Meeting the person you’ll spend the rest of your life with can be an earth-shaking, nerve-rattling experience for anyone, celebrities or not—it just so happened that the two individuals falling in love backstage at the Grand Ole Opry in the summer of 1956 were also famous musicians in their own right. That fateful meeting would later inspire “Ring of Fire”, which would become a signature song for one-half of that couple.
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Many assume the 1963 hit single is referring to the heat of romantic passion that comes with falling in love with someone. But for the songwriter, the “Ring of Fire” of which she spoke felt more like hell.
A Fateful Grand Ole Opry Meeting in July 1956
Johnny Cash and June Carter were no strangers to one another when they officially met backstage at the Grand Ole Opry on July 7, 1956. Cash grew up listening to the Carter Family on the radio, of which June was a part. Meanwhile, Carter had spent the last year or so listening to Cash’s single, “Cry, Cry, Cry”, which her one-time touring partner, Elvis Presley, used to tune his guitar. They had listened to one another’s voices so many times that both of them felt like they already knew each other.
In an essay she wrote for the liner notes of Cash’s 2000 album, Love, God, Murder, Carter recalled Cash introducing himself to her backstage at the Opry. “Johnny Cash took me by the hand and said, ‘I’ve always wanted to meet you.’ The strangest feeling came over me. I was afraid to look him in the eyes. It was one of the things I did best. I never stammered and still found myself not able to say much of anything.”
Carter continued, “I can’t remember anything else we talked about, except his eyes. Those black eyes that shone like agates. I only glanced into them because I believed that I would be drawn into his soul, and I would never have been able to walk away. I felt that he was the most handsome man I’d ever met.”
Other times, the couple recalled their interaction as far more forward. In a 2002 interview, Cash recalled shaking Carter’s hand and saying, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, and I’m gonna marry you someday.” Both musicians had different spouses at the time. So, it would have been a bold move, to say the least. But he wasn’t wrong. Cash and Carter married in 1968, just like he predicted.
“Ring of Fire” Was More Shameful Than Sensual
Johnny Cash and June Carter continued to cross paths with one another following their Grand Ole Opry meet-cute. Their admiration for one another continued to grow, causing Carter to write a song called “Ring of Fire” in the early 1960s with co-writer Merle Kilgore. The song’s lyrics seem to describe the fiery passion of a new relationship. “Love is a burning thing, and it makes a fiery ring.”
But interestingly, Carter was thinking less “hot romance” and more “hellish shame and longing.” The musicians interacted with one another as they continued their marriages with their first spouses, which Carter described as almost fearful. “Both of us afraid to look and both afraid to see the lost and lonely souls that we were,” she wrote in 2000.
“It took such a long time of praying and walking away when I knew from first looking at him that his hurt was as great as mine, and from the depths of my despair, I stepped up to feel the fire, and there is no way to be in that kind of hell, no way to extinguish a flame that burns, burns, burns. And so came the idea for the song ‘Ring of Fire’. I was ashamed to tell John that I had always cared, that I couldn’t get him off my mind. Out of the loneliness came one song after another.”
After Cash recorded a version of “Ring of Fire” in 1963, it became one of his biggest hits. Five years later, he married the woman who wrote it about him.
Photo by Bob Grannis/Getty Images
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