Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" (Apr. 1963)
With this song, I thee dance. For a love that burns, burns, burns.
On your wedding day, it’s all fun and games until the groom bursts into tears. Outside Fairchild Chapel, about an hour before the June 30 ceremony, I buried my face in the shoulder of my best man and left his lapels shiny and damp. “This is between you and your God,” Brian said with a friendly squeeze. My bout of generalized dread passed quickly enough. Well in time for the wedding and, just as importantly, the reception.
That April and May, Rebecca—then my betrothed, now my wife of 23 years—took charge of my dance lessons. On our living room rug, Rebecca taught me to two-step to Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”—which includes alternate steps for the alternating time signatures: ONE-and-two (L-R-L) over a three beat bar (3/4 time), and ONE-pause-TWO-pause (R-L) over a four-beat bar (4/4 time), round and round. In June 2001, wedding-party members dancing like Thriller-video zombies were still a decade away.
I was, at the time, a last wave Johnny Cash fan: I got into this guy after just about everybody. I knew of Cash through my father, a country music devotee. And, at the age of 32, I was well on the way to becoming my father. My favorite soda? Root beer, preferably in a brown bottle with real sugar. Choice of ice cream? Vanilla on a waffle cone, straight, no sprinkles.
On American Recordings (1994), his comeback-from-the-nearly-dead album, it’s just Johnny Cash’s baritone, rich and plain, his Martin D-35 acoustic guitar, and Rick Rubin at the controls. Cash sings a murder ballad. He sings about rage, the ghosts of Vietnam, and God’s grace. On “Drive On,” he offers the perfect admonishment for my pre-nuptial tremors: “It don’t mean nothing, it don’t mean nothing / drive on.” Which is what I did.
"Hello. I'm Johnny Cash." Drawing by hand, by @deathbydisco_
At our wedding reception, Jerry plopped a bottle of Don Julio Anejo tequila in the center of the head table. Multiple rounds of tequila-spiced toasts sparked laughter and tears. Then Rebecca and I stepped onto the dance floor. The opening bars by the Tijuana Brass, on loan from Herb Alpert, filled the room. Amid the laughter and the clapping along, in sequenced steps of threes and fours, Rebecca—looking radiant—and me, looking pensive, we squared the circle of our vows.
The dance was our gift: our guests had flown into Cleveland from New York, Toronto, Calgary and Saskatoon, California and South Carolina. The gift endures. That memory reel is their music video for “Ring of Fire.”
It could have been otherwise. Just two years after our wedding, on my 35th birthday, Johnny Cash passed away. Soon after, Merle Kilgore, co-author of “Ring of Fire,” proposed licensing the song for a Preparation H commercial.
Kilgore co-wrote the song with June Carter, whose courtship with Cash inspired the devilish imagery. “There is no way to be in that hell,” Carter noted, “no way to extinguish a flame that burns, burns, burns.”1
Kilgore requested permission from Rosanne Cash, daughter of Johnny and Vivian Cash. “The song was about the transformative power of love,” she noted. “That’s what it will always mean to the Cash children.”2 On behalf of the Cash children, she declined Kilgore’s request. Thank God.
Coda
This past February, I got on the phone with Brian. “I’ve been meaning to ask you for years,” I said. “While we were hanging out behind the chapel before my wedding, I had a moment, and just burst into tears. I pretty much buried my face into your shoulder, and you said, ‘This is between you and your God.’ Do you remember that?”
“Vaguely,” he replied slowly. “It’s been a few years.”
“Of course,” I said. “I figure it was simply my actual life confronting the contradictions of the life I had lived inside my head for decades. That’s what all that therapy was for,” I rambled. “To disassemble that script, and take stock of how damn fantastic my life actually was—and still is. There we all were: my brilliant, beautiful betrothed, my family, my dearest friends from high school and college. I was scared, but I figure I was also overwhelmed with joy.”
“Hmm,” Brian said. “I remember dancing at the reception, and one of the guys from the clean-up crew shouting, ‘Soul Train, fellas! Soul Train!’ when P-Funk came on. And then he joined us on the dance floor. That was cool.”
"Ring of Fire"/"I'll Still Be There," 1963. Click the image for song.link to listen to "Ring of Fire" on your favorite platform.
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I walk the line,
Randal 🎙️🎙️🎙️
Notes
Alex Baker. 2023. “Inside the Song: Johnny Cash and ‘Ring of Fire,’” fender.com. February 6. https://tinyurl.com/3bzmnh47. In A Complete Unknown (2024), Robert Boyd Holbrook, in the role of Johnny Cash, gives viewers a convincing taste of the dark, self-destructive side of the Man in Black.
Ibid.
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That *is* my Ring of Fire mental video, and a fine and true one it is. Leaping in, radiant and terrifying. 💜
I wish I had stayed till the end of the reception.