Raw Beauty

Johnny and June Carter Cash live in an expansive, uniquely shaped home that edges Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville. There are no dividing walls between rooms in the oblong-shaped house, which has been built to blend into the lush, green hills and woodlands that surround it. The bottom floor, which opens onto the lake, is largely for entertaining. It features a music room and an enormous dining area with stout, dark wood furniture and heavy, gleaming silver serving sets.

The third floor is private, for the most part, with an enormous master bedroom crammed with one-of-a-kind furniture, huge portraits and pieces of art, and the peculiarly personal comforts of its occupants. Daily activity focuses on the second floor, which includes a long kitchen area, a guest bedroom where the ailing family patriarch often naps, and a sitting room full of plump chairs and family mementos.

The keepsakes, of course, are many. As the first person inducted into both the country and the rock ’n’ roll halls of fame, Cash has an immense number of plaques and trophies. Situated among them are many photos of Cash and Carter posing with various celebrities, politicians, and religious figures, and in various exotic locales.

Amidst all the furnishings and the awards and the photographs, one item in particular stands out: It’s a mint-condition cover of June Carter Cash’s 1975 solo album, Appalachian Pride, which sits resting on a wrought-iron bracket on an end table. The placement of the LP suggests that, for all the things she’s done in her long and varied career, the singer is especially proud of this effort.

It also suggests why, at age 69, Carter Cash is back with the second solo collection of her career. “I’ve been really happy just traveling with John and being Mrs. Johnny Cash all these years,” she said in a recent interview at the Cash estate. “But I’m also really happy and surprised that someone wanted me to make another album, and I’m real proud of what we’ve done.”

She should be. Press On will likely be one of the most acclaimed, and most talked about, country albums of 1999, even if the stark, primitive nature of the recording keeps it from receiving the widespread radio airplay it deserves.

Once one of the most popular stars of the Grand Ole Opry, where she was known for her comic songs and colorfully outrageous performing style, Carter Cash has spent the last five decades sharing the spotlight with her famous husband or with her mother, sisters, and daughters in the similarly renowned Carter Family. But the new album suggests that she could have brought a passionate voice and spiritual center to country music had she pursued recording with the same vigor that she gave to caring for her extended family. On Press On, her pitch may sometimes waver and the arrangements may not unfold with the precision of most modern recordings, but the songs own more heart and truth than anything country radio will play this year.

“Her time is now,” Johnny Cash told a celebrity-packed gathering of friends, family, and press representatives May 15 on the grounds of the Cash estate, where the couple hosted a buffet dinner and hour-long performance by Carter Cash. “I’ve encouraged it all these years, to let people know what she has to offer.... Now you know.”

Singing in a raw-boned voice as harsh and sweet as the autoharp she plays, Carter Cash makes up for her lack of technique with songs of undistilled emotion. Perhaps driven by the recent death of her sister Helen and the debilitating illness of her husband, who has suffered from a rare nerve disorder, Shy-Drager Syndrome, for the last year-and-a-half, this grand lady of American folk music has assembled an album of unpolished acoustic music that juxtaposes Carter Family standards, deeply felt mountain hymns, and anecdotal originals. There’s even a hilarious, grandmotherly take on film director Quentin Tarantino, as told in a musical note to her granddaughter, Tiffany Anastasia Lowe.

For our interview, Carter Cash suggested we go to a rustic log cabin located back in the woods on the Cash estate. Easing a black Mercedes sedan along a thin strip of dirt road, she explained that she and her husband used the cabin as a personal refuge. “We put it back here so that when things got too tough, we could run in here and go back about 100 or 150 years,” she says. “Both of us grew up like that, so that’s why we like it so much. And we wanted our son John Carter to be able to shovel chicken manure as he grew up. We thought it would give him character.”

The cabin sits on a large tract of undeveloped woodland. To the natural habitat, which teems with deer and wild hogs and turkey, the family has added buffalo and such exotic animals as emu, ostrich, and llama. The wildlife has proven treacherous on occasion: An ostrich once kicked Cash and broke five of his ribs, and emus have bitten Emmylou Harris and Tom Petty during visits.