In a sense, the name tells the story; the tale of a woman now best known as the wife and stage partner of one of the greatest singer-songwriters ever to emerge from the country and western tradition. Yet for decades before she married Johnny Cash, June Carter had a remarkable career of her own, both as an award-winning singer-songwriter with her own Carter Family – stars of the country music scene – and as an actress training and working in New York. And she achieved all this – in her teens, twenties and thirties – while marrying twice, enduring two heartbreaking divorces, and becoming the single mother of two little girls, one from each marriage.
Advertisement Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. It was this story – so full of drama and glamour, and yet in some ways so familiar – that drew the Glasgow-based actress and singer Charlene Boyd to learn more about June Carter Cash, and to create a show about her; and the result is her first-ever play, June Carter Cash: The Woman, Her Music, And Me, set to open at Summerhall during this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, before a month-long Scottish tour. “My mum sang in a country-and-western wedding band when I was a wee girl growing up in Cumbernauld,” explains Boyd, “so I was singing country songs from an early age.
Then ever since I was at the RSAMD 15 years ago, I’ve been singing in a Johnny Cash tribute band, doing what they once described to me as “backing vocals” – and I soon realised that that meant June! “So I became interested in this woman and her story; and when the pandemic hit in 2020, and there was no other work around, I began to think about it more seriously, and to work up a Creative Scotland application for some development money. I began to talk to so many people on Zoom – people in Nashville, people at the Country Music Association – and to learn so much more about her. “And when I packaged all this into a little video, and sent it round Scottish companies looking for support for my funding application, I just received this amazingly positive response from almost everyone – so that much more quickly than I expected, Grid Iron Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland jointly commissioned the show, and I knew that it was going to full production.
” Two things about this process, though, took Boyd by surprise. The first was that she had never expected to write the show herself; as a high-profile actress around Scotland’s theatres since she graduated in 2009 – working with companies including the NTS, the Citizens’ Theatre and Grid Iron – she had never turned her hand to writing, and assumed she would have to commission a writer for the show. As soon as she started to talk to her chosen director Cora Bissett, though, it became clear that that wouldn’t be necessary.
“I could see immediately that Charlene should write the script,” says Bissett, who is famous for creating music-theatre shows including Glasgow Girls and her own smash-hit gig show What Girls Are Made Of. “She’s been living with this project for years, and is so passionate about it. And anyone who’s worked with her knows what a bright and creative theatre-maker she is.
” Advertisement And the other unexpected aspect of the process came with Boyd’s recognition that in exploring June’s story – as she made a research trip to Nashville, met June’s family, and talked in depth to June’s singer-songwriter daughter Carlene Carter – she was also, in a sense, exploring her own. Like June, Charlene Boyd is a charismatic singer and performer; like June in those early years, she is the mother of two children, and has experienced a painful divorce. And like June, she knows what it is to live a life strangely divided between show business glamour, and the constant slightly chaotic domestic pressures of single parenthood on an uncertain income; one minute on stage in New York in The Strange Undoing Of Prudencia Hart, the next – in Bissett’s words – “wrestling with a broken washing machine in a Glasgow high-rise.
” “It was Carlene Carter,” says Boyd, “who said to me, look, anyone can write a life of June Carter Cash – the facts are known. But only you can write about why this story matters to you. So the play we’ve made is kind of cabaret in which I play a figure who is partly me, and partly June.
I wanted it to be about the experience of being a working mother, in a creative industry where your need to be creative can be seen as selfish, and where you can be heavily judged for that. Advertisement “I’ve kept the script short, so as to give full weight to June’s songs – both the familiar ones, like Ring Of Fire and Jackson, and some of June’s less well known songs, which are just beautiful. Shona Reppe has made a fantastic set, capturing that mix of domestic chaos and onstage magic that June knew so well.
And I’ll have a wonderful three-piece band on stage with me, holding it all together. “So now, I’m just hoping that it will all do June’s story justice. When I talked to the Carter Cash family, they said I was the first person ever to approach them about telling June’s story in its own right, rather than in connection with Johnny.
So this show focusses mainly on the time before she became Mrs Cash. Not because their time together doesn’t matter – it does, and they had a wonderful relationship – but because this is the story people are less likely to know; and one that has resonances for so many women juggling their lives today, all captured in such gorgeous music, and beautiful songs.” June Carter Cash: The Woman, Her Music And Me is at Summerhall, Edinburgh, 2-24 August, as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and on tour across Scotland until 22 September, www.
nationaltheatrescotland.com.
