This is Rosanne Cash’s Patsy Cline record

She’d earned her place in honky tonk heaven in 1981 with Seven Year Ache which hit number one on Billboard’s country chart and made the top 25 on the pop list, putting her firmly in what was the called crossover territory.

Six years later she released one of the best ever break up albums of all time, Interiors, which marked her as not just a great performer but a songwriter of great power and insight.

Cash’s new record is another triumph and a deeply personal project that exposes some new aspects of her relationship with her father, Johnny. It also cements her place in any Nashville hall of fame.

This is Rosanne Cash’s Patsy Cline record when her always considerable talents combine – a voice of tremendous understated power, an interpretive mind that can transform the familiar to the exceptional and the ability to drop subtle whiplash moments into songs – to create a work of art of supremely casual perfection.

When she was just 18 – and five years before her first recording contract – Johnny Cash gave his daughter a list of 100 essential songs which he said she needed to explore and get inside of.

The songs on the list were mainly straight country tunes but there were also country-soul and folk titles. Overall, it was a primmer of 20th century American culture.

Cash has teamed up with her husband, composer and producer John Leventhal to make The List, a collection of a dozen songs from those titles her father wrote down.

It’s a reminder of what a great singer of other people’s songs Rosanne Cash is. Like Cline, she can breath new life into classics and make the signature work of someone else her own.

They start with William Heagney’s Miss the Mississippi and You, a country standard which oozes Music Row in Nashville. While it’s a delightful start to the record, it doesn’t quite prepare the listener for the deep soulful resonance of the next song, A.P. Carter’s Motherless Children. Rosanne gives it a bluesy lean and you can hear the bourbon distill as she sings.

Elsewhere there is that haunting Dylan composition Girl From the North Country which has been covered by everyone from Rosanne’s dad (who performed it in a duet with Joni Mitchell) to Eddie Vedder and Rod Stewart. The power of this great song is enhanced by some soul-invading guitar work which sits alongside a transfixing harmonica (both played by the multi-instrumentalist Leventhal).

Other great performances are 500 Miles, written by Hedy West, Long Black Veil (penned by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin) and Harlan Howard’s Heartaches By The Number.

My favourite is Sea of Heartbreak, written by Hal David and Paul Hampton and first released as a single by Don Gibson in 1961. There are four duets on this record and on this song she works with Bruce Springsteen (once called “that hillbilly singer from New Jersey” by Steve Earle) and it’s a sublime match.

Rosanne’s carefully restrained vocal gives the interior grief a deeper dimension while Springsteen’s rock’n’roll voice track pushes the emotion along like a railroad train.

The other duets are with Elvis Costello (Heartaches By The Number), Jeff Tweedie (Long Black Veil) and Rufus Wainwright (Merle Haggard’s Silver Wings). They all work brilliantly.

Once you start listening to The List it is hard to stop. You want to ride to the end of the journey, seeing where she goes and what she makes of the stops and byways. It’s as much an exploration as a revelation, ticking two vital country music boxes.

In an interview with The New York Times early this month, Rosanne Cash dips into her regrets saying her biggest one was not asking Johnny to update that 1973 list. “I regret not asking my dad what the songs of the list would be from 1973 to 2009,” she said.

You can sense on this record a wholeness and freedom that she’d been searching for since she recovered from the break-up with Crowell and the drugs and booze that were her friends.

It’s a homage to her father but also a statement of personal strength. As she told The New York Times, cheerfulness is a choice. “I realised at some point that I didn’t want to become a bitter old woman,” she said.

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