The Greatest Love Story

Since it's February 14th, I thought I'd share a little bio on, what I believe to be, the greatest American love story. It's not saccharine, traditional or couth but it was genuine and withstood the test of time. I'm talking about Johhny and June and their story was best conveyed by Sarah Vowell on This American Life. 

The marriage of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash is the greatest love story of the 20th century. The first time Johnny saw June, he was on his high school senior class trip to Nashville, and she was on stage at the Grand Ole Opry, singing with her famous relatives, the Carter family, and cracking jokes with Ernest Tubb.

Years later, in 1961, the Opry was where they would meet. They were backstage, and Johnny went up to June and told her, "You and I are going to get married someday." She laughed and told him that she couldn't wait. I'm guessing that when Cash went home that night, he didn't mention this to Vivian, his wife.

Not long after that, June joined Johnny's road show and they were traveling around the country together on tour. His wife mostly stayed home, and so did her husband. But June Carter was a lady-- a solid, accomplished, well-meaning Christian professional. And no solid, well-meaning Christian pro willingly falls in love with another woman's husband, especially if he's a pill-popping speed freak like Johnny Cash was back then.

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Years later, June would describe falling in love with Johnny this way. "I felt like I had fallen into a pit of fire and I was literally burning alive." So June, who had been a professional musician since she was as tall as a ukulele, called her songwriting partner, Merle Kilgore, and they wrote about June's forbidden feelings for Cash.

It was a song straight out of Dante. They gave it to June's not particularly Dante-esque sister Anita, who recorded it as "Love's Ring of Fire."

Johnny Cash heard Anita Carter's record, and then one night, he had a dream. He dreamed of mariachi horns playing this song. Some say it was the influence of the then-popular Tijuana Brass. Others say it was the barbiturates he took before bed to take the edge off the amphetamines. Either way, Johnny cash went into the studio with a couple of trumpet players and made his dream come true.

The peculiarity of the song's orchestration is topped only by the weirdness of its credits. Here was a married man singing a song written about him by the betrothed woman who was in love with him, and singing the record back-up "oohs" were said woman, June Carter, as well as her sister and her mother. Mother Maybelle Carter, the most respectable elder in the history of country music, if not America itself. Listen to how cheerful they sound.

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 In this song, to compare love to fire, isn't just the pop music sexy heat cliche like "you give me fever" or "hunka, hunka burning love" or "it's getting hot in here." This is fire as in brimstone, old-time religion, written by the daughter of a people who believed in the eternal flames of hell.

June Carter was coveting her neighbor's spouse, which meant she was breaking one of the Ten Commandments. Loving Johnny Cash was a sin, and for her, the wages of sin were death-- a death in which the sinner spent all eternity as nothing more than kindling.

When June Carter admitted to herself that she loved Johnny Cash, it is, in a small Country and Western love song way, not unlike the moment Huck Finn resolves to help the slave Jim escape, even though he's been told that doing so would be wrong. "All right then," he says. "I'll go to hell."

This is from June's recording of "Ring of Fire." Notice, no trumpets. Just an old-timey fiddle, and she strums her autoharp, maybe ribbing her husband a little by pointing out in the liner notes, "That's the way I've heard it from the beginning."

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There's an acre of misgiving in that little word, "oh." As in, oh, what have I done. Oh, his poor wife. Oh, Lord, forgive me. Oh, for crying out loud, I better flush his pills down the toilet yet again. Oh, I am Grand Ole Opry royalty, and this belligerent drug addict is about to get banned from my beloved Opry for smashing out the stage lights with a mike stand, and oh, I'm going to love him anyway.

"Ring of Fire" became a number one hit for Johnny Cash in 1963. Then, finally, he got divorced, and June got divorced, and he got sober, and in 1968 they got married.

When I say that Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash's romance was the greatest love story of the 20th century, I'm not just thinking about their fiery courtship, though your better love stories do require that obstacles are overcome, and the Cash's had plenty of those. I was really thinking about their marriage-- 35 years of actual happily ever after.

The pictures of the two of them together through the years are almost suspiciously entertaining to look at. Johnny's cracking June up, or she's cracking him up, or in my favorite, the photo on his compilation album, Love, she's fallen asleep against his shoulder. His chin is resting on her head, and he might be smelling her hair. In his liner notes next to that picture, Johnny Cash says that he's sitting there thinking about Robert Browning's poem about the death of his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, when June Carter Cash walks in and wonders what he'd like to eat for lunch.

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 And that seems about right-- the two of them in a room together, pondering sandwiches and poetry. Grandly, he often credited her with saving his life. But he also bragged, she likes the same kind of movies I do.

On June's solo album, Press On, after her "Ring of Fire," the very next song is a duet with Johnny. It's a gospel ballad narrated by an old married couple worried that one will die before the other. Worried about getting left behind. "If it proves to be as well that I am first to cross," June sings, "and somehow I have a feeling it will be."

As she predicted in the song, June died first. Four months later, Johnny was buried next to her, because, as he once said, "This thing between us has been happening since 1961, and I just don't want to travel if she can't come with me."