June Carter

She was born Valerie June Carter on 23 June 1929 in Maces Spring, Scott County, the second of the three daughters of Maybelle Carter and Ezra “Eck” Carter, A. P. Carter’s brother. Her mother played the guitar in the Carter Family, which had made its first records at Bristol nearly two years before she was born. She began singing at home at about nine, and at ten she, her sisters Helen and Anita and their cousin Janette joined the family’s broadcasts from Texas over Mexican border radio. Hers was never the strongest voice in the family, and she made herself its comedian, dancing, singing, telling jokes and playing the autoharp.

When the Carter Family trio broke up in March 1943, Maybelle formed Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters with her daughters: Helen played accordion, Anita bass, and June autoharp, and she was the act’s front person and comedian. They began on WRNL in Richmond, Virginia, then moved to WRVA, and June finished high school in Richmond in 1946. The group went on to WNOX in Knoxville, where Chet Atkins joined them on guitar, and to KWTO in Springfield, Missouri, and made its first Grand Ole Opry appearance on 29 May 1950. On stage she often played a country character called Aunt Polly and sang novelty songs.

Her recording career began at the family’s first RCA Victor session, in Atlanta on 2 February 1949, where two sides were issued under her name, “Root, Hog or Die” and “The Bald Headed End of the Brook,” with her singing and playing autoharp, Maybelle on guitar, Anita on bass, Helen on accordion and Atkins on electric guitar. In New York on 17 May 1949 she recorded a comic “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” with Homer and Jethro, which reached No. 9 on the country chart and No. 22 on the pop chart, and she made more sides with the duo in Chicago in October 1949 and January 1950. Further RCA singles of her own followed until early 1951, two of them billed as June Carter and Her Bashful Rascals. She sang on the Carter Sisters’ Columbia records too, among them “Foggy Mountain Top” and “Fair and Tender Ladies” from February 1952. Her own Columbia sessions at Castle Studio in Nashville began on 10 December 1952 with “No Swallerin’ Place” and “Jukebox Blues”; on 20 May 1953 she recorded the duets “Love Oh Crazy Love” and “Time’s a Wastin’” with her first husband, the country singer Carl Smith, and in November 1954 she cut “Let Me Go, Lover.”

The director Elia Kazan, who had seen her as Aunt Polly on the Opry, persuaded her to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, and in the mid-1950s she spent two years there with her daughter Carlene, coming back to Nashville at weekends for the Opry and now and then breaking off to tour with Elvis Presley. In 1957 she appeared in an episode of Gunsmoke and two of The Adventures of Jim Bowie, and acting remained a sideline for the rest of her life, through Little House on the Prairie and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman to Robert Duvall’s film The Apostle (1997). She went on recording, “Strange Woman” for Columbia in April 1956 and, for Liberty, “The Heel” in August 1961 with Ray Edenton on guitar.

She first met Johnny Cash at the Opry in 1956, and in December 1961 he invited her, her mother and her sisters to tour with him. With Merle Kilgore she wrote “(Love’s) Ring of Fire,” which Anita recorded in 1962; Cash’s version, released in April 1963, spent seven weeks at No. 1 on the country chart. He recorded more of her songs, among them the Top Five hits “The Matador” (1963) and “Rosanna’s Going Wild” (1968) and the Top Ten “Happy to Be with You” (1965). On 8 July 1963 she sang with Maybelle, Helen and Anita at the Columbia sessions that produced the Carter Family album Keep on the Sunny Side, billed with Cash, and the Carter Family added “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” to it that November. Her own Columbia singles of 1963 to 1965 included “Tall Lover Man,” cut in April 1964 with Norman Blake among the guitarists, and in 1964 she and Cash released a duet of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe.”

On 11 January 1967 she and Cash recorded “Jackson,” with Blake on twelve-string guitar and Dobro, Luther Perkins on guitar, Marshall Grant on bass and W. S. Holland on drums. It reached No. 2 on the country chart, won a Grammy, and appeared on their album Carryin’ On with Johnny Cash and June Carter that August. Cash proposed to her on stage in London, Ontario, in February 1968, and they married on 1 March 1968 in Franklin, Kentucky. She sang “Jackson” with him at Folsom Prison on 13 January 1968 and at San Quentin on 24 February 1969, and their “If I Were a Carpenter,” recorded on 20 August 1969 with the Carter Family singing harmony, also reached No. 2 and won a second Grammy. The Country Music Association named the couple its group of the year in 1969, and from June 1969 to March 1971 she was a regular, with her mother and sisters, on ABC’s The Johnny Cash Show.

For decades after the marriage she put her own career second to work beside Cash on stage, on television and in the studio. Their Columbia records together included a family Christmas album in 1972 and Johnny Cash and His Woman in 1973, and from 1972 most of their sessions took place at the House of Cash studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee; in April 1974 she recorded “Ole Slew Foot” there with Cash and his family. She also kept touring with her mother and sisters as part of Cash’s show. Her one solo album of the period, Appalachian Pride, produced by Cash and recorded at House of Cash in January and February 1975, came out on Columbia that September with “The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore” and “East Virginia Blues” among its songs. She published two memoirs, Among My Klediments (1979) and From the Heart (1987), and she went on singing with Cash on tour into the 1990s, from Wembley Arena in London in 1981, where Marty Stuart was in the band, to the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1994.

Late in life she came back to records of her own, built around the songs she had grown up with. Press On, produced by her son, John Carter Cash, and issued by Small Hairy Dog in April 1999, mixed her own songs with Carter Family material, among them a new “Ring of Fire,” “Diamonds in the Rough” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album. In late 1998 she and Cash recorded “Far Side Banks of Jordan” at the Cash Cabin in Hendersonville with Norman Blake, Marty Stuart on mandolin and Rodney Crowell, and in 2002 she sang “Diamonds in the Rough” with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Earl Scruggs at Scruggs Sound Studio in Nashville. Her last album, Wildwood Flower, again produced by John Carter Cash, returned to the Carter Family songbook with “Keep on the Sunny Side,” “Storms Are on the Ocean,” “Sinking in the Lonesome Sea,” “Cannonball Blues,” “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?” and “Wildwood Flower.”

She died in Nashville on 15 May 2003 and is buried in Hendersonville Memory Gardens; Johnny Cash died on 12 September that year. Dualtone released Wildwood Flower on 9 September 2003, and it brought her two more Grammys, Best Traditional Folk Album and, for “Keep on the Sunny Side,” Best Female Country Vocal Performance. The 2005 film Walk the Line told her and Cash’s story, and in 2025 she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

• 1968: Grammy Award, “Jackson” (with Johnny Cash)
• 1969: Country Music Association Group of the Year (with Johnny Cash)
• 1971: Grammy Award, “If I Were a Carpenter” (with Johnny Cash)
• 2000: Grammy Award, Best Traditional Folk Album, Press On
• 2004: Grammy Awards, Best Traditional Folk Album, Wildwood Flower; Best Female Country Vocal Performance, “Keep on the Sunny Side”
• 2025: Country Music Hall of Fame