June Carter was an accomplished singer, performer, and actor before she met and married country music star Johnny Cash in 1968. As they toured the world together, Cash was an international sensation, surpassing the Beatles in album sales in the late 1960s. Decades later, when Carter was 70, she released her second solo album and earned a Grammy. A new documentary, June, by director Kristen Vaurio, chronicles her long career.
Vaurio tells KCRW that June Carter came from a family of country music superstars. The Carter Family — consisting of Alvin Pleasant (A.P.), his wife Sara, and his sister-in-law Maybelle — had a prolific career from 1927 to 1943, in which they recorded more than 300 songs, some featuring three of Maybelle’s kids (June, Helen, Anita).
Maybelle was a guitar virtuoso who developed the “Carter Scratch” — the foundation for playing country music. Vaurio describes, “It's a way of playing the rhythm part and the lead part at the same time on the guitar. It's like you wrap your fingers around. And there's apparently very few people who can do it today.”
After the Carter Family disbanded, Maybelle Carter formed a singing quartet with her daughters. In the lineup, “[June] was just this all-around entertainer,” describes Vaurio. “And she had this crackle, and this spark, and this thing where it's like when you see her onscreen in this archival footage, you just cannot stop looking at her.”
Vaurio adds that June Carter worked hard as a comedian, was well-read and well-studied, and wrote books.
She married another country music star, Carl Smith, but they divorced partly because he didn’t want her to be a breadwinner. “There was no moss growing under June’s feet, she was always gonna keep moving,” says Vaurio.
Carter then relocated to New York City with her young daughter Carlene, but continued commuting back to Tennessee on weekends to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, where she met Johnny Cash backstage.
“He grew up listening to her on the radio because everybody listened to the Carter Family. And so he heard her as a little girl. … He said … as a child, he was gonna go marry her someday. And she'd heard about him from [her friend] Elvis [Presley].”
Vaurio continues, “When she and Johnny got married, and they were on the road, they were the biggest act in the world.”
Then in 1999, Carter came out with her solo album Press On, which earned her a Grammy. Four years after releasing that record, she died at age 74, and Johnny Cash passed away a few months later.
“They lived a really hard life. It's not easy to be on the road and traveling that much. And I think that both she and John, their bodies showed it in the end,” Vaurio notes.
She adds, “They were so happy and in love, especially at the end of their lives, they had that peace and that happily ever after. During those final few years, there was a song they always sang together, ‘The Far Side Banks of Jordan,’ and it's a conversation back and forth between the two of them about someone's going to die first, and how they'll be waiting on the other side of the River Jordan. It is just a really beautiful testament, it's almost like they predicted it in a way.”