Eight days after the Obama inauguration, and a cold rain lashes down on Gansevoort Street. Last night there was snow, but the thin crust it left on the cobblestone street has turned to gray mush. Pedestrians clamber over icy mounds at sidewalk intersections. Taxicabs race past, unfazed by the slick conditions, splashing dirty water onto pinstriped slacks and blue jean legs that stand too close to the curb.

Just above Greenwich Village, Gansevoort Street cuts straight through Manhattan’s meatpacking district on a short but noble dash toward the Hudson River. As far as I know, nobody has slaughtered animals here for decades, but the massive, towering brick buildings that once held sprawling killing floors remain, a reminder that blood-drenched sawdust and factory whistles were once as much symbols of New York as today’s Starbucks coffee shops, Duane Reade drugstores, and Prada sunglasses.

Along the Gansevoort side of one of those old slaughterhouses, dented steel doors hide various businesses. It’s hard to tell what kind of businesses because no signs announce their activities. An after-hours club? A storage facility? An escort service? In contrast, across the street, commerce carries on without embarrassment: a diner, a furniture store, and—a bit farther up the street toward Ninth Avenue— a trendy French eatery named Pastis. Some know the neighborhood for its Hogs and Heifers bar, where folks go to model their biker wear, sorority girls flash their friends for thrills, and the likes of Julia Roberts and Paul McCartney show up to dance on the bar.

Behind one of the steel doors is a recording studio. Naturally, it is hidden. Nobody is invited to stop in and record a track for his mama, like Elvis Presley did at Sun Records in Memphis. It’s a serious studio, yet not so serious that its lease cannot be yanked away. Skyrocketing rents—at this point still impervious to the economic climate and fueled by the popular nightclubs and restaurants in the neighborhood—will spell the end of this studio, or at least the end of its incarnation on Gansevoort Street. Soon, it’s a pretty good guess, a shop offering foreign coffee and baked things too pretty to eat or maybe an upscale workout spot will take its place. A portrait of a woman in a head covering stares out from the wall next to the gray door, her expression seemingly oblivious to the studio’s certain fate.

Inside, the studio buzzes with activity. Like the ubiquitous scaffolding that despite the economy still wraps so many buildings in Manhattan, the framework for Rosanne’s session comes together. John Leventhal positions microphones, clears space in the recording booth, and checks levels. Around him, Bestor Cram’s documentary film crew members—still hoping for funding at this stage—rush to erect lighting, connect to the studio soundboard, white balance their cameras, and check their own levels. They have littered the hallway that leads from the street entrance to the actual studio with bags and cases of equipment; back and forth they hustle, moving cameras, tripods, and cords. Focused, Leventhal strides to each task while the crew hops around him. It’s like an Irish hooley.

To Leventhal, though, it is more hassle than hooley. He rules his studio, needing more than anything to block noise and traffic that will upset his process. But right now, there’s nothing but noise and traffic. He’s courteous always, helping Dominic Musacchio, the soundman, plug into the main audio source, digging up a cord for Jesse Beecher the cameraman. Still, occasional sarcasm and exasperated sighs betray him. Rightly, he fears that cameras will stiffen his actors, Rosanne and a drummer who will be playing along with the tracks, and that the mystery and magic of record making will disappear when it is laid bare for viewers and readers. He will be happy when the day’s shooting ends.

Outside in the bleak midwinter, a cab drops Rosanne in front of the dour woman. She limps to the steel door and pulls herself into the hallway. She lifts off an impossibly large and furry hat and glances at the mad scene. Nestling into a soft couch, she pulls out her iPhone (which during breaks will be as constant in her hand as a glass of water) and explains her limp to me. A few days before, she dropped a boiling kettle of water, scalding her right foot. The next evening, while performing with former husband Rodney Crowell at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room, she tortured her foot in the tight shoes she chose to wear. Over the weekend, infection set in.

Will she have to recline on a couch with her microphone and deliver “Miss the Mississippi and You,” popularized by Jimmie Rodgers? I’m reminded that the Singing Brakeman, struggling with tuberculosis, needed a couch close to him while on one of his New York sessions, and that Rosanne’s father toward the end rested on his studio couch when the day’s work drained him.

As it is, Rosanne will forgo the Jimmie Rodgers song today and sits only during her breaks. She takes on Patsy Cline’s “She’s Got You” instead. John has worked out a groovy arrangement that opens with smart electric piano riffs and rings ever so faintly of Floyd Cramer. The Cramer connection, though, doesn’t stick for long; Booker T. Jones poking at Hammond B3 keys seems more like it.

