Country singer June Carter Cash was listed in critical condition at Baptist Hospital Saturday due to complications from surgery to replace a heart valve last week. Cash, 73, is the wife of Country Music Hall of Fame and Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame member Johnny Cash and is also the most celebrated living member of the “first family of country music,” the Carter Family.
According to sources close to the family, June’s recovery was promising until Thursday, when she went into cardiac arrest and was without oxygen for a period of time. She was immediately placed on life support. Her husband, who had also been hospitalized at Baptist recently, was readmitted as a precaution. Through his manager, he requested that fans and friends pray for his wife at 10 o’clock Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, the Cash family reportedly gathered at the hospital to discuss whether to keep June on life support. They haven’t issued a statement about whether a decision was made, but Cash’s life support is said to have been disconnected. There’s been no further word about her condition.
Although best known as “Mrs. Johnny Cash,” a title she more than earned through her efforts to save her husband from his self-destructive impulses, June Carter Cash is an accomplished artist in her own right. Said by Minnie Pearl to have the best comic timing she’d ever heard, June honed her bumpkin improv with her mother, aunt and uncle—the original Carter Family—on Border Radio in the late ’30s and early ’40s. Teaming up with country comedy duo Homer & Jethro in 1949, she had a Top 10 country and Top 30 pop hit with a riotous, Spike Jones-style “mugging” of Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
In the 1950s, she toured with Elvis Presley and studied acting with Sandy Meisner at New York’s renowned Neighborhood Playhouse, going on to appear in numerous TV shows and movies, most recently co-starring with Robert Duvall in the 1997 film The Apostle. Cash has also recorded with her mother, Maybelle Carter, and her sisters Helen and Anita, as well as with her husband and as a solo act. Press On, her solo album from 1999, won a Grammy Award.
The Carter and Cash families have experienced considerable losses of late. June’s sisters Anita and Helen both died during the late ’90s, while Johnny Cash’s older sister Louise died April 4. June’s passing, which appears to be imminent, would represent an enormous loss not just to the Carter and Cash families, but to the entire country music community, which, with the recent passing of Waylon Jennings, Johnny Paycheck, Bill Carlisle, Jesse McReynolds and Bashful Brother Oswald, has seen more than its share of death.
