How Johnny Cash's future wife wrote one of his biggest songs

23 September 2025, 13:24 | Updated: 23 September 2025, 13:47

Johnny Cash wrote most of his massive hit singles. 'Ring of Fire' wasn't one of those.

'Ring of Fire' is one of Johnny Cash's greatest and most important songs.

The Man in Black had enjoyed a string of Country number ones in the 1950s, but things had slowed down somewhat before he got back to the top with the storming, brass-powered track.

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But this most memorable of Johnny Cash songs – one that gave its name to at least one of his many best-of compilations – wasn't actually written by the man himself.

Instead it was written by his then-future wife June Carter, together with songwriter and performer (and future Hank Williams Jr manager) Merle Kilgore.

Here's how it happened.

Johnny Cash - Ring Of Fire (OFFICIAL VIDEO) COLOR VERSION ReMastered

June Carter was touring with Johnny Cash for the first time in 1962, and Merle was also on the tour. June and Merle both lived four blocks apart, north of Nashville. These near-neighbours sparked up a songwriting partnership.

Years earlier, Johnny had written 'I Walk the Line' about his (ultimately doomed) bid to resist temptation while married to his first wife Vivian Liberto.

Now, the future Mrs Carter-Cash crafted the lyrics to 'Ring of Fire' about her her desire for Johnny and hesitation given the fact that she was currently married for the second time, and he was still married to Vivian and swirling in a world of alcohol and drug abuse.

According to the liner notes of an Anita Carter CD box set, June was apparently inspired by the phrase "Love is like a burning ring of fire" in a book of Elizabethan poetry underlined by her uncle AP Carter.

[Love's] Ring Of Fire

It's worth mentioning here that no-one seems to actually know the poem in question. We've had a fair look around without much luck.

It's possible the poem wasn't one that's stayed the distance and has long since fallen out of print. Or perhaps June misremembered the exact line, or it even came from AP himself scribbling in a margin?

The closest we could find is a line the Victorian (not Elizabethan) era Robert Browning poem 'Love Among the Ruins'.

"And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced"

The song's co-writer tells a different story about where June got that killer line from.

"She said, 'Well Kilgore I've been looking through some old letters and friend of mine just got a divorce," Merle told the Grammy Foundation Living History project.

"He said, listen to this, 'Love was like a burning ring of fire'. You know, 'I can't stand it anymore and I'll never fall in love again'.

"She said, 'That's something in that title don't you think?' and I said, 'Yeah I really think we should work on that'."

Merle Kilgore on Writing "Ring of Fire"

And so when June's sister Anita got in touch to say that she needed one more song for her upcoming record, June gave Merle a buzz and they finished it off in a hurry, laying it down in the studio on October 24, 1962.

In archival footage featured in 2024 documentary June, you can hear the woman herself talking about the inspiration behind the song and how it came together.

"I didn’t want to fall in love with him, didn’t mean to fall in love with him. I was scared to death of him," June said of her feelings for Johnny while both were already married to other people.

"I wouldn't even admit it to myself for a long time. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I didn't want to do anything that would hurt him or his family or my family."

She added: "I'd been writing songs with a guy named Merle Kilgore, a great songwriter, and he encouraged me to write.

"The next morning Kilgore came in, and I said we've got to hone a little bit on this but I really think I've written a great song."

As it went, June and Edwin 'Rip' Nix divorced in 1966. Johnny and Vivian did the same a year later.

Johnny and June married a year after that, and their love burned, burned, burned until June's passing in May 2003, just four months before Johnny's death.

June herself performed the song over the years and released her own studio version on 1999 album Press On.

Johnny played the song live for the last time just weeks after June died, during his final ever public performance on July 7 at the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, Virginia.

Johnny Cash -- His Final Live Performance (2003)

But there are other competing stories, theories and ideas of how 'Ring of Fire' came to be.

Keeping things relatively delicate, the song has been invoked with a chuckle by people who have enjoyed a particularly spicy meal the night before.

And like Johnny Cash himself, who once performed live in a fluffy feather boa and was happy to play comedic songs like 'A Boy Named Sue', Merle Kilgore had an easy sense of humour when it came to his work.

When he performed the song, Kilgore would often dedicate the track "to the makers of Preparation H" (a haemorrhoid cream) in concert, and even entertained the idea of licensing the track for an advert for the stuff.

TV producer Sula Miller of Big Grin Productions in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, had apparently come up with the concept after she heard the song on the radio while suffering from the condition.

June Carter Cash Performs “Ring of Fire” and Sits Down With Johnny | Carson Tonight Show

But regardless of what Johnny might have thought had he been alive, the surviving Carters and Cashes were not amused.

