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05/15/2003 Archived Entry: "June Carter Cash, RIP"
June Carter Cash, RIP
This has been a bad week in terms of losing pioneers. This latest may be the saddest of them all:
June Carter Cash, a scion of a pioneering family in country music and the wife and Grammy-winning duet partner of singer Johnny Cash, died Thursday of complications from heart surgery. She was 73. Cash died at Baptist Hospital with her husband and family members at her bedside, manager Lou Robin said.
Cash had been critically ill. She had surgery May 7 to replace a heart valve.
I was just reading a story in the latest issue of Smithsonian today about how the Carter family practically gave birth to American country music, and that is not the slightest exaggeration.
A.P. Carter was destined for fame. But on July 31, 1927, he was tired and dusty from the drive he and his wife, Sara, and Sara’s cousin, Maybelle Addington, had made from their home in Maces Springs, Virginia. It was only 25 miles to Bristol, on the Tennessee-Virginia border, where A.P. was to audition the next day, but his tires had blown out so many times on the hot pavement that the family of singers arrived too late to rehearse. The next morning, A.P., Sara and Maybelle climbed the narrow stairs of an old hat factory on Bristol’s State Street, lugging an Autoharp and a guitar, to perform for Ralph Peer, a producer from New York City’s Victor Talking Machine Company. Peer was in town for a ten-day talent search and recording session. When the trio began to perform—the lyrical "Single Girl, Married Girl" and "Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow"—Peer was impressed. "Soon as I heard Sara’s voice," he said later, "I knew it was going to be wonderful." The Carter Family’s multigenerational career—and the broader world’s acquaintance with country music—began that day.
Blah3 sends deepest condolences to The Man In Black, Johnny Cash.
