Weekly Finale: Ring of Fire

For this week's musical finale, I am looking at the 1963 Johnny Cash song, "Ring of Fire".



"Ring" was written by June Carter Cash and Merle Kilgore. Although June later married Johnny Cash, she was allegedly having an affair with him at the time she wrote (and he recorded) the song. She was married to Edwin "Rip" Nix at the time she wrote the song.

According to Wikipedia, the song actually is about love:

Although "Ring of Fire" sounds ominous, the term refers to falling in love – which is what June Carter was experiencing with Johnny Cash at the time [she wrote it]...She worked with Kilgore on writing a song inspired by this phrase as she had seen her uncle do in the past. She had written: "There is no way to be in that kind of hell, no way to extinguish a flame that burns, burns, burns".

But there is another account of the song's writing:

Cash's first wife, Vivian Liberto, offers a different conception of "Ring of Fire" in her book ["I Walked the Line"]. She contends that June Carter Cash was not a co-writer of the song: "To this day, it confounds me to hear the elaborate details June told of writing that song for Johnny. She didn't write that song any more than I did. The truth is, Johnny wrote that song, while pilled up and drunk, about a certain private female body part. All those years of her claiming she wrote it herself, and she probably never knew what the song was really about." Liberto claims that Cash decided to give Carter co-writer status because "She needs the money". 

Even though Johnny Cash is most closely associated with "Ring", June's sister Anita was the first to record it. Anita's version is cringe-inducing.

"Ring" has been covered multiple times over the years, ranging from the also cringe-inducing cover by Eric Burden and the Animals, to the more normal country version by artists such as Alan Jackson:



However, the best cover was by the punk band Social Distortion in 1990:



The beauty of Social Distortion's cover is they brought the song to a different musical style, and played it perfectly in that style.

That is the end of this week's blogging. Try to stay cool over the weekend. I will return Monday with more hot blogging.