Inside The Ballad of Johnny & June with John Carter Cash
“Everybody always asks me what’s the most important thing my parents ever taught me,” says John Carter Cash. And his answer is… “Persistence! In the face of struggle and hardship you continue on. My dad stuck with it, he kept making music. My mother June did too.”
The parents he speaks of are of course Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter Cash, both American icons and legends of country music. Their 35-year marriage as well as their huge musical legacy is explored and celebrated in the stage musical The Ballad of Johnny & June, which arrives at Lowry, Salford from 9th to 13th June as part of a six-month tour of the UK and Ireland following acclaimed seasons at California’s La Jolla Playhouse and the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, Alberta.
The show packs a plentiful supply of Cash’s best-known songs, including I Walk the Line, A Boy Named Sue, Folsom Prison Blues, Hey Porter and Ring of Fire (which was written by June and Merle Kilgore). Jackson was a famous Johnny and June duet, while Wildwood Flower is a traditional song that harks back to June’s history with her parents and siblings in the Carter Family band, who were a huge influence in the development of folk, bluegrass and country music. The iconic songs, and Johnny and June’s famous love story, are brought to life on stage by the talented cast lead by musical theatre stars Christopher Ryan Grant as Johnny and Christina Bianco as June.
“For a long time I’ve wanted to see the right musical made, something that wasn’t just recounting the same information that everyone’s seen before,” reflects John (now 55). “It’s like characters are often portrayed in a two-dimensional way, but I wanted to show the more complicated parts of my parents’ nature. I wanted to portray the truth and beauty of the simple people that they were and the love they shared.”
He’d been contemplating this project for a decade when the stars finally aligned and he met producer, director and writer Des McAnuff, whose glittering career includes such fabled musical productions as The Who’s Tommy, Jersey Boys, the Temptations story Ain’t Too Proud and Summer: The Donna Summer Musical. What especially recommended him to Cash was his work on Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with music and lyrics by Roger “King of the Road” Miller. “I knew he was the right person, because it was my father’s favourite play, and I just felt it was the right choice.”
And so it proved. “It really is something I believe in,” Cash asserts, of the finished product. “I think the song choice is neat because the hits are there, but there are also songs that really tell the full arc of my parents’ lives. I think it’s a wonderful production.”
John’s own contributions to the show have been invaluable, bringing vital insights and emotional truths to a story which, as Johnny and June’s only child, he is uniquely familiar with. He impressed McAnuff in the way he wanted to convey some tough reality, rather than airbrushed fantasy. “We realised that he didn’t want the fairytale, he wanted the truth,” McAnuff told the Los Angeles Times. “The truth is so much more interesting than the fairytale.”
The script for the musical was written by McAnuff and Robert Cary, based on a string of in-depth conversations with John.
He recalls: “I sat down with Des and Robert for numerous hours where they dug deep into my life and my memories, and really looked into my experiences. It wasn’t like any other creative process that I’ve ever done. And then they would go ‘right’, and we’d come back and do it again, until they said ‘we want your character to tell the story’. They’d heard me relate the story to them so many times that they felt that the man who plays me should be the guide for the entire musical.”
Thus the John Carter Cash character (played by Ryan O’Donnell) breaks the fourth wall with the audience, acting as narrator and singing the theme tune, newly written for the show by the musical director.
“Most of the things you see are tied in with my personal memories, and the way the characters speak is straight out of my mouth,” adds Cash. “So in essence I did write a lot of them, it’s just editing it in the right way.”
Following in the parental footsteps, John has been a musician and songwriter (he’s released three solo albums), and still remembers how his father introduced him to Bob Dylan’s music when he was 12 years old.
“He bought me cassettes of the first three Bob Dylan albums, and I sat in my room at their apartment in New York City and listened to them all the way through. That was when it was just Bob with his harmonica and guitar. My dad said ‘don’t listen to that rock’n’roll stuff that Bob did later, listen to the early ones’.”
Later, he became prolific as a record producer. As well as working with a string of prestigious artists including Sheryl Crow, Loretta Lynn, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, he produced his mother’s albums Press On and Wildwood Flower, and worked on four of the albums which his father released on Rick Rubin’s American label.
“Rick Rubin would be there for some of the sessions, and in some he wouldn’t be. In those instances I was sort of acting as producer for my father. That was when I was really beginning in the industry. I’d never produced before when I started working with my dad and my mother in the studio, and that’s really where I learned how to make music, working with them.”
After his parents had died, within a few months of each other in 2003, he took a conscious decision to embrace his experiences of being a part of the Carter-Cash dynasty, rather than pursuing a separate career which would take him away from the family legacy. A first step was his writing a biography of June, Anchored in Love: An Intimate Portrait of June Carter Cash (2007).
“It was the first book I ever wrote,” he recalls. “I really opened up about my mother’s life and my family’s life. It’s where my philosophy about what to present and how to present it began, although of course there are lots of things I’d never tell.”
Something he did choose to do was face up to the realities of how both his parents suffered from debilitating addictions. June had problems with amphetamines and painkillers, while Johnny battled addictions to alcohol, amphetamines and barbiturates. But during their lifetimes both of them were willing to discuss their problems, believing that their example could help people in their audience struggling with similar issues.
Getting to grips with his family history has been a huge undertaking for John, and he describes it as “an ongoing catharsis. If I had a master’s or a doctorate in something, it would be Johnny Cash and the Carter family. I’ve studied it my whole life.”
Much of what he has learned has found its way onto the stage, and he’s keen to stress that despite the enormous presence of Johnny, the Man in Black, it’s not a one-man show.
“This musical is as much about my mom as it as about my dad. It shows my mother’s strengths. It shows where she faltered. But it shows the beauty that they had in their love and their relationship.”
The Ballad of Johnny & June – The Johnny Cash musical is at Lowry, Salford from 9th to 13th June. Tickets are available from thelowry.com