The Sister Johnny Cash Had An Affair With While June Was Pregnant

Nashville, 1970. June Carter is carrying her only child, and by her husband's biographer's account she has just worked out that he has been having an affair with her sister. That is eighteen months after London, Ontario, where Johnny Cash stopped a song in front of seven thousand people and asked her to marry him. Walk the Line ends on that proposal, with the fallen man saved by a good woman's love. Then it rolls the credits and leaves out the next thirty-five years. This is those years. The suitcase he took from her hotel room so she couldn't leave the tour. Anita Carter, the sister who first recorded Ring of Fire, dying under their roof in 1999. The memoir about putting your husband second only to God, published the same season June had divorce papers drawn up. A gun held to their eleven-year-old son's head one Christmas in Jamaica. An ostrich, a morphine drip, and three treatment centers in nine years. June's own addiction, kept quiet until her son wrote about it after she died. A doctor who told her that her biggest problem was being the wife of Johnny Cash. And 2003, the year four funerals came in eight months. By the end you will know why the story of the woman who saved Johnny Cash had to stop the clock in 1968. If you want more real stories behind the legends you think you know, subscribe. If this one changed how you see the marriage, leave a like. And tell me in the comments, where are you watching from? Sources include Robert Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life (2013); John Carter Cash, Anchored in Love (2007); June Carter Cash, Among My Klediments (1979); Marshall Grant, I Was There When It Happened (2005); Encyclopedia Virginia; and reporting by the Associated Press, the Globe and Mail and CBC. The affair with Anita Carter is Hilburn's conclusion, which he calls probable. The year of the Cinnamon Hill robbery differs between sources. Images from Wikimedia Commons, the National Archives and the Prelinger Archives. #johnnycash #junecarter #junecartercash #anitacarter #countrymusic #musichistory #theprivaterecord