June Carter Cash

Keep on the Sunny Side: Her Life in Music

(Columbia/Legacy)

After June Carter Cash died on May 15, 2003, obituary writers seemed uncertain what to say about her musical career beyond her presence at the roots of country with the Carter Family and at the side of her husband, Johnny (who would pass on four months later). The inconsistency of both her pitch and her scattered, fitful output were noted, but her own recordings became a footnote to her life story.

There was good reason for confusion—June's output was scattershot, and usually in some collaboration with her family, friends or husband. But those obituaries might have read differently if Keep on the Sunny Side: Her Life in Music, the stunning new two-disc compilation of June's work, had been released before her death instead of two years after. Sunny Side is one of the few greatest-hits albums that may actually serve a historical purpose. It places June Carter Cash's own music into proper perspective for perhaps the first time. These 40 tracks were previously spread over 64 years, some drawn from out-of-print singles and LPs, many previously uncommitted to CD. When assembled in this careful and (mostly) chronological manner, they bring the evolution of June's musicality and personality into sharp, sudden focus.

Born into one of the nation's great musical families, June was perfectly at home onstage from an early age. As a 10-year-old eagerly seizing a border-radio microphone for a quick tumble through Stephen Foster's "Oh! Susannah" early on Sunny Side's first disc, her ebullience is striking. After the song, radio announcer Brother Bill Guild takes stock of the youngster's confidence: "She's always willing to say something over the mic."

From the beginning, June's effervescence trumped any weakness in her imperfect alto. In fact, she learned quickly how to use its limitations to her advantage by focusing on lighthearted, self-mocking fare. Sunny Side finds a 19-year-old June griping about a stingy husband (and name-checking the young guitarist on the session, Chet Atkins) on her own "Root, Hog or Die" and sending up Frank Loesser's "Baby, It's Cold Outside" with Homer & Jethro. She may have dumbed down to suit a comedic persona on songs like "Country Girl" ("I always believed that too much learnin' just drives you crazy"), but her intelligence is palpable.

June wed Carl Smith in 1952, when he was in the midst of a string of Top 10 country hits, but she dominates their duet "Love Oh Crazy Love"—and not just because she threatens to "knock the fire" out of him. As the 1960s dawn, Smith is gone and June's range has grown; "The Heel" is an oddball piece of sung-spoken noir that suggests the influence of her studies at the Actors Studio in the late '50s, while "Tall Loverman" is a stark murder ballad that demonstrates her knack for writing an original that reeks of old-country mythology.

The latter finds June backed by a rhythm section borrowed from her new paramour, Johnny Cash. The boom-chicka underpinning on "How Did You Get Away From Me," from the same year, announces that June's music is now inexorably hitched to Cash's, even if they won't be hitched themselves for another four years. When that familiar sound comes around the bend, it signals both the arrival of the love of her life and the end to a brief moment when she could be judged on her own merits, unclouded by the influence of either the Carters or Cash.

Still, the collision of these elements is fascinating. There's a detached air when June's sisters and mother join her on a 1964 take of "Ring of Fire," as if to distance the singers from the song's inspiration, June's infatuation with the then still-married Man in Black; the presence of Cash's band behind them erases that distance.

When the couple were finally free to marry one another in 1968, June seemed perfectly pleased to devote herself to a life of, as she once said, "paddling along after John." That's just what she did, except for a hiccup in 1975, when she recorded her first proper album under her own name, Appalachian Pride. That set is presented here in its entirety, throwing Sunny Side's sense of proportion out of whack. It's worth it to have this long out-of-print gem back in circulation. Appalachian Pride is a surprisingly smooth and commercial effort that unfortunately provides the only dated moments on either disc, as the wah-wah guitar on "Losing You" threatens to eat the song alive and "Shadow of a Lady" gets bogged down with synthesizers. Head instead for the galloping "Gatsby's Restaurant," written with daughter Rosey Nix (who died just a few months after her mother in 2003), which attests to the endurance of June's surreal sense of humor.

The previously unreleased recitation "Song to John," from the same period, reconfirms that supporting her husband is still June's priority (and offers biblical justification: "And even if you've been wrong and I've known it, you've always been right, because that's God's order"). In a way, it's only natural—June always seemed to be as in awe of Johnny Cash as the rest of us, and seeing her belief in him helped us all to believe in him. Being a reflection of him, bringing light to his darkness, became her art.

But there's an element of resignation in June's understanding that the world will always treat her as an afterthought to her husband's immense fame and talent. In her 1987 book From the Heart, June compares herself with Moses' brother Aaron, destined to help win the war by holding up the arms of another. "God give me the strength to lift his arms and be satisfied with that," she writes, but not before wondering aloud, "Why can't I be Moses—and he hold up my arms?" That wasn't to be. After Appalachian Pride, June submerged herself in family life, pitching in gamely on her husband's records and tours but setting aside any solo aspirations.

And so after 1976's chillingly prophetic "Far Side Banks of Jordan" ("If it proves to be His will that I am first to cross / And somehow I've a feeling it will be," she sings), Keep on the Sunny Side leaps forward over two decades. In the interim, her mother Maybelle and aunt Sara of the Carter Family had died, and her own daughter, Carlene, had become a country star in her own right, as had Johnny's daughter, Rosanne. Johnny had developed autonomic neuropathy, forcing him off the road and into the studio for a series of career-rejuvenating albums that found great power by setting his aging voice against a simple acoustic backdrop.

That approach informed June's own eventual return to recording with 1999's Press On. By then, her voice had grown into a blunter and rougher instrument, one she could no longer will into pitch. Just as she had when she was 10, standing in front of the border-radio microphone with her smoother-singing sisters, June would have to rely on her personality, charm and wit to win the day—and just as in 1939, that's precisely what happened.

Keep on the Sunny Side offers a stingy three songs from June's triumphant revival, each from a different release, presumably for licensing reasons. All are re-recordings of Carter Family classics, bringing June's story back to its beginning, while unavoidably noting all that's been lost and gained along the way. You can scan the liner notes and see both: on "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," she is accompanied only by the guitar of Marty Stuart, her former son-in-law; "Keep on the Sunny Side" finds June supported on the choruses by her children, grandchildren and Johnny—pitching in for her as she always did for him.

Keep on the Sunny Side thoughtfully uses its title song, written by (or at least credited to) June's uncle A.P. Carter, as a metric for her progress. The first disc opens with a scene-setting 33-second snatch of the song performed by the Original Carter Family and closes with a 1963 version by June, her sisters and mother with Johnny; the curtain comes down on the entire collection with the solo "Sunny Side" from her posthumous Wildwood Flower album.

The canny sequencing demonstrates June's commitment to her heritage, as well as her steadfast belief in the ideals in the song. "Sunny Side" is about dogged optimism in the face of "the storm and its fury"; it's about acknowledging that there is reason to despair, but consciously choosing hope as a method of survival. It's the sort of sentiment that's uniquely useful to a woman whose family suffered through the Depression in Appalachia before unexpectedly becoming spectacularly famous, and whose third husband was a self-destructive, mercurial personality who required massive amounts of faith on her part.

Keep on the Sunny Side hit stores on the same day as The Legend, a four-CD Johnny Cash box set that for the most part merely reshuffles an already well-anthologized body of work. Sunny Side does something much more valuable. It gathers the flowers June left scattered across the decades and weaves them into a garland that looks just beautiful on her.