“Ring of Fire” is a country classic written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore. By the most-repeated account, June Carter found the song’s central image — love as a burning ring of fire — in a line from a letter, and she and Kilgore finished the song quickly when her sister Anita Carter needed material for a record.
Anita Carter recorded it first, in 1962, under the title “(Love’s) Ring of Fire.” But the song belongs above all to Johnny Cash, June Carter’s future husband, whose 1963 recording — famously arranged with mariachi-style trumpets — became one of the biggest hits of his career and a permanent country standard.
The song has since been recorded across nearly every American genre, bluegrass included. The version heard here is by Earl Scruggs, the banjo master, who recorded it in the early 1970s as part of his post-Flatt and Scruggs work.
