The Culture Beat

Here’s this week’s column for the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press. A little cultural geography lesson might be in order. This part of the country, collectively known as the Southern Highlands (northeast Tennessee, southwest Virginia, western North Carolina) is a hotbed for folk music — country, bluegrass, the works. Bristol, Tenn.-Va. (the town literally straddles the state line), is the town where the original singing Carter Family (A.P., Sara and “Mother” Maybelle) and Jimmie Rodgers recorded in 1927, the “Bristol sessions,” and the so-called big bang of country music.

Hiltons, Va., the home of the Carter clan, is only a 45-minute drive from downtown Johnson City. About 20 years ago or so, the Carters transformed the property into a museum and down-home concert pavilion and called it the Carter Family Fold, and local musicians perform every Saturday night. (Every now and then, bigger names come in too.) Seating used to be split log benches, old school bus seats nailed to the floor, blankets, folding chairs and the like. After the Fold received a big grant a few years ago, they’ve gone upscale, to theater seating. On a typical Saturday night, about a thousand people come, many of them locals who bring their taps and clogging shoes and dance in the open space in front of the stage. Tickets cost a princely $5. The show has been emceed by Janette Carter and, until his death earlier this year, her brother Joe. She specialized in autoharp; he specialized in guitar and imitating barnyard animals during “intermissions.” It’s definitely worth a visit.

Rita Forrester’s last strong memory of Johnny Cash dates from the summer of 2003, when he performed on the stage of the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, Va., the home of his wife, June Carter, who had died that spring.

Rita knew Johnny and June well. She’s family, the daughter of June’s cousin Janette Carter, who has run the Fold for years. Janette is struggling with Parkinson’s disease and Rita, besides her full-time job in Johnson City, is running the Fold for now. Johnny and June performed there three or four times a year.

But this last time, Johnny, gray and grieving, sang alone. It turned out to be his last performance. He died a few weeks later.

“He was so weak and sick,” Rita recalls. He could barely walk, and someone suggested he go on stage in a wheelchair. He refused. Instead, he slowly, painfully walked on stage.

“He was talking about his life without June and how hard that was,” Rita recalls. “They had an amazing love. If we could all be loved as much as they loved each other … ” Her voice trails off.

Their romance and career is portrayed in a new movie opening next week, Walk the Line, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, actors handpicked by Johnny and June to portray them, according to Rita. (That’s Phoenix and Witherspoon cuddling in a publicity still at the bottom of this post.)

Johnny and June met in 1961. (They’re pictured here in 1975.) He was at the peak of his popularity, and she and her famous musical family started performing with him. They were married to other people at the time, but Johnny and June fell in love. Hit songs like “Walk the Line” and “Ring of Fire” reflected the tensions they felt. Eventually the first marriages broke up.

“I don’t think they ever set out to ever hurt anyone,” Rita says. “Their love for each other — they had to accept and deal with that. They made the best of their rocky start.”

It was rocky. Success almost killed Johnny. Addicted to amphetamines, he hit bottom in 1967, feeling isolated and cut off from God. One day, the 35-year-old star crawled into a Tennessee cave, intending to get lost in the darkness and die.

Instead, Cash thought about God. As he wrote in a 1997 autobiography, he felt “a sensation of utter peace, clarity, and sobriety. … I became conscious of a very clear, simple idea: I was not in charge of my own destiny. I was not in charge of my own death.”

He crawled out to start a new life and within a few months, he and June were married.

“John got a long way from his faith,” Rita says. “Love and faith is what brought him back. John said June and her faith saved him.”

In the years to follow, Johnny and June were open about their faith as well as their failures, and their recording careers stalled. That only cemented their reputation for risk-taking and honesty. They were known for defying expectations and stretching boundaries.

Fellow musician Kris Kristofferson called Johnny “a walking contradiction,” and by all accounts that wasn’t in spite of his faith but often because of it. Late in his career, Johnny worked with a surprising array of musicians, such as Red Hot Chili Peppers and rap producer Rick Rubin. (His last big hit was the antithesis of lighthearted Christian living — a deep, dark confessional cover of a Nine Inch Nails song: “Hurt.”)

“They met so many different people from different walks,” Rita says. “They learned from everyone.”

That openness and authenticity — a common description — not only brought new fans, it also gained a respectful hearing for their faith.

“They witnessed to people who never would have known anything about Jesus,” Rita says. They didn’t preach or “make judgments about other people. Their Christianity was just obvious. It was about the way they chose to conduct their lives.”

Rita is eager to see those lives portrayed on the screen next week, and she expects to cry when she does.

“I’m sure it will be a bittersweet experience,” she says. “I’m hoping it will bring a real sense of what good people they were. I hope their faith comes through strongly.”

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, Nov. 12, 2005.