June Carter Cash (73), a member of a pioneering clan of country singers who collaborated with her husband Johnny Cash and was regarded as a musical hero in her own right, has died in Nashville of complications of heart surgery.
Carter Cash and her husband won Grammy Awards for duets on the songs Jackson (1967) and If I Were a Carpenter (1970). She also won a Grammy for her 1999 acoustic album, Press On, which revisited much of her musical career.
It was her first solo album in 25 years and a triumphant return for an artist who long submerged her ambitions to care for her ailing husband. She endured years of his amphetamine abuse and helped to rescue him physically, professionally and spiritually.
"June said she knew me - knew the kernel of me, deep inside, beneath the drugs and deceit and despair and anger and selfishness, and knew my loneliness," Johnny Cash wrote in his autobiography. "She said she could help me . . . If she found my pills, she flushed them down the toilet. And find them she did; she searched for them, relentlessly."
Carter Cash co-wrote the country favourite Ring of Fire, which described her all-consuming passion for her husband, whom she married in 1968. The lyrics include the lines: "I fell into a burning ring of fire/ I went down, down, down and the flames went higher."
She also sang memorable duets with Johnny Cash in It Ain't Me Babe and If I Had a Hammer. Her voice was earthy, with a rural, rootsy sound that influenced everyone who followed. As an artist she reached beyond the music world. She wrote memoirs and acted in films, playing Robert Duvall's mother in the 1997 movie The Apostle. The Cashes also appeared at Billy Graham crusades.
She was born Valerie June Carter in Maces Springs, in south-western Virginia, where her family planted its roots early in the world of country music.
The Carter Family band, including her mother, Maybelle, helped to bring Appalachian harmonies to wider audiences through ground-breaking radio performances and recordings.
When the original Carter group disbanded, Maybelle and daughters June, Helen and Anita became Mother Maybelle & the Carter Sisters. June showed great promise as an entertainer, delighting audiences with her daffy humour while playing the autoharp.
The Carters performed on radio, which brought them greater recognition for their pleasing harmonies and impressive guitar licks. Maybelle was known for creating "the Carter scratch", a now-popular style in which melody is played on the bass strings of a guitar.
The act arrived at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry in 1950. At the time, June Carter was on the charts with a Top-10 hit Baby It's Cold Outside.
"The Opry was a magic place that was my home," she would recall. "I could not do any wrong there."
In 1952 she married singer Carl Smith and three years later gave birth to a daughter, Carlene Carter, now also a popular country singer. When the marriage dissolved, Carter went on tour with Elvis Presley. "I kind of ran away," she told one interviewer. "I was handled by Col Tom Parker. Working with Elvis was something for me to hide behind. Elvis had a big crush on [her younger sister\] Anita, but then he got a crush on me. Elvis got a crush on whoever was handy.
"I decided I wouldn't touch him with a 10-ft pole. Lord only knows where he'd been. I think that was a big shock to his ego."
When director Elia Kazan was scouting film locations in Nashville, he saw June Carter perform and encouraged her to study acting in New York. She took his advice.
In later years she made guest-starring appearances on television. From her New York days, she knew many famous actors and once hinted that there might have been more than mutual attraction between her and James Dean.
She maintained a regular schedule, performing with her mother and sisters and sharing the stage with such stars as Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. After years of performing together, Johnny Cash proposed to her on stage in London, Ontario.
Her earlier marriages to singer Carl Smith and Nashville police officer Rip Nix had ended in divorce.
Johnny Cash, who suffers from Shy-Drager syndrome, a disorder similar to Parkinson's disease, survives her. Other survivors include a daughter from her first marriage, country singer Carlene Carter; a son from her third marriage, John Carter Cash; and a step-daughter, singer Rosanne Cash.
June Carter Cash: born June 29th, 1929; died May 15th, 2003.