'A kind of swampy Delta rhythm' in Roseanne Cash's inauguration story

From a blog in The New York Times featuring songwriters' memories of how they came to write a song ... this by Roseanne Cash, a reminisence of the time she played at an inaugural ball in 1993 and her father sat in with the band on his song "Big River." Highlight:

We had rehearsed Dad’s “Big River” that afternoon, without him, and the band kicked it off.

Dad was supposed to come in after four bars, but he just stood at the front of the stage, strumming the guitar I had lent him in an absentminded-way, and surveying the crowd. I felt a surge of alarm. Four more bars went by. Had he forgotten the words? Forgotten where he was supposed to come in? I even whispered loudly to him, “Dad!”

He looked back at me over his shoulder and gave me a little self-satisfied smile. He started tapping his foot, swinging his ankle back and forth, in a way that was so iconic, so him: the sultry internal rhythm of a boy from the Mississippi Delta. He was grooving with the band. He let another 8 bars go by as he settled in, and then he sang the first line of the song.

After the show, Dennis, the drummer, came up to me. “I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget the way he tapped his foot,” he said. I never will, either.

I hadn't known this before, but Roseanne Cash is as good a storyteller as she is a songwriter. There's a lot else in the story. A memory of her children with Mister Rogers, the TV children's performer, and Johnny Cash's views on politics. (He was an astute observer of so many things.) Including this, looking ahead to today's inauguration of our first African American president:

We had a discussion about world leaders not long before his death in 2003, and I decried the lack of women in high office. “A black man will be president first, before a woman,” Dad said authoritatively. “People in this country are more prejudiced toward women than they are toward black men.” He paused. “But you’ll see both in your lifetime,” he said quietly.

I felt a twinge of sadness. The implication, of course, was that he himself would see neither. He has proven to be prescient. A black man is about to be president, before a woman, and I am here to see it. Dad is not, but I can imagine his foot tapping, his ankle swaying, to a kind of swampy Delta rhythm, which is a kind of African beat, by way of America, in a kind of insouciantly confident way, a way that mesmerizes those who witness it.