June Carter Cash left mark on Nashville, Man in Black
By Peter Cooper
Nashville Tennessean
Gannett News Service
June Carter Cash spent a lifetime around the giants of country music and wrote one of country's best-known songs, yet her life is defined less by relatives, connections or creations than by warmth and force of personality.
June Carter Cash, shown here performing at an awards show in 2002, helped write "Ring of Fire" for husband Johnny Cash.
She died Thursday at 73, eight days after undergoing heart surgery.
The last surviving daughter of iconic guitarist Mother Maybelle Carter and the wife of the legendary Johnny Cash, June Cash began performing on radio shows with the Carter Family in 1939.
Nearly a quarter century later, she enlisted friend Merle Kilgore to help compose a song about the fright involved in her escalating relationship with Johnny Cash.
The resulting song, "Ring of Fire," is now a standard of American popular music, as Cash's definitive 1963 hit version spawned covers by artists from Ray Charles to Frank Zappa.
"A song like that goes on forever," Johnny Cash told the Tennessean last summer, though when his wife heard his comment she immediately deferred the credit: "John was the best part of that: It was the way he sung it and the way he did it."
• Born June 23, 1929, in Maces Springs, Va. • Daughter of Mother Maybelle Carter, a member of the original Carter Family trio • Co-wrote "Ring of Fire," one of country music's best-known and best-loved songs • Made three solo albums: "Appalachian Pride" was released in 1975 and is not currently in print in the United States; "Press On" was released in 1999 and has now been reissued on Dualtone Records; "Wildwood Flower" is scheduled for an August release on Dualtone. • Won three Grammy awards, two for duets with husband Johnny Cash and one for her "Press On" album
In the liner notes of her 1999 "Press On" album, June Cash described "Ring of Fire's" inception: "I felt like I had fallen into a pit of fire and I was literally burning alive."
June Carter Cash
Her intuition wasn't far off the mark, as joining with Johnny Cash meant helping to tame a man who, to paraphrase Kris Kristofferson's synopsis of Johnny Cash, was both great and wasted. For years Cash battled a drug addiction, and scores of fans credit his wife with saving her husband's life.
"What June did for me was post signs along the way, lift me up when I was weak, encourage me when I was discouraged, and love me when I felt alone and unlovable," Johnny Cash wrote in "Cash: The Autobiography."
"She's the greatest woman I have ever known. Nobody else, except my mother, comes close."
Born June 23, 1929, Valerie June Carter spent her early years as a self-described tomboy. She'd milk cows or gather kindling wood at her family's Maces Springs, Va., home, or take delight in riding on a motorcycle with father Ezra Carter. Once, Ezra ran the motorbike into a ditch, shooting his daughter into a cornfield.
"I survived with only scratches and an eager yearning to do anything my father did — to follow him and do anything his boy would have done," June Carter Cash wrote in her own autobiography, "Among My Klediments" published more than 20 years ago. "Only I wasn't a boy. I was a girl. But I really tried hard not to be. I wanted to be Daddy's boy."
June grew up the middle of three daughters and watched her mother become a major music star as part of The Carter Family, which included Maybelle's cousin, Sara, and Sara's husband, A.P.
After Sara left the act in 1943, Maybelle soldiered on, with her teenage daughters, June, Helen and Anita, in tow. June played autoharp, wore comic clothing and cracked jokes for the act that became known as Mother Maybelle & The Carter Sisters.
That group played radio stations in Richmond, Va.; Knoxville, Tenn.; and Springfield, Mo., hooking up along the way with a young and talented guitarist named Chet Atkins. Atkins' pals, Homer & Jethro, teamed with June in 1949 to produce a Top 10 country version of "Baby It's Cold Outside."
In 1950, Mother Maybelle & The Carter Sisters joined the Grand Ole Opry, where June became popular for what Carter Family biographer Mark Zwonitzer called her "huckleberry humor and wholesome sex appeal."
In Nashville, the Carters befriended many top performers, including Elvis Presley and the not-long-for-this-world Hank Williams.
July of 1952 brought a marriage to country star Carl Smith, one of the top hit-makers of the 1950s. They divorced in 1956, but not before producing a daughter, future country singer Carlene Carter.
Around that time, June began splitting time between Nashville and New York, where she studied acting under director Elia Kazan. In New York, she made friends including Robert Duvall and James Dean. She name-checked the latter in a song called "I Used To Be Somebody":
"We were young and foolish/ And crying out for fame/ He said James Dean was his name."
Later, she would parlay her acting skills into several key roles, including a part as Duvall's mother in "The Apostle."
"I had a great love for acting, and maybe, if I hadn't gotten to know Johnny Cash better, my life would have been different," she wrote for the "Press On" notes.
Before she got to know Johnny Cash, she married a man named Rip Nix. That union brought a daughter, Rosey. By the late 1950s, she'd already met Cash, backstage at the Opry. According to Zwonitzer, Johnny Cash — then married to his first wife — greeted her by saying, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash and I'm going to marry you someday."
She became a regular part of Cash's concerts beginning in 1962, he recorded "Ring of Fire" in 1963 and the pair married in 1968.
"There are so many things I could tell about those years — the sleepless nights in the apartment he shared with Waylon Jennings, the wrecks, the pain, the hurt," she wrote in "Among My Klediments." "He should have died a thousand times from an overdose or a wreck. ... But God never let him go, and neither did I."
