June Carter, Not Johnny Cash, Wrote 'Ring of Fire'

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June, a new documentary on Paramount+ revisits the life and country music legacy of June Carter Cash. Though it was often her husband Johnny Cash in the limelight, this feature focuses on her decades-long career, including her role in writing one of Johnny's biggest hits: “Ring of Fire.”

June and Johnny's love story was epic, but as portrayed in the 2005 movie Walk the Line, it was not without turmoil. In fact, it was downright painful for June when she realized she was falling in love with Johnny in the early 1960s.

At the time the two were touring together, but both were still married, with children, to other people. Moreover, June knew Johnny was in the grips of addiction. Her feelings tormented her.

“I didn’t want to fall in love with him, didn’t mean to fall in love with him. I was scared to death of him. … I wouldn’t even admit it to myself for a long time,” June said in archival interview footage included in the documentary. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I didn’t want to do anything that would hurt him or his family or my family.”

Her religious upbringing added to her conflict. She had only ever intended to marry once, yet there she was on the precipice of ending her second marriage.

“I tell you it can kill people like me when something like that happens,” she said. “One night, I woke up in the middle of the night and I was crying when I woke up and I thought, I can’t do this. This is driving me crazy because all I could feel was pain.”

But a creative spark emerged from that pain. “I’d been writing songs with a guy named Merle Kilgore, a great songwriter, and he encouraged me to write. The next morning Kilgore came in, and I said we’ve got to hone a little bit on this but I really think I’ve written a great song.” That song was “Ring of Fire.”

June's sister, Anita Carter, recorded the first version, “(Love's) Ring of Fire,” in 1962, but it really took off when Johnny released his take in 1963, allegedly inspired by a dream to add mariachi-style trumpets. His version, which featured some tweaked lyrics and his baritone voice backed by the harmonies of the Carter Family, reflected in contrasting musical elements the conflict expressed in the lyrics: a great love that is the source of an all-consuming inner conflict.

As Emmylou Harris explains in the documentary: “When Johnny recorded it, you’re talking about this thing that came from this really deep ‘I’m going to Hell, I’m in a ring of fire. I’m going to burn in Hell because of what I feel,’ and then you have this angelic chorus of these Carter girls…the juxtaposition of it, there are just so many things that shouldn’t work, and yet it works because it is unusual.”

The Johnny Cash version of "Ring of Fire" claimed the number one spot on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart for seven weeks in 1963 and was a crossover mainstream hit too, peaking at number 17—his first song to crack the Top 20 of Billboard's Hot 100 list. Its success continued as the title track of his album Ring of Fire (The Best of Johnny Cash), which was the top country album for 14 weeks in 1964.

Eventually, June and her second husband, Edwin "Rip" Nix, separated and divorced in 1966. Johnny and his first wife, Vivian Liberto, followed suit in 1967. In 1969, the two married and made a life together for 35 years, with six daughters from their previous marriages between them and welcoming son John Carter Cash in 1970.

A few years before her death in 2003, June Carter Cash returned to the studio to record her Grammy-winning album, Press On, released in 1999. The second track: "Ring of Fire."

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