"When most people think about June Carter Cash, they're probably thinking about Reese Witherspoon."
Create a free account to read this article
or signup to continue reading
That's one of the first things we hear in June, the new music documentary about the famed but probably underappreciated country musician and actress, June Carter Cash.
It's hard not to agree. Many people who only casually follow country music, especially outside of the US, probably first became aware of the multi-talented performer through the excellent film Walk the Line, for which Witherspoon won an Oscar for portraying June.
And while that film did a better job than many do in ensuring June was seen as more than just the wife of her globally famous husband, Johnny Cash, there is so much more to her story than Walk the Line shows.
Long before anyone had ever heard the name Johnny Cash, June Carter was already a mainstay on the country music scene.
She was raised in a famous country music family, and performed with "Mama Maybelle" Carter since childhood, alongside her two sisters. The Carter girls travelled the American south, and could often be heard on the radio with their series of country staples.
Among the many talking heads in the documentary who speak to the life and influence of June Carter Cash is Dolly Parton. She talks about how all the boys and girls who wanted to learn the guitar would cut their teeth playing Mama Maybelle's Wildwood Flower. Parton is far from the only famous face in June. There's also Cash family friend Willie Nelson (who was a member of the Highwaymen with Johnny; and the fact that June was not a performer in that group is disappointing to a number of interviewees), modern-day country music star Kacey Musgraves, actor Robert Duvall (who cast June in his film The Apostle) and Witherspoon, of course.
Several of the couple's children - one of June's, one of Johnny's, and their son together - also share their memories of their parents in the documentary, and it's so enlightening to hear from people who were inside the bubble.
June's eldest daughter Carlene is particularly candid, and happily speaks about her mother's various romances, with no sign of awkwardness. She says she frequently asked June if she ever slept with Elvis back when she was touring with him, but her mother never admitted an affair.
Carlene contrasts quite a bit with Johnny's eldest daughter Roseanne, who is more reserved with her memories, and shares that her mother - Johnny's first wife, Vivian Liberto - was utterly heartbroken upon the dissolution of their marriage.
There is a wealth of archive footage and talk show interviews featuring June throughout the documentary. These snippets go further than the talking heads ever could in painting a picture of the woman.
She comes across as a person so filled with life and energy and optimism. She bore a smile in nearly every piece of footage featured, always countering pesky questions with a quick joke or playful jab.
June's easy charm and command of the stage is obvious, especially in her long-running appearances on the Grand Ole Opry stage on TV and radio back in the 1950s. She could have been a huge star of film and TV, if life didn't happen quite the way it did, with pregnancy and divorce popping up at inopportune times. June herself says, in one of her archive interviews, that when she realised she was falling in love with Johnny Cash she tried to deny it, because it was the most inconvenient timing.
By the time we reach the end of the documentary, and family and friends still get choked up remembering June's death 20 years earlier, at age 73 - and it's hard, as a viewer, not to get choked up too.
