The title is “June” – no surname. Which is surely director Kristen Vaurio making a point, since her documentary about June Carter Cash makes a convincing case that the country singer has for too long been under-appreciated and overshadowed by her husband Johnny. The stereotype of June is that she was the wifey-for-lifey who saved Cash from his demons, but the woman who emerges here is tough and funny, blazing a trail for herself as an artist. As Reese Witherspoon, who portrayed her in the movie Walk the Line, points out – still indignant – it was June who wrote Ring of Fire (with Merle Kilgore), one of Cash’s most famous songs.
Carter was born into country music royalty, the Carter family, and was touring by her teens. She may not have been the best singer in the family, but she had personality and sang with “guts and heart”; so says Dolly Parton, among the country legends interviewed here. In archival footage we see June putting on a hammy hillbilly accent and goofing around in front of the camera, early in her career.
But she wasn’t a woman to be boxed in by the conservative country scene. (The dress code for women on her regular gig on a country music show was gingham dresses – “the homemaker” look.) After divorcing her first husband in the mid-50s, June moved to New York to study acting, hanging out with James Dean and Brando. She was married to husband number two when she fell for Johnny Cash; “He scared the daylights out of me.” That’s when she wrote Ring of Fire, with its dark, tortured message about love: “It burns, burns, burns.” After getting a divorce, she gave Cash an ultimatum: stay clean for six months and I’ll consider marrying you.
This is a respectful film, but it does pick a little at the myth of the Johnny’n’June love story. “June didn’t save my dad. You can’t save someone from addiction,” says one of his daughters from his first marriage. June’s daughter rolls her eyes at the way her ambitious firecracker mum walked around telling everyone she was happy being Mrs Johnny Cash after they got married; the truth was more complicated. In the end, the best insights into the couple and their long, loving but complex and sometimes painful marriage come from their family, not the county music walk of fame crowd.
• June is available from 17 January on Paramount+
