Rosanne Cash rides the long and winding sonic highway.

Three years ago marked the first time Rosanne Cash returned to her father’s boyhood home in Dyess, Arkansas, since Johnny himself dragged her out there at 12 years old.

The five-room shack was one of those provided to farmers under FDR’s New Deal during the Great Depression. Today it stands alone in a barren field against a seemingly perpetual gray sky, freshly sanctioned as a historic site by the state.

For Rosanne, the home, which opened to the public to tour in 2014, gives her an idea of the destitution and impoverishment that plagued Johnny’s childhood, and much of the South at that same time.

Johnny Cash’s boyhood home turned also out to be one of many stops: Rosanne also visited Robert Johnson’s grave and the Tallahatchie Bridge, famously referenced in Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.”

Though Rosanne Cash grew up in Southern California, she is a Memphis, Tennessee native. As she approaches 60, Cash is able to embrace her Southern roots much more easily than she did as a teenager.

“When I was growing up, there wasn’t a leveling of cultures as there is now in the country with the Internet and chain stores,” she explains. “Each area still had a distinct personality. I identified as a Californian.”

Before recording The River & The Thread (Blue Note), Cash and her husband/collaborator John Leventhal stopped at many of the monuments – peppered throughout Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee and Virginia – that write the book of Southern music history. The journey became the foundation for Cash’s 2014 record and connected her with the South in a way she had never been able to enjoy before. She lists off some of the spots she visited: “Stax Records, Sun Records in Memphis, the Alabama Chanin workshop in Florence, Alabama, where they sew all the clothes I wear on stage. The famous recording studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, the hills of Virginia.”

These storied landmarks, many of which have a direct link to Cash’s father (and her stepmother June Carter), inspired the narratives on Cash’s 13th studio release. A crossbreed of autobiography and historical fiction, The River & The Thread flows with hand-on-the-shoulder comfort that seduces listeners effortlessly.

The album opener “A Feather’s Not A Bird” resonates with warm blues tones that are as nostalgic as the sound of rusty-stringed guitar plugged into a 1955 Fender Tweed Amp. “World of Strange Design” marks one of several tunes showcasing an impressive array of special guests; in this song, slide guitar master Derek Trucks unloads potent solos.

Cash shows just how ambitious she gets with “When the Master Calls the Roll,” a creative rendering of a folk ditty about a wife losing her husband in the Civil War. It’s worth a listen for the all-star choir of Kris Kristofferson, Tony Joe White, John Prine, Amy Helm (Levon Helm’s daughter) and Rodney Crowell (Cash’s ex-hubby).

While The River & The Thread feels especially cathartic, like making amends at a loved one’s grave, Cash feels that all art accomplishes similar ends.

“There is a restlessness that builds in creative work that is a huge release and relief when finished,” she says. “Of course, then you second guess things later on, but the satisfaction of completion and feeling a work has merit is very cathartic.”

At the 57th annual Grammy Awards on Feb. 8, Cash batted 1.000 with The River & The Thread: three nominations, three wins, including Best Americana Album, Best American Roots Performance and Best American Roots Song (“A Feather’s Not A Bird”).

When Cash accepted her third Grammy of the night – the fourth total of her career – she quoted Ray Charles: “You’re a better singer at 50 than you are at 30, because your whole life shows up in your voice.”

Though her delivery appeared cool, she says fireworks were exploding on the inside.

“I don’t know that I had a coherent thought, I was just ebullient,” Cash says. “I did feel a wave of gratitude to all the people who worked for the record who were unseen out of the public eye.”

Looking back on a career that now spans 35 years, Cash is mostly proud that she’s continued to work through times of self-doubt – even when she thought no one cared about her music and found herself thinking, “What’s the point?”

“Even then, I still kept working and trying to become better at what I do,” she says.

How does Cash feel about following up her masterpiece?

“I can’t think about it in that way,” she says. “That would paralyze me. I just want to write some more good songs.”

Cash says there aren’t any plans of another record yet, but there’s still a lot of material she’s yet to write.

In the meantime, she recently collaborated with T Bone Burnett on a few tunes for the upcoming season of True Detective.

ROSANNE CASH 8pm Thursday, March 19. Sunset Center, Ninth and San Carlos, Carmel. Sold out. www.sunsetcenter.org