Rosanne Cash is back in Southern California this week, having swept through in August on a promotional tour for her New York Times bestseller “Composed: A Memoir,” in which she sorts through her life through the prism of the songs she’s written, sung or heard over her 55 years.

Between an appearance on “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson” on Monday night and a scheduled question-answer-performance session tonight at the Grammy Museum in downtown L.A., the singer-songwriter and her musical collaborator husband, John Leventhal, took time for a living-room performance Tuesday morning in the Hollywood Hills home of author, KCRW-FM deejay and music supervisor Gary Calamar.

The intimate setting, packed with several dozen guests, provided an ideal forum for Cash to read a passage from “Composed,” in which she recalled rooting through writing assignments she’d done as a schoolgirl. She recalled plucking the phrase “A lonely road is a bodyguard” from one of those old papers. The mature writer in her admired her youthful choice of a metaphor rather than a simile (which would have made it “A lonely road is like a bodyguard”), then dropped it into the song “Sleeping in Paris,” from her 1993 album, “The Wheel,” with which she started her short set.

Ben Keith, the veteran steel guitarist who played on Patsy Cline’s 1961 hit “I Fall to Pieces” before befriending Neil Young and going on to play on more than a dozen of the Canadian rocker's albums, has died. He was 73.

He died of a heart attack, director Jonathan Demme said Tuesday. Demme, who directed Young’s concert films “Neil Young Trunk Show” from earlier this year and 2006’s “Heart of Gold,” said Keith had been staying at Young’s ranch in Northern California, working on new projects with his longtime collaborator.

Keith was featured prominently in both. In “Neil Young Trunk Show,” shot in Pennsylvania at a stop on Young’s 2007-2008 concert tour, Young said a key reason he chose to tour with Keith, bassist Rick Rosas and Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina, rather than convening the full, hard-rocking Crazy Horse trio, was that “I can do more variety this way, because Ben plays so many instruments.”

Demme called Keith “an elegant, beautiful dude, and obviously a genius. He could play every instrument. He was literally the bandleader on any of that stuff… Neil has all the confidence in the world, but with Ben on board, there were no limits. Neil has a fair measure of the greatness of his music, but he knew he was even better when Ben was there.”

Most recently, Keith had been touring with Young’s wife, Pegi, in support of her second solo album, “Foul Deeds,” for a handful of West Coast performances in June. He also had played earlier this year with Neil Young on his first totally acoustic tour in several years.

Keith met Young in 1971 in Nashville, where the rocker was working on what would become his commercial breakthrough album, “Harvest.” Keith came to the recording studio at the invitation of bassist Tim Drummond, whom Young had asked to find a steel player for the sessions. When Keith arrived, “I didn’t know who anyone was, so I asked, ‘Who’s that guy over there?’ ” and was told “That’s Neil Young.”

Hank Cochran, the celebrated country songwriter and singer who died Thursday at age 74 from pancreatic cancer, spent most of his life immersed in music, searching for the next song to write, and it sounds like that’s the way he spent his final time on Earth.

“I spent the last day of his life at his bedside along with his family and a few close friends,” singer and songwriter Jamey Johnson told me in an e-mail he sent a few hours after Cochran died at his home in Hendersonville, Tenn. “Buddy [Cannon, the songwriter] joined us later in the afternoon and brought along Billy Ray Cyrus. We sang a range of old gospel songs and many of his own songs to him: ‘I Fall to Pieces,’ ‘Is it Raining at Your House,’ ‘Set 'em Up Joe’ and ‘Make the World Go Away.’

“My 6-year-old daughter even sang along with us on ‘The Chair,’ and she got a kick out of Billy Ray's ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ which even got Hank singing along for a note or two,” Johnson noted. “Although Hank was tired, he didn't want anyone to leave. He was enjoying the fellowship.”

Because Cochran had been struggling for a long time with cancer, many of his friends kept in close touch and spoke to him in person or by phone in his final days. Ray Price told me, “I talked to Hank on Monday and had a chance to say goodbye. This is not a real happy day; he will be missed, I guarantee it. … He was a great person in our business, and he contributed an awful lot.”

Jim Marshall, the great rock, jazz, country, blues and folk photojournalist who died Wednesday in New York at age 74, was the world’s eye on countless key moments in pop music during the '60s and beyond.

In this shot that Marshall took in 1968 at Folsom Prison, the focal point obviously is Johnny Cash, on his way to the watershed concert that helped rejuvenate his career at a time many in country music, and even executives at his own record label, considered him washed up.

But look to Cash’s left. That skinny fellow in the Woody Allen-like glasses is The Times’ own Robert Hilburn, the paper’s longtime pop music critic who was the only reporter to accompany Cash at that historic performance. Hilburn also had to do some heavy lobbying to get editors at The Times to agree to send him to cover the show.

“I had been a fan since hearing ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ on the radio in the '50s, and what could be better than to see him sing it live at Folsom?” Hilburn wrote in recalling the assignment many years later, one he recounts in his 2009 book “Corn Flakes With John Lennon: And Other Tales from a Rock 'N' Roll Life."

“Cash wore a black leather coat over his black suit as he stepped  past the prison's gray walls just after sunrise," Hilburn noted. "The mood was tense. Two weeks earlier, inmates had held a guard at knifepoint. Guards with rifles followed Cash's party everywhere. He seemed nervous, but not for his safety.

“What worried Cash was the concert itself. He wanted to capture on tape the electricity he had felt in other prison shows, when the inmates' response to his tales of sin and salvation, redemption and regret was so intense that he had chills. Cash was spellbinding on that stage, and ‘Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison’ turned out to be one of the most acclaimed live albums ever, revitalizing his career.”

Marshall also was the official photographer for Cash’s 1960s musical variety TV series, and photographed the singer and his wife, June Carter Cash, many times over the years. I reached out to their son, John Carter Cash, shortly after getting the news of Marshall’s death.

“Jim sent me a photo of my grandparents that hangs on my wall,” Cash responded by e-mail. “I cherish it dearly.  There is an amazing photo Jim took of my father and Shel Silverstein hanging beside it…. My family in particular will cherish your art for generations to come. We will miss you.”

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, 1968. Credit: Jim Marshall