When Rosanne Cash decided to go public with her father, Johnny Cash's list of 100 essential country songs, she didn't realize the intensity with which people would want to know the names of all of them. Johnny gave them to her as a gift when she was 18 as a way of educating her about what daddy did at the office.

Rosanne first revealed the list's existence while on tour supporting her 2006 album 'Black Cadillac.' Hounded by fans after virtually every show and prodded by her husband to do something with the list, Cash recorded a dozen of the tracks and has just released them this week on an album entitled, simply, 'The List.' And indeed, as was father Johnny's intention, the songs are essential country music selections. They're taken straight from the songbooks of the greats -- ranging from Merle Haggard to Jimmie Rodgers -- and Cash was careful to include certain indispensable style deviations including honky tonk and Delta blues.

But that still leaves 88 songs on paper that we don't know about, and Cash isn't ready to reveal the rest of them just yet -- she had a hard enough time choosing the first dozen. "As far as picking the songs we did, some of them were clearly not going to work," Cash tells Spinner. "They were too gender specific or they were too much of a period piece, and I couldn't do another version of 'This Land Is Your Land.' You know what I mean?"

Indeed. But now that a dozen are down and being passed around, that's 88 songs Cash still has to pull from and, luckily, she plans to continue the project. "That doesn't mean I'll stop writing," she says. After all, she's long since established herself as a top-selling and award-winning songwriter in her own right. But perhaps by sharing with us an important gift that her father gave to her at a young age, she is somehow honoring her private past while sharing music history with the world. After years of keeping it between her and her dad, she's finally ready. "In fact, a month ago I said to John [her husband], 'I want to start recording Volume 2 of 'The List," Cash admits. "And he said, 'Can we just get this one out first, please?"

He got his wish this week when 'The List' finally hit store shelves. Or, at least, its first dozen songs.