Single Song Sunday: Ring of Fire
(A dozen folkcovers of the Carter/Cash classic)
February 27th, 2010 — 08:50 pm
According to Wikipedia, 80% of the world’s major earthquakes take place in the Ring of Fire, a volatile region of the Pacific that spans a 40,000 kilometer horseshoe of coastland and island nations from New Zealand and Japan to Alaska, Mexico, and a huge swath of the American continents. Last night, for example, an 8.8 earthquake hit Chile, killing hundreds, and leaving as many as a million people homeless. The resultant tsunami activity – earthquakes move water like a kid rising out of a bathtub – is bearing down on the Americas, and has already proved a real threat to Pacific islands from Hawaii to French Polynesia.
Why so little relative death from an earthquake as much as 100 times more powerful than the quake which recently hit Haiti? Infrastructure and population density, mostly. Chile has money; its buildings shuddered, but most did not fall. Whether the waves that follow will hit already-broken communities, adding significantly to the death toll, remains an unknown.
June Carter didn’t have the seismic activity of the Pacific in mind when she wrote of her burning love for Johnny Cash way back in the early sixties, of course – instead, as the story goes, she took her titular phrase from the line “Love is like a burning ring of fire,” which she found underlined in one of her uncle A.P. Carter’s Elizabethan poetry books.
But the consuming conceit of loving an addict and alcoholic is a complex and effective device, a metaphor of “the transformative power of love,” as Roseanne Cash puts it, that has rung true through the ages. Ring of Fire is one of Johnny Cash’s most covered tunes, and generally cited as such, despite having been recorded first by June’s sister Anita on her 1962 Mercury Records album Folk Songs Old and New, which is where Johnny first encountered the haunting lyrics. According to Cash, adding the mariachi horns came from a dream, and the south-of-the-border punctuation seems to have clicked, as it was his version that caught the ear of the culture, eventually settling in as #87 on Rolling Stone’s list of the greatest songs of all time.
Johnny Cash would have been 78 this week. Other blogs have been celebrating by noting the release of his final posthumous collection of new material American VI: Ain’t No Grave, the last of the deliciously folk series of Rick Rubin-produced “American” recordings which Cash released in the final years of his life – a set of records that form the core of my own Cash collection, as, perhaps more than any of his life’s work, they serve as evidence of the true folk sensibility of the artist.
Originally, my intent today was to pay tribute to the Man in Black by offering some favorites from that series, which is chock full of poignant, perfectly broken covers of Tom Petty, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, and other songs stripped to the bone and retranslated as spiritual guideposts, a man looking back on a life spent walking the line between pain and redemption. But in the context of the most recent global disaster, there is perhaps no better way to celebrate his influence and soul than through a spectrum of folk and roots artists’ coverage of Ring of Fire – a song originally written to express a troubled love for Cash himself, ultimately redeemed by Cash and his loving partner as a dark celebration of love and its trials, and eventually grounded in the popular imagination as a song from the man’s own soul.
For to love the world’s music is to love the world. And as the walls of our safe havens shake and crumble, and disasters crash the beaches that we have built as bulwarks around us, we are reminded evermore that the world needs our love, just like Johnny needed June, to be whole.
- Lucy Kaplansky: Ring of Fire
(Sweet rootsy folkpop from Over The Hills, 2007)
- Naama Hillman: Ring of Fire
(Tender, echoey singer-songwriter fare from In Between The Lights, 2006)
- Allison Moorer: Ring of Fire
(Slow anthemic Americana from Mockingbird, 2008)
- Black Rebel Motorcycle Club: Ring of Fire
(A short, grungy verse-and-chorus from BBC3; more BRMC)
- Judd Grossman: Ring of Fire (solo)
- Judd Grossman: Ring of Fire (w/ trio)
(Lighthearted acoustic alt-country from Judd Grossman’s live audio web archive, 2006/2008)
- Annie Bethancourt: Ring of Fire
(Plaintive-yet-playful singer-songwriter fare live from LeStats, 2006; more Annie B)
- Finn’s Fury: Ring of Fire
(Celtic countryrock from What About Ya?, 2007)
- Madison Lint: Ring of Fire
(Joyously fun fiddle-driven folkrock from the Madison Lint demo, 2002)
- Your Eyes Are Doves: Ring of Fire
(Ringingly Dando-esque indiefolk from The Covers Project, 2007)
- Elvis Costello: Ring of Fire
(Gentle autoharp folkballadry from Anchored in Love: A Tribute to June Carter Cash, 2007)
- Bad Livers: Jailbait/Ring of Fire (Motorhead/Cash medley)
(funky country banjopunk from The Golden Years, 1992)
Speaking of helping hands and natural disasters: Thanks to all who participated in our recent “pay it forward” fund drive – together, we raised over $80 for Doctors Without Borders and the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts!
As a very special thank you to my readers, all those who give five dollars or more to help cover server costs at Cover Lay Down before the end of March will receive a homemade live bootleg mix of covers from this past year’s Clearwater, Grey Fox, and Falcon Ridge Folk Festivals. Click here to donate, and learn more about the project.