Saturday Soundtrack: Adultery Burns Like a Ring of Fire

My dad listend to both kinds of music: Country and western, so I heard this song many times while growing up.

Back in the 1960s Johnny Cash was a wild, out of control, hard drinking, pill-popping speed freak. You might remember that in 1965 he was baned from the Grand Ole Opry for breaking out the stage lights.

"The band kicked off a song, and I tried to take the microphone off the stand. In my nervous frenzy, I couldn't get it off. That was enough to make me explode in a fit of anger. I took the mike stand, threw it down, then dragged it along the edge of the stage. There were 52 lights, and I wanted to break all 52, which I did." -- Johnny Cash talking in 1993 about the night he was asked not to return to the Grand Ole Opry

Around this time Johnny started touring with the Carter Family, who are recognized as the very first Country music stars. That's how he met June Carter. She was married. Johnny was married. That didn't stop them and she wrote this song. The really bizzarre thing is that her mother "Mother Maybelle Carter" (Unlike Johnny, she was adored by the Opry.), and her sisters are singing back up with her. June Carter and Johnny Cash each divorced their spouses and married each other (1967?). I know, it's more than a little sick but you gotta ove those Mariachi horns. This is a recording of a 1968 Grand Ole Opry appearance.  I'm only guessing, but it was probably Mother Maybelle who got the ban lifted.  

It should be noted that a few years after this, Johnny Cash responded to an alter call at a little pentecostal church in Nashville. From what people say about him, after that he was a changed man.  At Stanford in the mid 1990s I saw him turn down an offered drink with these words "Thanks but if I have one drink I won't stop till I've had a hundred."