His Father Was a World-Class Sinner, but His Mother Was a Saint
A loving son remembers June Carter Cash
by Lacey Galbraith
Known for her spirit and humor, June Carter Cash was born into what is often called the First Family of Country Music, and she won Grammy awards and accolades during a career that spanned decades. In an era when most designated celebrities are given 15 minutes too long, June was, in every sense of the word, a legend. She never forgot Clinch Mountain, though. No matter how widespread her success, she was always at heart Valerie June Carter from tiny Maces Spring, Va., upholder of the Biblical edict, “Love thy neighbor.”
In his new memoir, Anchored in Love, John Carter Cash reiterates again and again the depth and gracious nature of his mother’s love, not only for her family but for everyone around her. In one example, he quotes a story his half-sister Rosanne told at June’s funeral in May 2003. Rosanne was visiting the Cash home in Hendersonville, Tenn., when the telephone rang. June answered it and began talking. “After several minutes I wandered off to another room, as it seemed she was deep in conversation,” Rosanne remembered. “I came back 10 or 15 minutes later, and she was still completely engrossed. I was sitting in the kitchen when she finally hung up a good 20 minutes later. She had a big smile on her face and she said, ‘I just had the nicest conversation,’ and started telling me about this other woman’s life, her children, that she had just lost her mother, where she lived, and on and on.” When Rosanne asked her stepmother whom she’d been talking to, June answered, “Why, honey, it was a wrong number.”
Cash addresses the parts of his mother’s history that could be turned into tabloid fodder, but he uses a light hand. June’s first marriage to Carl Smith in 1952 gets all of a page and a half; her second, to Rip Nix five years later, gets the same. He refers to a possible romance with Elvis Presley, but blink and it’s gone. Cash acknowledges that angry fights and tearful recriminations accompanied his parents’ marriage, and he attempts to discuss the drug addiction his mother suffered late in life, but any shadows that fall across his parents’ legacy are tempered—if not sometimes glossed over—by an emphasis on the rose-colored.
Which makes sense, given that Anchored in Love is more memoir than true biography. “This is not a scholarly work,” Cash emphasizes. Rather, it’s more of a “personal, from-the-heart account of what I remember or have been told about my mother.” In the end, he hopes readers will accept the book “for what it really is: my mother, seen through my eyes.” And in his eyes, June Carter Cash is not just the wife of the great Johnny Cash or the daughter of the pioneering Mother Maybelle Carter; she deserves of a spotlight all her own.
The book focuses on the small and treasured details that loved ones hold onto. There was June’s “magical way” of making her own limitations into strengths: “Whenever she had lacked vocal ability, she had compensated with soul. Whenever she had felt that she appeared ungraceful, she had kicked off her shoes and danced even harder.” Sometimes the treasured details come across to a reader as almost apocryphal. At their house in Jamaica, for example, Cash says, “There were hundreds of birds there, and she claimed to know each one by name. She would sing and whistle to them for hours, and the birds would flutter around her, even land on her, and ride on her shoulder.”
Still, after all the St. June hagiography, the real portrait that emerges here is of a mother who gave her children what they needed to carry on without her. As John Carter Cash says, “Sometimes, when the night is dark and I question my path, I think of the simple wisdoms she gave me, and suddenly the way seems straighter and the morning seems closer: God has a plan for you. This too shall pass. Press on.”
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