Behind her mic, which sits squarely in the middle of the room and faces John—who’s at the board as engineer—Rosanne wraps herself around the groove, rocking toward her entrance to the song.

One of Patsy Cline’s greatest performances, “She’s Got You” showcased her powerful vocals like no other when it was released in 1962 and established songwriter Hank Cochran’s career in Nashville. Sadly, she died in a plane crash within a year of its topping the charts. But Cochran would go on to write a dozen classics, including “Make the World Go Away” and “Don’t Touch Me.” “It’s a list song,” observes Rosanne of Cochran’s song. “I’ve got your picture, I’ve got your records, I’ve got your class ring. And in that way it’s kind of perfect, kind of satisfying. The fact that it’s content mirroring context is great, but you can kind of hear the songwriter going, ‘What else?’ What else would she have that he doesn’t. It’s kind of perfect, the perfect country song.”

So a song that makes a list appears on The List. Clever. It links to the album. But in a real way it links to Rosanne. One of the foremost female country stars of the 1980s recalling the undisputed country music queen of the early 1960s reveals that The List is every bit as much a search for Rosanne Cash’s place in the music schema as it is a tribute to her father’s sense of history. Up in Rosanne’s attic, she had dug out for me a 1996 New York Times Magazine piece she wrote on Patsy. It was at the height of the Patsy revival, when the Hollywood biopic Sweet Dreams was still fresh in the public’s consciousness and the touring stage show Always . . . Patsy Cline was hitting the big towns. In the piece, Rosanne’s admiration for her forebear was genuine, and it’s clear that she understood and related to the pioneer’s attitude. “Patsy Cline was wicked and fabulous when both qualities meant something, before they were cheap ideas used to market more flaccid talents. She was a source of fascination, distrust and raw, if hidden, admiration. But not judgment: there was nothing to attach judgment to because she, Patsy, did not judge herself.” Later in the essay, Rosanne’s mother reveals to her that Patsy had visited their home in California when Rosanne was too young to remember. “I sighed wistfully,” she wrote. “Somewhere in the blackout of early childhood I had had an encounter with Patsy Cline. I may spend the rest of my life trying to remember it.”

Rosanne also failed to remember that Patsy Cline had at least once arrived at her home bruised and battered, and her mother and father had given her refuge. “That sounds really familiar,” she remarks when I bring it up. “I remember there being something like that, like a secret, they wouldn’t tell us kids what was wrong. It was the same thing when they brought Carl [Perkins], when Dad brought Carl home and he was just bottomed out on alcohol, like a secret. ‘Don’t tell the children what’s really wrong.’”

Like Perkins, Patsy often toured with Johnny Cash, joining the show for stretches through southern Canada or the upper Midwest. She followed Cash through California too, and one night out there she’d clashed again with a male companion and Cash had carried her home. She stayed around for a few days until she healed. The act of hospitality contradicts the popular perception of the Cashes’ California household where we know Rosanne’s mother fretted over her drifting husband and Rosanne and her sisters pined for their dad. Indeed, there could be refuge and healing. According to the script, Vivian should have loathed Patsy, who came from the world that was stealing her husband away. “I would have thought that too,” admits Rosanne. “There was just something special about Patsy that my mother loved, just loved her. So if my mother felt that way about it, she could forgive anything, she could overlook it. I think all those [resentful] feelings were reserved for June.”

In front of the microphone, Rosanne brushes back her hair and digs in. There’s no self-consciousness. She’s scribbled out the lyrics on a yellow pad of paper, and with bifocals perched on her nose, she gets into the rhythm of the list of “She’s Got You.” She will screech to a halt when the lines elude her and curse flatness when it creeps in from time to time. But always she returns to battle. Lifting her scarf back up around her neck, she tells John to start over. “Keep the first two verses,” she demands. “But let me get this third one.”

At times John fails to see what has dissatisfied Rosanne when she stops, but he dutifully begins again with her, punching up the track where she has left it and watching her levels intently as she continues. But it cuts the other way too. According no license to their marriage, he stops her midline. “It’s a little shrill. Do it one more time.” She heeds him. She will rarely protest. Rosanne trusts John’s instincts. She lets him produce and allows him his vision.

This dance will conclude minutes after the noon hour. “She’s Got You” is done . . . for today.