Rosanne Cash has been an admired, successful, critically hailed singer-songwriter for nearly 30 years. But over the last year or so, her media profile has probably been higher than it has in a long time.

Rosanne Cash returns to Ann Arbor with "The List" on Saturday.

photo by Deborah Feingold

Between October of 2009 and this past August, she released an album that debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard Country Chart, and a memoir, “Composed,” that debuted at No. 20 on the New York Times’ hardcover nonfiction bestsellers list — and which earned stellar reviews from the likes of the Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly and Publishers Weekly.

And in the eyes of her fans and the country / roots audience in general, that album, “The List,” probably forged her strongest musical bond to date with father, the iconic Johnny Cash. On the disc, Cash covered 12 songs culled from a list her father gave her, when she was 18, of “The 100 Essential Country Songs” — after he learned she was so immersed in pop and rock that, at the time, she didn’t know many of these country classics.

It’s an album with emotional heft, and not just because we know that these songs were “passed down” to her from her father. Many of the songs sift through subject matter like heartache, loss, regret and death. Cash’s silky but wistful vocals are front and center, and the arrangements — which deftly synergize country, folk, pop and rock elements — are tasteful and finely crafted. And, to top it all off, the disc won Album of the Year at the Americana Music Association Awards on September 9. The album also earned plenty of winning reviews, which undoubtedly helped with the book’s critical and commercial reception.

“I was so gratified” by that reaction to the book," says Cash, who comes to Hill Auditorium on Saturday for a University Musical Society show. “I didn’t expect such a great response. In fact, I had (almost) trained myself not to expect any response, and just let the hard work be enough, but I admit the validation is wonderful.

“I know I'm a pretty good writer,” says Cash during a recent e-mail interview. (She was already a published author.) “I just didn't think anyone would pay attention to a memoir by a musician who wasn't Bob Dylan.”

Cash says the book actually had a decade-long gestation period. “I wrote an essay 10 years ago called "The Ties That Bind," and it was chosen for an anthology called ‘Best Music Writing 2000,’” she recalls. “My editor at Viking read it and said, 'that's the beginning of a memoir.' I kept writing bits and pieces and essays and thought I would never finish the book, but I had brain surgery in 2007, and (that) was intensely motivating. It was what I wanted to complete most of all.”

The brain surgery was for a structural abnormality, and was successful, but it did take her two years or more to fully recover, she says.

The book deals in part with growing up as the daughter of a wildly popular music hero, but also tracks her own evolution — both emotionally and as a writer coming into her own — and as one trying to forge an identity that was separate from that of her famous dad. She writes about struggling with various neuroses as a child, due to having a childhood that was privileged, but its down sides — given her father’s addiction to amphetamines when she was a kid, which resulted in him being erratic and withdrawn, she's said. And she also had to cope with her parents’ divorce.

The book “is not a standard memoir,” as Cash notes. It doesn’t follow a chronological narrative. “It’s just an arc of a narrative about my life, that I hope is conveyed poetically.”

On “The List,” Cash covered such gems as The Carter Family’s “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow,” Hank Williams’ “Take These Chains From My Heart,” Jimmie Rodgers’ “Miss the Mississippi and You,” Hank Cochran’s “She’s Got You” (a hit for Patsy Cline), Bob Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country,” Denny Dill / Marijohn Wilkin’s “Long Black Veil” (famously covered by her dad, Lefty Frizzell and The Band, among many others) and the traditional “Motherless Children.” Listen to Rosanne Cash "Motherless Children" (MP3).

Mark Jacobson, UMS programming manager, said it was way back in September of ‘09, a few months before Cash co-headlined the Ann Arbor Folk Festival in January — that Cash “agreed to open our Americas & Americans series, a season-long exploration of the traditions, peoples, and ideology about what it means to be Americans.” The UMS show will be a multimedia presentation of “The List,” he says. “Her music continues to communicate the soul of American roots music to international audiences.”

Cash says that the song on the album are the ones that "held the most resonance for me. They were either songs I had sung to myself for years, or ones that particularly suited my voice. Also, we wanted to balance the record, to make it a microcosm of the list — so the Carter Family had to be represented, and Jimmie Rodgers, and Hank Williams. It was extremely satisfying to use my voice in service of these great songs.”

Obviously, she wasn’t looking to do faithful “copies” of the originals, but wanted to put her own imprint on them, with the assistance of her husband / guitarist / producer John Leventhal.

“I'm a songwriter, and (for many years now) a New Yorker, and I have very wide musical tastes: I wanted to bring all of that to the table: an urban intelligence, a songwriter's attention to lyrics and a hard and fast devotion to the original songwriter's intentions regarding melody and lyrics.

“An exception might be ‘Motherless Children,’ where we drew from many old versions and curated a new version by picking and choosing from many versions.”

Kevin Ransom is a free-lance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.

Rosanne Cash performing live in Toronto earlier this year: