Rosanne Cash Discovers a Mirror in New Exhibit: ‘To Be Seen Is the Most Beautiful Thing’ (Exclusive)

 When the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum reached out to Rosanne Cash several months ago, telling her that she would be the subject of a new exhibit, she says that her first reaction was shock.

“I said, ‘Me? Are you sure?’” Cash, 69, tells PEOPLE. “I didn’t understand why they wanted to do it.”

For decades now, the one-time country hit-maker has been a stranger to the genre’s charts, as well as to Nashville’s wellspring, choosing instead to go her own way as a New York-based roots singer-songwriter. Still, Cash knew better, of course, than to turn down the Nashville museum’s attentions, and she opened her heart, as well as her cache of keepsakes, to the process.

The exhibit is now newly opened, and on Wednesday, Cash discovered for herself just how deftly it has answered her question: Why her?

In the sweep of its semicircular space, the artifacts, images and words vividly tell the story of a fascinating musical trailblazer who first challenged the commercial conventions of country in the 1980s. With a fresh sound that mixed LA country and soft rock, she topped the charts with two albums and 11 singles, including signature songs like “Seven Year Ache” and “Blue Moon with Heartache”; in 1988, she was Billboard’s top singles artist.  

Then, in the early 1990s, she boldly escaped conventions altogether, reinventing herself in New York as a singer-songwriter of profound introspection, turning herself into a founder of what has become the Americana movement. Her inventiveness has continued through the years with such seminal albums as The Wheel, The List and Grammy winner The River & The Thread.

Throughout it all, Cash has been both burdened and emboldened by her legacy, for there is no escaping the fact that she is the daughter of country cornerstone Johnny Cash.

She herself tried to run from her heritage in her early career. “At 23, I thought I was completely original, cut off from the past, from my legacy,” she said in her remarks to the throng of friends, family and industry insiders who gathered at the museum for a private reception on Wednesday. “Today I treasure that legacy and the traditions I built on … The experiences I thought I had nothing to learn from are those that left the deepest mark.”

Her father’s presence, as well as his deep love for his daughter, weaves its way through the exhibit, although notably missing is the now-legendary list of 100 country and roots songs that he deemed essential to her musical education. Presented to her when she was 18, she drew from it for the 12 tracks on her 2009 album, The List, but she has never revealed its entirety.

Though she says she intends for it to eventually reside in the museum’s archives, it was off limits for the exhibit. “I didn’t want to share something that personal,” she explains to PEOPLE. For that matter, she adds, it’s now also off limits to her.

“It’s in my file somewhere,” she says. “I’ve hidden it from myself for the moment.”

Museum writer-editor RJ Smith, who co-curated the exhibit, isn’t bothered by its exclusion: “It’s almost more powerful for being out of reach for us.”

Besides, there are so many other surprising and revealing treasures in the narrative that unspools from early childhood on. Cash was happy to share another personal playlist, created by her mother, Vivian Liberto, of her favorite love songs, including Willie Nelson‘s “Always on My Mind” and Frank Sinatra‘s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

Also on display are samples of handwritten correspondence from her dad. In one, from 1984, he confesses his pain and guilt over leaving her after his 1967 divorce from her mother, and he also affirms, “Where you stand with me, in my mind is as an equal. I have a love for you that knows no bounds.”

Standing before the exhibit, Rosanne Cash gazes at the three pages, torn from a spiral notebook, now behind glass for all to see.

“Oh,” she says with a sigh. “So sweet. That’s just a father’s unconditional love.”

But as heart-tugging as the letter is, the portion of the exhibit that Cash says brought her to tears is its centerpiece, a writing desk given to her by her father. On it sits an artful plaster cast of her hands — her own writing “tools” — and an expressive drawing of Cash’s silhouette that inspired one of her album covers.

Above the desk hangs a placard that describes a life-altering dream she had one night in the late 1980s, the impetus that made her question everything about her commercial career. Behind that hangs a curtain of cloth streamers, perhaps signifying the uncharted musical wilderness she was about to enter in that phase of her timeline.

“Everything changed after this,” Cash says.

As the exhibit describes, her 12-year marriage to pivotal musical collaborator Rodney Crowell soon ended, and she and their four daughters moved to New York. She moved her label home, as well, from Nashville to New York, and she found a new collaborator, musician-songwriter-producer John Leventhal, whom she married in 1995. Their son was born four years later.

The dramatic life shift, say Smith, keeps Cash relevant to this day “as a symbol of being true to yourself, of making career and artistic choices that are honest. When she left Nashville, she took a step back from country music and became more of a singer-songwriter. That was bold, and it was a big bridge to walk over. She owns those choices, and she’s made great music from that.”

The artifacts that illustrate her last three decades attest to her creative freedom, fluidity and activism: a copy of her 1996 short-story collection, Bodies of Water, the first of her four books; the potent poetry in the samples of her scribbled lyrics; an American Ingenuity Award from Smithsonian magazine; a Free Speech award from the Americana Music Association.

The name of the exhibit is “Time Is a Mirror,” taken from lyrics of her 2018 song, “Nothing but the Truth,” but Cash indicated in her reception remarks that the exhibit is a mirror, too. All the memorabilia she’s saved over the years, she said, turned out to be “a story I didn’t know I was telling.”

Smith and co-curator Mick Buck, Cash tells PEOPLE, “got who I am, and to be seen is the most beautiful thing. It’s what we all want, right? To be seen. And accepted.”

During her remarks, Cash expressed her gratitude to the museum, as well as several key figures who were present, including Crowell. “I learned so much from him — from the most technical to the most creative,” she said. “Mainly Rodney and I helped each other grow up, and we have these four beautiful daughters.”

Also on hand were lifelong friends Vince Gill and Emmylou Harris, both Hall of Fame members. Acknowledging their presence, Cash said, with a laugh, to Gill: “I always wish my voice sounded like yours and Emmylou’s put together.”

It’s just sinking into Cash that she’s made musical history — she is, after all, in a museum now — but that realization comes with mixed feelings.

“I don’t like to think that way because the danger then is you go, ‘I’m done,’” she says. “I want to feel like I’m still a beginner. I want to still do the work and be in the trenches.”

She’s only two years shy of both her parents’ life span — each died at age 71 — and, she says, that fact has been weighing heavily on her. “I feel an urgency, the urgency of age,” she says. “Like, what else do I want to do?”

At the moment, she says, she’s working on her next album, and she and her husband continue to collaborate. One work-in-progress is a musical based on the movie Norma Rae.

Even on the day she would be encountering her life in a museum, Cash says, something else, more pressing, had still captured her sharp and fertile mind.

“I’m dwelling on the lyric to the song I’m writing now,” she says with a chuckle of self-awareness. “Seriously, that’s what I woke up thinking about.”

“Time Is a Mirror” runs through March 2026 at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, and it is included with museum admission. The exhibit opening coincides with the digital release of The Essential Collection, new 40-song set drawn from Cash’s 15 albums.