New documentary ‘June’ celebrates country music matriarch who had a career apart from her famous husband, Johnny Cash.

By Nick Krewen

Special to the Star

Over his career, country music legend Johnny Cash always had some interesting Canadian ties.

Who can forget those Johnny Cash bank machines, ATM forerunners that the Man in Black was hired by Canada Trust to flog in a TV, radio and print advertising campaign?

But there was no bigger Canadian date for Cash personally than Feb. 22, 1968, when he posed a question that would change his life forever at a London, Ont., concert, hometown of his Canadian manager, Saul Holiff.

Cash had just invited the Carters, a regular part of his touring entourage — including mother Maybelle and sisters Helen, Anita and June — to join him onstage. 

“I’m standing with my family in front of about 7,000 people in London, Ontario, Canada, and (Johnny) walked up to the microphone and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ Just like that onstage,” June Carter Cash recalls in the new documentary June, now streaming  on Paramount Plus.

“I choked, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. I’m gonna quit! This is not happening to me. Shut up!” You know, I wanted to answer with some kind of glamour, but there’s no glamour to it. It’s yes or no. The show must go on and I said, ‘Yes!’”

Married a week later, they were inseparable.

“Where he goes, I will go and what he does, I will do,” June says in the doc.

While June does an excellent job of chronicling the enduring relationship between her and Cash, Emmy Award-winning director Kristen Vaurio says there was much, much more to the woman who was Cash’s emotional rock.

“She’s an endlessly fascinating person,” said Vaurio.

“I think part of it is that it’s just time for her to get her due,” Vaurio added during a Zoom call with June’s daughter, Carlene Carter, by her side.

There is one oversight in particular that Vaurio, June’s family and Sony Music would like to see righted: despite winning five Grammy Awards (including three for her solo work), touring the world and being a progeny of the Carter Family, Carter Cash is not in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

“They want her story to be better known, because that’s a wrong that needs to be righted at this point,” said Vaurio.

And what a story it is: collectively, the Carter-Cash clan is responsible for kick-starting or elevating a number of careers. Besides Johnny and June, there’s Carlene, who scored Canadian gold albums for 1990’s I Fell In Love and 1995’s Little Love Letters ; and four-time Grammy winner Rosanne Cash, daughter of Johnny and first wife Vivian Liberto. 

Respected country guitarist Marty Stuart was married for a time to Cindy Cash, Rosanne’s sister; and producer John Carter Cash, Johnny and June’s only offspring, has worked with everyone from Elvis Costello and Loretta Lynn to his parents, as well as Vince Gill and Willie Nelson.

But the family tree goes back to Maces Spring, Va.,and the Carter Family, country music’s first superstars alongside Jimmie Rodgers.

Mother Maybelle, who formed the Carter trio with her cousin Sara and Sara’s husband, Alvin Pleasant (A.P.) Carter, in 1927, was so formidable an instrumentalist that she created “the Carter Scratch,” a groundbreaking technique for playing guitar.

Known for such classics as “Can the Circle Be Unbroken” “Wildwood Flower” and “Keep on the Sunny Side,” the Carter Family broke up in 1936 and Maybelle carried on performing with her daughters, travelling from Virginia thousands of miles by car to perform on Texas radio programs near the Mexican border.

Eventually the Carters landed at Nashville’s “Grand Ole Opry,” the Saturday night radio program that continues today.

June Carter became a regular fixture at the Opry and, when the program began to be televised in the mid-‘50s, she was adored by audiences for her roles as singer and comedian.

Three years earlier, she met another of the Opry’s most in-demand entertainers, “Mr. Country” Carl Smith, and married him. Carter gave birth to Carlene before eventually filing for divorce in ‘56. Carlene says Smith wanted her to be more of a stay-at-home wife, but her mother had other ambitions.

Post-divorce, Carter grabbed Carlene and headed to New York, studying to be an actor, opening concerts for Elvis Presley and flying back to Nashville on weekends to fulfil her Opry duties.

“She didn’t want any fences to peg her in,” Carlene Carter said during the Zoom call.

“I think she managed that in her life and a lot of people just didn’t know about it. And people are saying, ‘Wow, I didn’t know she did that’ … She just loved making stuff. She was very creative.”

Although she was hired for roles on TV series like “Gunsmoke,” an unexpected pregnancy cut short her aspirations. Marrying speedboat racer Rip Nix and giving birth to daughter Rosie (not to be confused with Rosanne Cash), Carter returned to Nashville and met Johnny Cash at the Grand Ole Opry in 1956.

It would be five years until they crossed paths again but, in 1961, Cash hired June to be part of his band and they grew closer.

It wasn’t easy: Carter confesses in the doc that she was frightened she was falling in love with Cash, who was addicted to barbiturates and amphetamines at the time. She ended up quietly divorcing Nix and devoting her energies to her future husband, who spent time at the Carter household getting clean.

Carlene Carter had similar problems.

“We come from a family that has been plagued with certain addictions publicly,” Carlene said. “I remember calling one morning early in the mid-‘80s and saying to Mom, I need to go back to London (U.K.) and stay with my friend Lallie because I think I’m drinking too much, or I’m doing too much of this or that.

“And Mom said, ‘Honey, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re the only one in the family that’s normal!’”

Johnny got on the phone and offered to take her to treatment.

“That became the beginning of my push through life in different aspects of sobriety and understanding sobriety,” she said.

Besides co-writing the gigantic Johnny Cash hit “Ring of Fire,” June  nurtured a number of aspiring songwriters from Larry Gatlin to Ronnie Dunn, and Waylon Jennings to Kris Kristofferson.

“Mom was a soft place to land,” said Carlene. “She’d always feed you. She’d listen to you. She’d give you advice if you wanted it …  If she thought somebody was in trouble, she would suit up and show up. You could count on Mom.”

Carlene also confirmed an oft-told tale that is legendary in country music circles: that Kristofferson, frustrated with his songwriting career, commandeered and landed a helicopter on the Cash estate in Hendersonville, Tenn., to pitch Johnny songs.

“I was outside in the yard and I heard this (makes rotor sounds) and a little helicopter lands and out of it gets this really good-looking guy in leather pants,” Carlene said. 

“John wasn’t home. So it was me and Mom and I think maybe Rosie was there. Kris was a big part of changing a dynamic in our lives as far as really deep diving in having more new writers come over  and having more new people around, and Mom just loved that stuff.”

In her later years,  June Carter Cash received accolades for her own music and  for her co-starring role in the Robert Duvall film The Apostle.

She was in the midst of recording her album Wildwood Flower when she died in May 2003 at the age of 73. A heartbroken Johnny followed her four months later.

But the June documentary is not about sorrow, but a celebration of a country music matriarch who gave so much and was a pillar of the community.

“I hope it inspires people,” said Vaurio. ”I hope it inspires other women to be not afraid to try everything.”

Carter agreed.

“There’s no expiration date on being creative.”