Ring of Fire 1963

[thetworegs]

Here's a double fester LitC as well as being from the year of my birth. The Classic Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash....Thanks for listening...

Ring of Fire 1963

Johny Cash

[Redler]

Top class vocal interpretation and recording, Trev! Superb double fester!

[cuthbert]

Nice job on this old chestnut, Regs - your voice & guitar work well for this song.

[Farrell Jackson]

A real nice live take on this gem Trevor. Great vocal tone and delivery....backed by a stellar rhythm guitar! Well done on the double fester amigo!

Farrell

[Oldrottenhead]

great live performance.

[Groundy]

Great version Trev, Top class.....


Alex

[Geir]

Very nice Trev !!!

A great year to be born I was gonna do this to, but then I remembered I already had done it

[Johnny Robbo]

So different from the original. As always, Trev you make it your own, mate. Brilliant!

[ODH]

Curry houses, eh?

Nice job, Trevor, and very well recorded too.  What's your setup?  Live in the Car?

[AndyR]

EXCELLENT version.

I had a few laughs this afternoon at work. This is what I found on wikipedia about the conception of the song.

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. Some sources claim that Carter had seen the phrase "Love is like a burning ring of fire," underlined in one of her uncle A. P. Carter's Elizabethan books of poetry.[3][4] 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".[5]

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".[6]

The song was originally recorded by June's sister, Anita Carter, on her Mercury Records album Folk Songs Old and New (1963) as "(Love's) Ring of Fire". Mercury released Anita's version as a single and it was a featured "pick hit" in Billboard magazine.

After hearing Anita's version, Cash claimed he had a dream where he heard the song accompanied by "Mexican horns". Cash stated, "I'll give you about five or six more months, and if you don't hit with it, I'm gonna record it the way I feel it."[citation needed] Cash noted that adding trumpets was a change to his basic sound.[7]

When the song failed to become a major hit for Anita, Cash recorded it his own way, adding the mariachi-style horns. This sound was later used in the song "It Ain't Me Babe", which was recorded around the same time. Mother Maybelle and the Carter sisters are prominently featured in the Cash recording singing harmony. Cash tinkered with a few of the original phrases in Anita Carter's version of the song.

Cash's daughter Rosanne has stated, "The song is about the transformative power of love and that's what it has always meant to me and that's what it will always mean to the Cash children."[8]

In 2004, Merle Kilgore, who shared writing credit for the song with June Carter Cash, proposed licensing the song for a hemorrhoid cream commercial. When performing the song live, Kilgore would often "mock dedicate" the song to "The makers of Preparation H". [9]. However, June's heirs were not of a like mind, and they refused to allow the song to be licensed for the ad.