"There is no way we will ever let that happen," Rosanne Cash, the eldest daughter of Johnny and first wife Vivian Cash, told The Tennessean. "We would never allow the song to be demeaned like that."

"He [Kilgore] started talking about this moronic tie-in without talking to any of us. The song is about the transformative power of love and that's what it has always meant to me and that's what it will always mean to the Cash children."

Merle didn't push the issue.

"I certainly didn't want to upset the Cash family because I love them," he said. "I just thought it was kind of funny."

Ring of Fire - Merle Kilgore

But the incident does bring to mind a radical revisionist take on who actually wrote 'Ring of Fire' and what the song is really about.

Johnny Cash's first wife Vivian has claimed that it was JR himself who wrote the song, and he had given his then-friend, future-wife June the credit as a favour.

"One day in early 1963, while gardening in the yard, Johnny told me about a song he had just written with Merle Kilgore and Curly [Lewis] while out fishing on Lake Casitas," Vivian wrote in her posthumously published 2007 memoir I Walked The Line: My Life with Johnny.

She claimed that Johnny told her "I'm gonna give June half credit on a song I just wrote" because "she needs the money" and "I feel sorry for her". That song was 'Ring of Fire'.

"The mere mention of her name annoyed me. I was sick of hearing about her," Vivian complained.

"To this day, it confounds me to hear the elaborate details June told of writing that song for Johnny. She didn't write that song any more than I did.

"The truth is, Johnny wrote that song, while pilled up and drunk, about a certain private female body part.

"All those years of her claiming she wrote it herself, and she probably never knew what the song was really about."

Johnny Cash - Ring Of Fire (The Best Of The Johnny Cash TV Show)

You can believe who you want, thought a few elements of Vivian's story don't really seem to ring true.

Even if the general thrust of the story were correct, Vivian's timeline doesn't add up, with the song first being recorded in October 1962 and on shelves before the end of the year.

What's more, it feels impossible that, especially with so much money in royalties up for grabs, that this supposed secret would have been so well-kept till Vivian apparently revealed it in her book.

In his 1997 memoir Cash, Johnny was not only giving June credit for writing the song, but also hailing her as "one of the most neglected artists in country music" and rattled off a list of her other songwriting achievements, like 'Gone' and 'A Tall Lover Man'.

We're also not sure why Merle Kilgore would so happily go along with the supposedly falsified "official" line.

Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass The Lonely Bull Video 1962

And then there's the simple matter that – as we've already noted – Johnny Cash wasn't the first person to perform this song his then-wife claimed he had written.

Anita Carter's version as 'Love's Ring of Fire', appeared on her Folk Songs Old and New, released in December 1962. Record label Mercury was well aware of the quality of the song, and released it as a single early the next year.

Johnny was pretty desperate for a big hit around 1962, and it seems unlikely he'd have let his touring buddy's sister have first run at something as obviously good as 'Ring of Fire'.

"A most unusual tune is sold in winning fashion by the thrush who shows her own individual and exciting style here, supported by blue grass guitar work," wrote Billboard about Anita's original version in January 1963.

Indeed, Johnny heard this version of the song, and later claimed that he had a dream about the track being accompanied by mariachi horns, as recently featured on Herb Alpert's massive hit 'The Lonely Bull' and Bob Moore's 'Mexico'.

Blondie - Ring Of Fire [Live] (Roadie) (1980)

"I'll give you about five or six more months, and if you don't hit with it, I'm gonna record it the way I feel it," Johnny was quoted as telling Anita in A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears.

As Anita's version stalled, that's just what he did, complete with not just those mariachi-style horns from 'Mexico' Nashville players Bill McElhiney and Karl Garvin, but also Mother Maybelle Carter and The Carter Sisters singing backup.

"I was taking a bath one night when the phone rang and it was Cash," recording studio boss and publisher Jack Clement is quoted as saying in Johnny Cash: The Life.

"He told me about this song and how he had a dream about using mariachi horns on the intro. To some people , it probably sounded like a crazy idea, but I think he knew it would sound normal to me. Besides, he just wanted someone in his corner."

While production was credited to Don Law and Frank Jones, apparently Clement had a key role in merging that horn sound with the classic Cash boom-chick-a-boom rhythm and the Man In Black's deep delivery of the slightly-tweaked lyrics.

And did the trick: Johnny Cash's 'Ring of Fire' topped the Hot Country Singles chart and went to 17 on the Billboard Hot 100. Not for the last time, a written-off Johnny Cash had returned with a song hotter than anything else out there.

Johnny wasn't the last to strike gold with the track, though, as later covers came from big hitters like Jerry Lee Lewis, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Tom Jones, Earl Scruggs, Blondie (for the movie Roadie), Olivia Newton-John, Frank Zappa, Dick Dale, Grace Jones and many, many more.