My Music Monday

I'm still in Americana music mode.

Roseanne Cash's "September When it Comes", to me, is one of the best songs I own, and I think it is her best song by far. Naturally I will qualify this.

Cash wrote the song sometime around the turn of the 21st century. The story goes that her husband said it should be a duet with her father, as the song is about the passing of one's life. The other rationale was that they had never sung together. This last part is a nice story, but that's all it is.

Johnny and Roseanne Cash sang together on "The Ballad of a Teenage Queen" in the late 70s and then again with "That's How I Got to Memphis" in 1982.

Either way, I don't care for the duet of "September When it Comes" at all. Released in 2003, Johnny was in failing health and even worse singing voice. Of course, no critic would ever decry this and lauded it as some great performance. It's not.

However, three years earlier, Roseanne released a solo version via a BBC broadcast called The Transatlantic Sessions. There are a number of these disks out with various artists.

Having downloaded the solo song, I was so impressed with the arrangement and songwriting. I clearly liked the actual performance was well. So really colour me impressed when I finally found out that all Transatlantic Sessions are performed live. It did not sound that way to me via .mp3.

Backed by an Irish band (I do not think it's the Chieftains), it is one of few songs I can tolerate hearing a penny whistle.

The video version you see here is the version of the song on the Transatlantic Sessions Vol 2 disk. The audio version is cleaner, as there seems to be some distortion in the video.

Still, it's a great song that a decade later, I never tire of. It's not up, but then you know how I feel about that.