Rosanne Cash, the oldest child of a country music icon and a superb, genre-hopping performer in her own right, will commemorate a museum exhibit of her life and career with a new career-spanning 2CD retrospective.

The Essential Collection brings together 40 of Cash's most treasured recordings - half from her tenure on Columbia Records and the other from mostly 21st century work on the Capitol, Manhattan and Blue Note labels. The non-chronological set, curated by Cash herself, features all 10 of her No. 1 country singles, including "Seven Year Ache," "I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me," "Never Be You," "The Way We Make a Broken Heart" and "Tennessee Flat Top Box," along with duets with country and rock legends like Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Bobby Bare, Jeff Tweedy, and - in one of his final recordings before his passing - Rosanne's father Johnny Cash. The collection, available this Friday, December 6 on Cash's own Rumble Strip Records, features her own liner notes as well as ones penned by RJ Smith of the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum, which will open the exhibition Rosanne Cash: Time is a Mirror one day before, running through March of 2026.

It might have made sense that Cash would follow in her father's footsteps as a musician, but Rosanne - the eldest daughter of The Man in Black's first marriage to Vivian Liberto - forged a unique path that only fleetingly resembled the work of Johnny Cash. After graduating high school, she joined her dad's traveling tour as a wardrobe assistant, eventually making fleeting appearances onstage. Her first recorded credit was covering a Kris Kristofferson track on his 1974 album The Junkie and the Juicehead Minus Me; two years later, he cut an original song of hers, "Love Has Lost Again," on 1976's One Piece At a Time.

After studying acting at both Vanderbilt University and the Lee Strasberg Institute, Cash cut a little-known album in 1978 that was only released by the Ariola label in Germany; despite its obscurity, it did mark the beginning of one of her most fateful collaborations with Rodney Crowell, a guitarist for Emmylou Harris. He would subsequently produce her next five albums, all released by Columbia Records (who'd been releasing her father's work since the late '50s), and they would marry in 1979. Cash broke through on her own with 1981's Seven Year Ache, a thrilling country-rock hybrid packed with collaborations with legends and up-and-comers (Booker T. Jones, Emmylou Harris and Vince Gill among them) and featuring three consecutive country No. 1s in the title track, "My Baby Thinks He's a Train" and "Blue Moon with Heartache." She'd score an impressive bouquet of hits on that chart, including subsequent toppers like the Grammy-winning "I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me" and the Tom Petty-Benmont Tench composition "Never Be You" (both off 1985's Rhythm & Romance); four from 1987's masterful King's Record Shop (the John Hiatt-penned "The Way We Make a Broken Heart," her father's standard "Tennessee Flat Top Box," "If You Change Your Mind" and "Runaway Train"), and even a celebratory version of The Beatles' deep cut "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party" from a 1989 hits collection.

Cash went through some considerable changes in the decades to come. 1990's Interiors was a self-produced song cycle about failing relationships that anticipated her own divorce from Crowell; it made the Top 10 of The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. Follow-up The Wheel (1993) was inspired by a new relationship with the album's co-producer, multi-instrumentalist John Leventhal; the pair would marry two years later. After the stripped-down 10 Song Demo, her first effort for Capitol, was released in 1996, Cash stepped away from music for a time; she and Leventhal moved to New York City and welcomed a son, Cash recovered from a polyp on her vocal cords, and used her spare time to pursue projects as a prose writer and columnist. She returned with 2003's Rules of Travel, featuring "September When It Comes," a duet with her father that was released six months before his passing. Rosanne's mother died two years later, and the losses heavily influenced 2006's Black Cadillac. After many years, she hit a renewed commercial streak with 2009's star-studded The List (featuring 12 country covers from a list kept by Johnny Cash of his favorite songs in the genre) and the rootsy The River & The Thread (2014), her highest peak on the all-genre Billboard 200 at No. 11. That album and its lead track "A Feather's Not a Bird" would win three Grammy Awards for Best Americana Album, Best American Roots Performance and Best American Roots Song. The Essential Collection also features Cash's most recent single, 2021's "The Killing Fields," a dark meditation on the history of racist lynchings in the South that's only been available on 7" or digitally.

The new collection is available from Cash's official site, with signed copies available for pre-order. You'll find that link, and the full track list, below.

The Essential Collection (Rumble Strip Records, 2024)

Disc 1

1. Seven Year Ache
2. Tennessee Flat Top Box
3. Blue Moon with Heartache
4. The Wheel
5. The Way We Make a Broken Heart
6. What We Really Want
7. Sleeping In Paris
8. Never Be You
9. Runaway Train
10. I Don't Want to Spoil the Party
11. I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me
12. On the Surface
13. Seventh Avenue
14. On the Inside
15. You Won't Let Me In
16. Hold On
17. No Memories Hangin' 'Round (with Bobby Bare)
18. If You Change Your Mind
19. It Hasn't Happened Yet
20. My Baby Thinks He's a Train

Disc 2

1. A Feather's Not a Bird
2. Black Cadillac
3. Sea of Heartbreak (with Bruce Springsteen)
4. September When It Comes (with Johnny Cash)
5. When the Master Calls the Roll
6. The Only Thing Worth Fighting For
7. The Killing Fields
8. Western Wall
9. Heartaches by the Number (with Elvis Costello)
10. The World Unseen
11. The Long Way Home
12. She Remembers Everything
13. House on the Lake
14. List of Burdens
15. Long Black Veil (with Jeff Tweedy)
16. Modern Blue
17. God is in the Roses
18. Girl from the North Country
19. Rules of Travel
20. The Sunken Lands

Disc 1, Tracks 1, 3 and 20 from Seven Year Ache - Columbia JC 36965, 1981
Disc 1, Track 2, 5, 9 and 18 from King's Record Shop - Columbia FC 40777, 1987
Disc 1, Tracks 4, 7, 13 and 15 from The Wheel - Columbia CK 52729, 1993
Disc 1, Tracks 6, 12 and 14 from Interiors - Columbia CK 46079, 1990
Disc 1, Tracks 8, 11 and 16 from Rhythm & Romance - Columbia FC 39463, 1985
Disc 1, Track 10 from Hits 1979-1989 - Columbia OC 45054, 1989
Disc 1, Track 17 from Right or Wrong - Columbia JC 36155, 1979
Disc 1, Track 19 from Somewhere in the Stars - Columbia FC 37570, 1982
Disc 2, Tracks 1, 5, 11, 16 and 20 from The River & the Thread - Blue Note B0019511-02, 2014
Disc 2, Tracks 2, 10, 13 and 17 from Black Cadillac - Capitol CDP 09463 48738 0 2, 2006
Disc 2, Tracks 3, 9, 15 and 18 from The List - Manhattan 50999 684805 2 3, 2009
Disc 2, Tracks 4, 8 and 19 from Rules of Travel - Capitol CDP 72438 37757 2 9, 2003
Disc 2, Tracks 6 and 12 from She Remembers Everything - Blue Note B0028918-02, 2018
Disc 2, Track 7 from Universal Music Group single 00602435338866, 2021
Disc 2, Track 14 from 10 Song Demo - Capitol CDP 72438 32390 2 3, 1996