June Carter Cash dies with family at her side

The Tennessean.com

By PETER COOPER,Staff Writer

May 16, 2003

Country music star known for her warmth, personality

June Carter Cash spent a lifetime around country music giants and co-authored one of country's best-known songs, yet her life is defined less by relations, connections or creations than by warmth and force of personality.

Mrs. Cash, 73, died yesterday at 5:04 p.m. in Baptist Hospital, eight days after undergoing heart surgery on May 7. At the request of the family, funeral services will be private, according to a statement from Baptist Hospital late last night.

The last surviving daughter of iconic guitarist Mother Maybelle Carter and the wife of the legendary Johnny Cash, Mrs. 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 Johnny 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 Mrs. Cash 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.''

In the liner notes of her 1999 Press On album, Mrs. Cash described Ring of Fire's inception: ''I felt like I had fallen into a pit of fire and I was literally burning alive.''

Her intuition wasn't far off the mark, as joining with Johnny Cash meant helping to tame a man who was, to paraphrase Kris Kristofferson's synopsis of him, both great and wasted. For years, Johnny Cash battled a drug addiction, and scores of fans credit Mrs. Cash 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.''

Early years with family

Born June 23, 1929, into the clan known quite correctly as ''the first family of country music,'' 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,'' Mrs. Carter wrote in her own autobiography, Among My Klediments. ''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.''

Though the monetary rewards of Mother Maybelle's groundbreaking recording sessions with The Carter Family (a group that included Maybelle's cousin, Sara, and Sara's husband, A.P.), were not commensurate with the records' historical significance, June Carter and her two sisters lived comparatively well. The middle of three daughters, June grew up with clean clothes and abundant confidence, as she watched her mother become a major music star and saw her father do improbable things like build a dam that brought power to the area.

''My daddy was one of the heroes of the whole family,'' Mrs. Cash said last summer, during an interview at her childhood home in Maces Springs. ''He brought the first electricity to this valley.''

Sisters Helen and Anita took naturally to singing, but June's entry into the family business was more problematic. She had trouble singing on-key.

''When you don't have much of a voice and harmony is all around you, you reach out and pick something you can use,'' she wrote in Among My Klediments. ''In my case, it was just plain guts. Since I couldn't sing, I talked a lot and tried to cover up all the bad notes with laughter.''

When the Carter Family moved to San Antonio, Texas, to perform on border radio stations, Mrs. Cash made no attempt to cover her rural Virginia roots. She accentuated her accent and took the family microphone to deliver hicked-up radio ads for hair tonic and other products. As a teenager, she developed into quite a cornpone character actress, walking across stage and carrying a big piece of wood. When Maybelle would ask, ''Where you going?'' Mrs. Cash would reply, ''I'm looking for a room. I've got my board.''

After Sara left the act in 1943, Maybelle soldiered on, with her teenage daughters in tow. Mrs. Cash played autoharp, wore comic clothing and cracked jokes for the act that became known as Mother Maybelle & The Carter Sisters.

''My generation knew June Carter as Johnny Cash's wife, as the woman who wrote Ring of Fire and as part of the Carter Family,'' said singer-songwriter Dwight Yoakam, who recorded Ring of Fire on his 1986 debut album. ''By the time I became aware of her, she was this really seductive, Appalachian mountain princess who had captured Johnny Cash's eye. We didn't realize what my parents' generation knew, which was that June was the funniest of the Carter Sisters. Her act was this absurd, comedic take on herself.''

Mother Maybelle & The Carter Sisters played radio stations in Richmond, Va., Knoxville 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, the Carter women joined the Grand Ole Opry, where June became popular for what Carter Family biographer Mark Zwonitzer called her ''Huckleberry humor and wholesome sex appeal.''

Popularity did not, however, turn the country girl into any sort of prima donna. Kilgore recalled Mrs. Cash's decision to let him drive them both from Nashville to a show in Louisiana on a hot summer day.

''I had a Ford Falcon station wagon, with no air conditioning,'' Kilgore said. ''June said, 'That's OK, we'll drive fast.' ''

In Nashville, the Carters befriended many top performers, including Elvis Presley and the not-long-for-this-world Hank Williams. Mrs. Cash was a close friend of Williams' wife, Audrey, and one night in 1952 Mrs. Cash nearly caught a stray bullet that flew from Williams' gun during one of Hank and Audrey's domestic disputes.

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, Mrs. Cash 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.

 

Being a 'rock for Johnny'

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 Grand Ole Opry. According to author 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.''

That prediction ultimately came to pass, though the two would not take vows until March 1, 1968, soon after the release of the Carryin' on With Johnny Cash & June Carter duet album. But she became a regular part of Johnny Cash's concerts beginning in 1962, and he recorded Ring of Fire in 1963.

''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.''

A problematic courtship blossomed into one of country music's greatest love stories, of course.

''She was such a rock for Johnny, and I think the world saw that,'' said friend Jeff Hanna of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. ''Her strength was immeasurable. They were meant to be together.''

