her press release:

"If my father had been a martial arts master, he might have passed a martial arts ‘secret’ on to me, his oldest child,” Cash says. “If he had been a surgeon, he might have taken me into his operating room and pointed out the arteries and organs. If he were a robber baron, he might have surveyed his empire and said, ‘Honey, some day this will all be yours!’. But he was a musician and a songwriter, and he gave me 'The List.' "

Johnny Cash's Top 100 Essential Country Songs


For comparison's sake, her brother, working without his list but from the same material offered — in a surprising collaboration with Snoop Dog — the "Johnny Cash Remixed" last year: