Laura Cash

She was born in Sandwich, Illinois, in 1971, and her family moved to Corvallis, Oregon, when she was six. She began playing music at nine on a fiddle her father had restored, studied with the fiddler and guitarist Joey McKenzie, and from the age of twelve won contests in the western states, among them the Oregon state junior title in 1984, 1986 and 1987 and the junior championship at the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest in Weiser, Idaho, in 1988. She entered Oregon State University in 1989 but left in 1990, at eighteen, to play and sing with Patty Loveless in Nashville. She went on to tour with Pam Tillis, James House, Harley Allen and Chalee Tennison, played with Roy Acuff on his show and played the Grand Ole Opry with Ray Price, and in 1999 she sang and played fiddle on Benny Martin’s The “Big Tiger” Roars Again.

In 1999 she joined June Carter Cash and Johnny Cash on the Press On tour, and she married their son, the producer John Carter Cash, in 2000. On June Carter Cash’s last album, Wildwood Flower, recorded at the Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and released by Dualtone in 2003, she played guitar beside Norman Blake on most tracks, among them “Keep on the Sunny Side,” “Sinking in the Lonesome Sea” and the title song, fiddle as well on “The Road to Kaintuck” and “Kneeling Drunkard’s Plea,” and violin on “Storms Are on the Ocean,” and she sang in the chorus on “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone” and “Wildwood Flower.” The album won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album. Her first solo album, Among My Souvenirs, came out in 2003, and her second, Awake But Dreaming, in 2010; both were recorded at the Cash Cabin. In 2010 the Carter Family III, a trio of her, John Carter Cash and Dale Jett, a grandson of A. P. and Sara Carter, released Past & Present, and she remained in the group until 2016. She also played on Curly Seckler’s Down in Caroline (2005), took the adult division at Weiser in 2009, and appears in the documentary The Winding Stream, about the Carter and Cash families.