June Carter Cash
Valerie June Carter Cash was an American country singer, songwriter, comedienne, actress, and author. A five-time Grammy Award winner, she was a member of the Carter Family and the second wife of singer Johnny Cash. Before her marriage, she performed as June Carter, a name she continued to use professionally, including on songwriting credits. She played guitar, banjo, harmonica, and autoharp, and acted in several films and television shows. In 2009, she was posthumously inducted into the Christian Music Hall of Fame, and in 2025, she was named a posthumous inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Early life
June Carter Cash was born Valerie June Carter on June 23, 1929, in Maces Spring, Virginia, to Maybelle and Ezra Carter. Her mother was a country music performer with June's aunt Sara and uncle A. P. Carter. June began performing with the Carter Family from the age of 10, in 1939. In March 1943, when the Carter Family trio stopped recording together at the end of the WBT contract, Maybelle Carter, with encouragement from her husband Ezra, formed "The Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle" with her daughters, Helen on accordion, Anita Carter on bass fiddle and June on autoharp and as front person and comedian. The new group first aired on radio station WRNL in Richmond, Virginia, on June 1. Doc and Carl —Maybelle's brother and cousin, respectively, known as "The Virginia Boys", joined them in late 1945. June, then 16, was a co-announcer with Ken Allyn and did the commercials on the radio shows for Red Star Flour, Martha White, and Thalhimers Department Store, just to name a few. For the next year, the Carters and Doc and Carl did show dates within driving range of Richmond, through Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. She attended John Marshall High School during this period. June later said she had to work harder at her music than her sisters, but she had her own special talent —comedy. A highlight of the road shows was her "Aunt Polly" comedy routine. With her thin and lanky frame, June Carter often played a comedic foil during the group's performances alongside other Opry stars Faron Young and Webb Pierce. Carl McConnell wrote in his memoirs that June was "a natural-born clown, if there ever was one". Decades later, Carter revived Aunt Polly for the 1976 TV series Johnny Cash & Friends.After Doc and Carl dropped out of the music business in late 1946, Maybelle and her daughters moved to Sunshine Sue Workman's "Old Dominion Barn Dance" on the WRVA Richmond station. After a while there, they moved to WNOX in Knoxville, Tennessee, where they met Chet Atkins with Homer and Jethro.
In 1949, the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle, with their lead guitarist, Atkins, were living in Springfield, Missouri, and performing regularly at KWTO. Ezra "Eck" Carter, Maybelle's husband and manager of the group, declined numerous offers from the Grand Ole Opry to move the act to Nashville, Tennessee, because the Opry would not permit Atkins to accompany the group onstage. Atkins' reputation as a guitar player had begun to spread, and studio musicians were fearful that he would displace them as a 'first-call' player if he came to Nashville. Finally, in 1950, Opry management relented and the group, along with Atkins, became part of the Opry company. Here the family befriended Hank Williams and Elvis Presley, and June met Johnny Cash.
Carter and her sisters, with their mother Maybelle and aunt Sara joining in from time to time, reclaimed the name "The Carter Family" for their act during the 1960s and 1970s.
Career highlights
While Carter may be best known for singing and songwriting, she was also an author, dancer, actress, comedian, philanthropist, and humanitarian. Director Elia Kazan saw her perform at the Grand Ole Opry in 1955 and encouraged her to study acting. She studied with Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York. Her acting roles included Mrs. "Momma" Dewey in Robert Duvall's 1998 movie The Apostle, Sister Ruth, wife to Johnny Cash's character Kid Cole, on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and Clarise on Gunsmoke in 1957. She was notable as Mayhayley Lancaster playing alongside husband Cash in the 1983 television movie Murder in Coweta County. June was also Momma James in The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James. She also acted in occasional comedy skits for various Johnny Cash TV programs.As a singer, she had both a solo career and a career singing with first her family and later her husband. As a solo artist, she became somewhat successful with upbeat country tunes of the 1950s, such as "Jukebox Blues" and the comedic hit "No Swallerin' Place" by Frank Loesser. Carter also recorded "The Heel" in the 1960s along with many other songs.
In the early 1960s, Carter wrote the song "Ring of Fire", which later went on to be a hit for her future husband, Johnny Cash. She co-wrote the song with fellow songwriter Merle Kilgore. Carter wrote the lyrics about her relationship with Cash and she offered the song to her sister, Anita Carter, who was the first singer to record the song. In 1963, Cash recorded the song with the Carter Family singing backup and added mariachi horns. The song became a number-one hit and went on to become one of the most recognizable songs in the world of country music.
