Sometimes a great song is hiding in plain sight.
Before Johnny Cash turned “Ring of Fire” into one of the most instantly recognizable country songs ever recorded, it belonged to Anita Carter, the youngest daughter of country music pioneer Maybelle Carter and the younger sister of June Carter. Her recording, called “(Love’s) Ring of Fire,” appeared on her album Folk Songs Old and New.
Written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore, the song was originally given a strikingly different treatment. Anita’s rendition is gentle and folk-inflected, carried by her clear, expressive voice. Mercury Records released it as a single, and Billboard selected it as a “pick hit.” But the record never became the success its admirers hoped it would be.
Johnny Cash heard something else in it.
Cash later said he dreamed of hearing the song accompanied by Mexican-style horns. It was an unusual idea for a country recording at the time, but Cash couldn’t shake it. He reportedly told Anita that if her version didn’t become a hit within several months, he wanted to record the song the way he heard it.
When Anita’s recording failed to take off, he did exactly that.
Cash recorded “Ring of Fire” on March 25, 1963, transforming the restrained folk song with booming mariachi-style trumpets, electric guitar, his unmistakable baritone and backing vocals from Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters. The arrangement was unlike Cash’s basic sound and virtually impossible to forget.
Released on April 19, 1963, “Ring of Fire” became the hit Anita’s version had not. It spent seven weeks at No. 1 on the country chart and crossed over to the Billboard Hot 100, where it reached No. 17. The record also helped pull Cash out of a career slump and began another major run of hits for the singer.
The meaning behind the song has been disputed, but according to both June Carter and Cash, it sprang from the powerful connection they felt upon meeting and the love that would torment them for years to come.
“Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, I got on my knees and told her that I was going to marry her someday,” Cash later said. “We were both married to someone else at the time. ‘Ring Of Fire’—June and Merle Kilgore wrote that song for me-that’s the way our love affair was. We fell madly in love and we worked together all the time, toured together all the time, and when the tour was over we both had to go home to other people. It hurt.”
And Carter was no less forthright. While the song’s lyrics could have suggested the fiery beginning of a new romance, for her the image was conjured from a place that felt more like hell, as their love grew and the two were still painfully apart.
“It took such a long time of praying and walking away when I knew from first looking at him that his hurt was as great as mine, and from the depths of my despair, I stepped up to feel the fire, and there is no way to be in that kind of hell, no way to extinguish a flame that burns, burns, burns,” she wrote in 2000. “And so came the idea for the song ‘Ring of Fire’. I was ashamed to tell John that I had always cared, that I couldn’t get him off my mind. Out of the loneliness came one song after another.”
More than six decades later, the song’s stature has only grown. Cash’s “Ring of Fire” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 2024, Rolling Stone ranked it No. 25 on its list of the 200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time, celebrating the song’s depiction of “unbridled love” and the unmistakable arrangement that transformed Anita Carter’s quiet folk recording into a country classic.
At Montana’s Under the Big Sky festival in 2024, Country Music Hall of Fame member Tanya Tucker performed “Ring of Fire” as one of the country classics she grew up with. Talking about those older country songs that influenced her, she told Rolling Stone, “It’s what you grow up with and what you know.” The song itself has traveled far beyond country music, covered by artists ranging from Eric Burdon and the Animals and Ray Charles to Blondie, Social Distortion and Alan Jackson.
But underneath those famous trumpets is still the song Anita Carter sang first: a small, beautiful folk ballad about love becoming so powerful that there is no escaping the flames.
Johnny Cash simply heard the fire.
Related: 1972 Country Rock Song, Inspired by a California Road Trip, Is Still a Beloved Hit 54 Years Later
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