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| ARCHIVE : Capital News June 2003 Vol 28 No 6 |
JUNE CARTER CASH
Susan Jarvis
The wife of JOHNNY CASH had undergone heart surgery eight days before and passed away with her husband and her family at her side just after 5pm.
The funeral was attended by some 2,000 people at Hendersonville, including KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, TOM T HALL, RODNEY CROWELL and MARTY STUART (who have been married to Johnny's daughters Rosanne and Cindy), TRISHA YEARWOOD, RICKY SKAGGS and HANK WILLIAMS JR.
During the service ROSANNE CASH (Johnny's eldest daughter) said "My Daddy has lost his dearest companion and his soul mate. If being a wife were a corporation, June would have been a CEO. It was her most treasured role."
After marrying Johnny in 1968 June Carter adopted a support role with her own career, working with Johnny on his show and his business interests. She did however pursue her interest in acting and took a number of roles (most notably as ROBERT DUVALL's mother in the movie "The Apostle" and a number of appearances in various TV series).
The death of June Carter Cash saw a number of newspaper and magazine articles give a glowing account of her life, which included a struggle to fit in with her iconic mother and two sisters who were much better singers, two failed marriages, two daughters, the rescue of Johnny Cash from his drug addiction, the very successful marriage to Johnny Cash and the birth of their son JOHN CARTER CASH in 1970.
Peter Cooper, the music writer for Nashville's daily newspaper The Tennessean prepared an outstanding article for his paper in which he began with "June Carter Cash spent a lifetime around country music giants and co-authored one of country music's best known songs, yet her life is defined less by relations, connections or creations, than by warmth and force of personality."
June Carter was the last surviving daughter of MOTHER MAYBELLE CARTER, a member of country music's ground breaking pioneer super group THE CARTER FAMILY. June's musical career dates back to 1939 when she began performing with her mother and two sisters (Helen and Anita) following the disbandment of the original Carter Family.
In her own autobiography Among My Klediments June described herself as a tomboy "eager to do anything my father did - to follow him and do anything his boy would have done. Only I wasn't a boy. I was a girl. I wanted to be Daddy's boy."
Sisters Helen and Anita took naturally to singing, but June 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 performed on radio stations, she accentuated her accent and took the microphone to deliver hicked-up radio ads for hair tonic and other products.
During the 1940s the family headed for Nashville with a young guitarist from East Tennessee named CHET ATKINS. Ironically June was the first sister to have a national chart hit. In 1949 she did a parody of Baby It's Cold Outside with HOMER AND JETHRO which peaked at #9 on the Billboard chart.
In his Tennessean article Peter Cooper all the time respectfully referred to June as "Mrs Cash". Here's an extract:
In July 1952 she married country star CARL SMITH, one of the top hit-makers of the 1950s. They divorced in 1956, after 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.
''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 notes of her 1999 album Press On.
Before she got to know Johnny Cash, Mrs Cash 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 Carter Family biographer Mark 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. But she became a regular part of Johnny Cash's concerts beginning in 1962, and he recorded her song 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 pain, the hurt,'' she wrote in Among My Klediments. ''He should have died a thousand times from an overdose or a car 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.
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.
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.
The Rev. Billy Graham has been a close friend of the Cash family for many years. Dr 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.
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.
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.''
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