It's TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Today we've got something special for you. It's a musical treat from a living legend, singer-songwriter Roseanne Cash. She weaves family history, personal experience, and American history into her songs. And as you'll hear, braiding these together makes both the music and the context

richer and more meaningful.

I had a friend, a songwriting mentor and a great songwriter, John Stewart, who told me just before he died, we are all just radios

hoping to pick up each other signals. I found that to be true and profound, and I've spent my life

trying to clear the static.

The strongest signals that come to me are musical in the form of songs or stories told in rhythm and rhyme.

Sometimes I can tune into a revolution in the heart.

Sometimes I hear keen from my Celtic ancestors.

And some songs have been postcards from my future.

In my family, there was a song for every loss, every celebration,

every unspoken need, every longing.

But there was also so much chaos that often I was the only one who recognized what was being communicated.

My grandmother, Carrie Cash, moved with my grandfather and their five children into a New Deal-era colony,

created by FDR for poor families in the sunken lands of the Arkansas Delta

in 1935. So they moved into this freshly painted cottage and she gave birth to two more babies there

with the assistance only of a doctor

who came by in a horse and buggy and pulled two loose aspirin from his pocket to give to her,

the same pocket in which he kept his fishing worms.

That's true.

I read once that every time an old woman dies, a library disappears.

And before her library disappeared, I tuned into my grandmother's signals and gleaned her

tenacity, which I borrowed, and her long-suffering and her life of constant work with seven children,

...