Ring of Fire co-writer Kilgore was best man at the Cashes' wedding. He said any concerns about Johnny Cash's lifestyle were allayed by those who fathomed Mrs. Cash's depth of caring.

''He was so wild, but they were madly in love,'' Kilgore said.

Johnny Cash's troubles with pills didn't go away immediately, but no one could deny Mrs. Cash's positive effects on his lifestyle. The Cashes won two Grammy Awards for best country duo recordings, one for If I Were A Carpenter and the other for the propulsive Jackson.

''The everlasting image welded into my memory of the two of them is Jackson,'' Yoakam said. ''When John and June did Jackson, it was just hot as pistols, fever-pitched sexuality.''

In Nashville, Johnny and Mrs. Cash became the center of a circle of creative Nashvillians who included songwriter Kristofferson.

''I'm happy to say he's no longer wasted, and he's found a good woman,'' said Kristofferson of Johnny Cash, in the intro to a song on Kristofferson's debut album. ''I'd like to dedicate this to John and June, who helped show me how to beat the devil.''

 

Living with faith

Mrs. Cash made a solo album, Appalachian Pride, in 1975, but for the most part she put individual ambitions on hold and concentrated on more supportive roles. She and other members of the Carter clan accompanied her husband on concert appearances, helped raise the couple's son, John Carter Cash, and assisted in most every aspect of Johnny Cash's life.

Throughout, Mrs. Cash leaned on Christianity for guidance and for limits.

''If you always follow your heart, that old heart will get you in trouble,'' she told the Nashville Banner's Michael McCall in 1990. ''If you have boundaries that hem and haw and fly up in the air, you might as well give up. 'Cause that heart will go boogety, boogety, boogety, and you'll get messed up.''

Among those who came to know Mrs. Cash's spiritual side was the Rev. Billy Graham, who, with wife Ruth Graham, was a close friend of the Cash family.

''We have always had much love for the Cash family,'' Graham said in a statement. ''June will be greatly missed, and we look forward to seeing her in heaven.''

While her part in her husband's touring show helped keep Mrs. Cash in the public eye and helped to spread the Carter Family legacy, she seldom stepped out to display her solo talents after Appalachian Pride's release. In the late 1990s, though, at her husband's insistence and with son John Carter Cash's production help, she recorded the heralded Press On album.

The album, released in 1999 and recently reissued on Dualtone Records, contains some Carter Family standards, a couple of well-chosen cover songs and some originals that do well to capture Mrs. Cash's unique sense of humor and wordplay: One minute, Mrs. Cash was singing the poignant I Used To Be Somebody, the next she was relating her feeling that ''Quentin Tarantino makes the strangest movies I have ever seen.''

At the heart of Press On was a stripped-down acoustic sound that harkened to Carter Family days.

''How can you be any purer than pure if your name is Carter?'' she said to The Tennessean's Jay Orr in 1999. ''How can you get away from being a Carter? There's a part of you that's gonna come through. How do you keep from doing it? It's what you're born to do.''

Press On won a Grammy — Mrs. Cash's third — for best traditional folk album. A new album, Wildwood Flower, has been completed and is slated for a Sept. 9 release.

Growing older together

Johnny and Mrs. Cash had been off the road for the past half-decade, and he often has been ill.

''Nobody could ever have a truer companion through the sickness as June was,'' Johnny Cash told The Tennessean in 2000. ''We're closer now than we've ever been in our lives. We've seen a lot of them die and fall, seen great artists bite the dust, but she and I have fought together and fought for each other, and we're one.''

Johnny and Mrs. Cash eventually bought back Ezra and Maybelle Carter's home at Maces Spring, and the couple often returned there. Last summer, Mrs. Cash attended a dinner celebration in nearby Bristol, commemorating the 75th anniversary of ''The Bristol Sessions,'' the recording dates that launched the careers of The Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers and others.

The morning after that posh dinner, Mrs. Cash was back at the homestead, singing in the living room with family members, including daughter Carlene and granddaughter Tiffany Anastasia Lowe.

The room rang with harmonies, as three generations of Carter kin sang Hello Stranger, It Takes A Worried Man and even I Used To Be Somebody.

After the singing session, Mrs. Cash told stories about Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and assorted Carters, and she took care to point out various landmarks on the property.

''My daddy planted those right there,'' she said, pointing to some shrubs. ''You know, John came out here and he couldn't stop loving it. Look at that water running there, just like a little velvet ribbon.''

Mrs. Cash had a way with description, with stories and songs and with people. She was a collector of music, a spreader of humor, an international ambassador of country music and a saving grace to Johnny Cash. Mrs. Cash's death leaves a void that extends past the immediate family for which she cared, past the grounds of her properties and past the line that divides performer from audience.

''Our lives are entwined with the people over the footlights,'' she once wrote. ''We are a part of them.''

Mrs. Cash is survived by her husband, Johnny; son, John Carter Cash; daughters; Carlene Carter and Rosey Nix; and numerous stepchildren, grandchildren and other relatives.

Peter Cooper writes about music for The Tennessean. He can be reached at 259-8220 or by e-mail at pcooper@tennessean.com.