This Johnny Cash Classic Had a Much More Salacious Meaning (And Different Songwriter), According to His First Wife

Deducing the real truth in matters of the heart can be incredibly difficult, and the same can be said about creative inspiration and song origins. Put those all together, and the “he said, she said”s can begin to multiply. One of Johnny Cash’s biggest hits was no exception to this rule, with many different people offering just as many explanations for what really inspired—and who really wrote—the 1963 song, “Ring Of Fire”.

According to some accounts, June Carter and Merle Kilgore were the original songwriters. The fact that Carter’s sister, Anita Carter, was the first artist to record a version of this track makes this story all the more plausible. Moreover, the romance that was slowly starting to burn between June and Cash, who, at that point, were just colleagues and not yet a couple, seemed to be a driving force behind the song.

Unsurprisingly, though, Cash’s first wife, Vivien Liberto, had a much different recollection of how “Ring Of Fire” came to be.

Vivien Liberto Claimed Johnny Cash’s “Ring Of Fire” Was an Innuendo

Johnny Cash and June Carter went down in history as one of the most famous country music power couples of all time. But before there was “Johnny and June,” there was “Johnny and Vivien.” Vivien Liberto was Cash’s first wife and the mother to his four daughters. As Cash’s musical career pulled him further away from home and closer to Carter, Liberto struggled to reconcile with what was happening with her family. It was during this messy interim period that Liberto first heard of the song “Ring Of Fire”. She described that fateful day in her memoir, I Walked The Line: My Life With Johnny.

“One day in early 1963, while gardening in the yard, Johnny told me about a song he had just written with Merle Kilgore and Curly [Lewis, Cash’s friend and the contractor who built the Cash and Liberto residence in Casitas Springs] while out fishing on Lake Casitas. ‘I’m gonna give June half-credit on a song I just wrote,’ Johnny said. ‘It’s called ‘Ring Of Fire’.’” Liberto remembered feeling irritated by the mention of Carter’s name. She asked her husband why Carter would receive a half-credit, and he replied, “She needs the money. And I feel sorry for her.” Liberto added, “I was so naive and trusting.”

“To this day, it confounds me to hear the elaborate details June told of writing that song for Johnny,” Liberto wrote. “She didn’t write that song any more than I did. The truth is, Johnny wrote that song while pilled up and drunk about a certain private female body part. All those years of her claiming she wrote it herself, and she probably never knew what the song was really about. But I was the bigger fool.”

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