Q&A with country music icon Rosanne Cash

When you’re the daughter of Johnny Cash, your Tennessee roots are apparent and profound. But while Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Rosanne Cash was born in Memphis in 1955, she was uprooted as a toddler to California, and for the last two decades she and her husband/ band mate John Leventhal have raised their children in Manhattan.

The seed for her latest, acclaimed record was planted after she began reconnecting with Memphis and other historic parts of the South, like the Mississippi Delta and her father’s childhood home in Dyess, Ark. The nostalgic voyage ultimately resulted in her new LP, “The River & the Thread,” her highest Billboard charting album. Time magazine praised the record, noting that “it paints a beautiful and complex portrait of the American South, seen through the eyes of a prodigal daughter come home.”

On Thursday, Cash and Leventhal will perform their new album in its entirety followed by older tunes at the Wharton Center. Cash spoke with us by phone from the road about the show.

What were the main sources of musical inspiration while you were down South?

There were two things going on at once. One was that I was involved with Arkansas State University fundraising to help restore my father’s boyhood home. In fact, the entire colony there is a New Deal-era colony in Dyess. It’s my dad’s boyhood home, but the New Deal is an important part of our country’s history and people don’t really pay much attention to that. It was a whole Heritage Site they wanted to restore, so I started going down for fundraising.

At the same time I’d made a friend, Natalie Chanin, in Florence, Ala. I was going down to see her and she taught me to sew. She said that line, “You have to learn how to love the thread.” It was chilling to me. I kept thinking about that as I was driving through the Delta and then John and I started writing that song. At the same time Marshall Grant died, who was my dad’s original bass player in the Tennessee Two. Marshall was very close to me my whole life. So we wrote “Etta’s Song.” Then more songs started coming and we started realizing we were writing an album about the South.

How did Marshall Grant inspire “Etta’s Tune”?

“Etta’s Tune” is about Etta and Marshall Grant — they were married for 65 years. When he died in 2011, she told me, “Every morning we woke up and said, ‘What’s the temperature, darling?’” I just thought that was such a beautiful thing. John said, “Well, that’s the first line of a song.”

For all of those details, I tried to put myself in Marshall’s head to write the song. A lot of the details are true: The house that’s full of the keepsakes, being tormented by memories, which he was toward the end. It’s a love story. There are a lot of couples on this album.

You have lived in New York for the last 20 years. How was it reconnecting with the South?

I still have family scattered across Tennessee, so it’s not like I haven’t been there a lot over the past 25 years. But, my heart was really open to all of it. The restoration, going back to see my childhood home in Memphis, taking my son to Sun Records for the first time, the Dyess Project, going to see Natalie and then Marshall died. My heart was really open to it. I started to see these deeper connections to not just the geography, but the people there, the characters, the stories, the past and the future.

How is it working in the studio with your husband?

It’s good. We’ve definitely worked out a lot of stuff over the years in the studio. We’ve learned how to work together. I think there was more conflict in the beginning — (actually) I know there was more conflict in the beginning. We’d take things personally and try to work things out with each other in the studio, which isn’t cheap. It’s a high hourly rate to do that. Now we know how to work with each other. We really appreciate what the other one brings. If there’s conflict, it’s in the service of the project rather than personal. It can be very romantic. I feel very lucky we can do this.

Songwriting-wise, what are you into right now?

At this point in my life I’m really interested in making thematic records and having a narrative go through all of the songs. I know it’s so old-fashioned to think about concept albums, but that’s what most interests me right now. To just throw down 10 songs, I’m just not interested.

Tell me about “When the Master Calls the Roll.” Where did that come from?

That is a Civil War ballad based on my ancestors. I wrote the song with John and my ex-husband Rodney Crowell, who’s a great songwriter. I always wanted to write something in the tradition of the great Appalachian or Celtic ballads that were really narrative and laid out a landscape. I think we cracked the code on that one.

What’s next? Do you have the next album on your mind yet?

Not really. We’re still out in support of this record. We have started another project but it’s not an album, that’s all I can say right now. We’re writing music for a play but I can’t really say what it is yet.

You’ve said this is part of a trilogy that connects to your previous two LPs. How’s that?

I’ll probably regret saying that. I thought it was. At the time I finished it, I thought, “Well, this ties everything up.” It starts with mourning, claiming legacy and then bursting open and telling stories. In that way, I guess it is a part of a trilogy. In another way it feels like a beginning to me.

Rosanne Cash with John Leventhal

7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 23 Wharton Center, Pasant Theatre $55 (800) WHARTON, whartoncenter.com