June Carter Cash 1929-2003 CARTER FAMILY FAME WAS JUST BEGINNING By: Geoff Boucher LOS ANGELES TIMES June Carter Cash, a singer and songwriter who grew up in the famed Carter Family and then created a musical bridge to a new generation of country music with her long marriage to Johnny Cash, died yesterday at Baptist Hospital in Nashville, Tenn. She was 73. Mrs. Cash died eight days after open heart surgery ended with severe complications, said Lou Robin, longtime manager to the couple. Her husband and family members were at her bedside. Mrs. Cash had co-writing credits on Ring of Fire, Long-Legged Guitar Pickin' Man and Jackson. Performing as a duo with husband Johnny, her hits included the 1964 reworking of the Bob Dylan song It Ain't Me Babe and their fiery 1967 recording Jackson, which won the couple a Grammy, as did their 1970 version of If I Were a Carpenter, written by Tim Hardin. For much of her life, Mrs. Cash could have played second fiddle in a famous family. Instead, she shaped herself into a star in her own right, although she often put her family obligations ahead of career. Her mother, aunt and uncle, performing as the Carter Family, were a pioneering force in country music's leap from regional sound to mainstream popular music in the 1920s. Their hits Will the Circle Be Unbroken? and Keep on the Sunny Side made them royalty in the field. And when she became June Carter Cash, her husband's status again put her in a supporting role. Valerie June Carter was born in Maces Springs, Va., on June 23, 1929, the second of three daughters to Mother Maybelle Carter, one of the founding members of the Carter Family trio, and Ezra Carter, a farmer. Young June was quickly brought into the family music circle and learned to play the autoharp. By age 10, she and her sisters, Anita and Helen Carter, and their cousin, Janette Carter, were performing on radio shows that beamed the family's music across much of rural America. The elder Carters would typically perform traditional music and originals by A.P. Carter, such as Wildwood Flower, while the second-generation females would do versions of the day's biggest hits as well as novelty tunes. By 1943, the original Carter act had disbanded, and the new incarnation of the family act -- Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters -- became a staple of radio and the Nashville stage. By the 1950s, she had established herself enough to become a solo artist, and she spent a year as an opening act for Elvis Presley. As a signature performer on the Grand Ole Opry radio show, she was not just a dynamic singer, but also a firebrand comic presence, with her playful lyrics and stage banter. Her marriage in 1952 to honky-tonk singer Carl Smith, which ended in divorce, produced two daughters, Rozanna and Rebecca. The latter became a country singer herself and performed under the name Carlene Carter. The lasting love of her life, however, would be singer Johnny Cash, whom she married in March 1968. Their son, John Carter Cash, was born in 1970. Presley had introduced June Carter to the music of Johnny Cash, his label-mate briefly at Sun Records, in the mid-1950s, and after a chance meeting at the Opry late in that decade the future couple agreed to work together. By 1961 she was touring with Cash. Soon, Mother Maybelle and the other Carters joined the troupe of the Man in Black. Mrs. Cash retired from her solo career with the marriage to Cash (although her solo album debut, Appalachian Pride, would not be formally released until 1975). The marriage was volatile in the early years as her husband grappled with drug addiction, but through the decades they became a famously devoted pair. Her husband wrote of her in his autobiography: "What June did for me was post signs along the way, lift me when I was weak, encourage me when I was discouraged, and love me when I was alone and felt unlovable. She is the greatest woman I have ever known. Nobody else, except my mother, comes close." Mrs. Cash also studied acting in the 1950s with director Elia Kazan and celebrated instructor Lee Strasberg. Besides her stage time on the Johnny Cash Show TV program, launched in 1969, she also appeared in numerous television movies and series including Gunsmoke, Little House on the Prairie and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. She also appeared in Robert Duvall's acclaimed 1997 film The Apostle. She was the godmother to Randall Hank Williams, better known as country singer Hank Williams Jr., was a close friend of Patsy Cline, and taught Presley how to tune a guitar. In 1996, during a Johnny Cash show at the House of Blues in West Hollywood, she performed a song she had written that spoke of her personal odyssey. The poignant I Used to Be Somebody reflected on the passings of friends and the fickle nature of fame. Ironically, the song about faded glory earned her a career revival 30 years after her retirement as a solo artist. The performance led directly to a new record deal and an album, Press On, released in 1999. The collection, exploring moral dilemmas but laced with humor and steeped in rural imagery, won a Grammy as best folk album, the only solo Grammy of her career. "I've been really happy just traveling with John and being Mrs. Johnny Cash all these years," she told the Los Angeles Times in a 1999 interview. "But I'm also really happy and surprised that someone wanted me to make another album, and I'm real proud of what I've done."

Originally Published In the Lexington Herald-Leader On May 16, 2003







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