In her autobiography, I Walked the Line, Cash's first wife Vivian Cash disputes that Carter co-wrote the song "Ring of Fire". Vivian relates the story that Cash told her in 1963: he wrote the song with Kilgore and Curly Lewis while fishing and he was going to give Carter half credit because "he needs the money. And I feel sorry for her."
Carter's first notable studio performance with Johnny Cash occurred in 1964, when she sang a duet with him on "It Ain't Me Babe", a Bob Dylan composition that was released as both a single and on Cash's album Orange Blossom Special. In 1967, the two found more substantial success with their recording of "Jackson", which was followed by a collaboration album, Carryin' On with Johnny Cash and June Carter. All these releases predated her marriage to Cash, after which she changed her professional name to June Carter Cash. She continued to work with Cash on recordings and on stage for the rest of her life, recording a number of duets with Cash for his various albums and being a regular on The Johnny Cash Show from 1969 to 1971 and on Cash's annual Christmas specials. After Carryin' On, Carter recorded one more direct collaboration album, Johnny Cash and His Woman, released in 1973, and, along with her daughters, was a featured vocalist on Cash's 1974 album The Junkie and the Juicehead Minus Me. She also shared sleeve credit with her husband on a 2000 small-label gospel release, Return to the Promised Land.
Although she provided vocals on many recordings and shared the billing with Cash on several album releases, June Carter Cash only recorded three solo albums during her lifetime: the first, Appalachian Pride, released in 1975, Press On, and Wildwood Flower, released posthumously in 2003 and produced by her son, John Carter Cash. Appalachian Pride is the only one of the three on which Johnny Cash does not perform, while Press On is notable for featuring Carter singing her original arrangement of "Ring of Fire".
One of her final appearances was a non-speaking/non-singing appearance in the music video for her husband's 2003 single, "Hurt", filmed a few months before her death. One of her last known public appearances was on April 7, 2003, just over a month before her death, when she appeared on the CMT Flameworthy awards program to accept an achievement award on behalf of her husband, who was too ill to attend.
She won a Grammy award in 1999 for, Press On. Her last album, Wildwood Flower, won two additional Grammys. It contains bonus video enhancements showing extracts from the film of the recording sessions, which took place at the Carter Family estate in Hiltons, Virginia, on September 18–20, 2002. The songs on the album include "Big Yellow Peaches", "Sinking in the Lonesome Sea", "Temptation", and the trademark staple "Wildwood Flower". Due to her involvement in providing backing vocals on many of her husband's recordings, a further posthumous release occurred in 2014, when Out Among the Stars was released under Johnny Cash's name. The album consists of previously unreleased recordings from the early 1980s, including two on which June Carter Cash provides duet vocals.
Her autobiography was published in 1979, and she wrote a memoir, From the Heart, almost 10 years later.
Personal life
Carter was married three times and had one child with each husband. All three of her children went on to have successful careers in country music. She was married first to country singer Carl Smith from July 9, 1952, until their divorce in 1956. Together, they wrote "Time's A-Wastin". They had a daughter, Rebecca Carlene Smith, known professionally as Carlene Carter, a country musician. Carter's second marriage was to Edwin "Rip" Nix, a former football player and police officer, on November 11, 1957. They had a daughter, Rosie Nix Adams, on July 13, 1958, who became a country/rock singer. The couple divorced in 1966. Their daughter died in 2003, at the age of 45, from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in a school bus that had been converted into a campervan.Carter and the entire Carter Family had performed with Johnny Cash for a number of years. In 1968, Cash proposed to Carter during a live performance at the London Ice House in London, Ontario. They married on March 1 in Franklin, Kentucky. They had one son, John Carter Cash, who is a musician, songwriter, and producer. The couple remained married until her death in May 2003, four months before Cash died.
She also gained four stepdaughters from her third husband's previous marriage to Vivian Liberto, including Cindy and Rosanne.
Carter's distant cousin, the 39th U.S. president Jimmy Carter, became closely acquainted with Cash and Carter and maintained their friendship throughout their lifetimes. In a June 1977 speech, Jimmy Carter acknowledged that June Carter was his distant cousin.
Carter was a longtime supporter of SOS Children's Villages. In 1974, the Cashes donated money to help build a village near their home in Barrett Town, Jamaica, which they visited frequently, playing the guitar and singing songs to the children in the village.
Carter also had close relationships with a number of entertainers, including Audrey Williams, James Dean, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Jessi Colter, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Elvis Presley, Robert Duvall, and Roy Orbison.
At the end of her life, she and her husband attended the First Baptist Church in Hendersonville, Tennessee.