Ring of Fire

Everyone knows the horns. Fewer people know the song wasn’t his.

“Ring of Fire” was written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore, about what it felt like to be falling for Johnny Cash while he was married to someone else and deep into amphetamines — the fire being a thing that burns you, not a thing you enjoy. June’s sister Anita cut it first, in 1962, as “(Love’s) Ring of Fire”: slow, mournful, and largely unheard. Cash asked for the song only after her version failed. He had heard something in it that her arrangement hadn’t found.

What he heard was mariachi trumpets, which came to him in a dream and had no business anywhere near a country single in 1963. Bill McElhiney played them, and they are the reason the record works — two bright, martial figures that answer each vocal line like a taunt, turning a private confession of dread into something closer to a procession. Cash sings it almost flatly, with no ache in it at all, which sounds like a mistake for about ten seconds and then reveals itself as the point: the man in this song has already stopped resisting.

It held No. 1 on the country chart for seven weeks and crossed over to pop, and it is still the strangest arrangement decision anybody made in Nashville that decade. It is also, structurally, a love song written by the woman it’s about, first recorded by her sister, and sung into history by its subject.

Greatest of All Time. It took two Carters, a co-writer, and a trumpet section to make the most Johnny Cash record ever made.