Watch Johnny Cash Dedicate His Final Public Performance To His Late Wife, June Carter Cash, In 2003

Can hear the heartbreak in his voice.

Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash had one of the all-time great love stories in country music, a story that still serves as the standard for what true love should be.

Cash met his future wife, June Carter of the legendary Carter family, back in 1956 during his Grand Ole Opry debut. The Carter family was country music royalty, and Cash was just experiencing his first commercial success after making his first recordings for Sun Records in 1955.

They were both married to other people at the time: Cash was married to his first wife, Vivian Liberto, and Carter was married to her first husband Carl Smith (though they would divorce that same year). But the connection between Cash and Carter was instant.

As June Carter recalled in the liner notes of Cash’s 2000 box set, Love, God, Murder:

“I can’t remember anything else we talked about, except his eyes. Those black eyes that shone like agates… He had a command of his performance that I had never before. Just a guitar and a bass and a gentle kind of presence that made not only me, but whole audiences become his followers.”

The two became close, despite Cash still being married to Vivian and Carter marrying her second husband Edwin “Rip” Nix in 1957. Cash toured with the Carter family in the 1960s, but it was also during this time that his life began to spiral not only due to marriage problems and his ultimate divorce from Vivian Liberto but because of his addiction to alcohol and pills.

Cash was arrested several times in the 1960s, and finally June Carter, along with Mother Maybelle Carter and her husband Ezra Carter moved in with Cash to help him get clean.

Throughout his struggles, Cash had his eye on June Carter, but she refused to marry him while he was on drugs. But on February 22, 1968, Cash proposed to Carter onstage at a concert at the London Gardens in London, Ontario, Canada, and the two were married a week later at a ceremony in Franklin, Kentucky – and the rest, as they say, is history.

The two were married for 35 years, until June Carter Cash’s death on May 15, 2003 following complications from heart valve replacement surgery at the age of 73. And Johnny did his best to stay busy to keep his mind off the heartbreak of losing his wife.

According to Marty Stuart, Cash’s son John Carter Cash called him the day after June died to tell him that Cash wanted to go into the studio to record. And producer Rick Rubin, with whom Cash worked for his American Recordings series of albums, Cash knew that he had to stay busy:

“When June died, it tore him up. He said to me, ‘You have to keep me working because I will die if I don’t have something to do.'”

Well Cash would also give his final public performance not long after June passed away – and it was a special one.

On July 5, 2003, Cash performed at the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, Virginia. The venue, named of course after the royal family of country music and founded by Jeanette Carter (daughter of Sara and A.P. Carter), is dedicated to preserving old time country music and bluegrass. And during Cash’s final performance, it was also dedicated to the memory of June Carter Cash.

Cash was frail and in poor health thanks to being diagnosed years earlier with autonomic neuropathy due to diabetes. He was in a wheelchair, and his voice was noticeably weak. But he still took the stage with his signature introduction:

“Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.”

And before singing “Ring of Fire,” he dedicated the song written by June Carter Cash to his late wife:

“The spirit of June Carter overshadows me tonight with the love she had for me, and the love I have for her.

We connect somewhere between here and heaven. She came down for a short visit, I guess, from heaven to visit with me tonight to give me courage and inspiration like she always has.

She’s never been one for me except courage and inspiration. I thank God for June Carter. I love her with all my heart.

I would like to do a song that she wrote that she was extremely proud of.”

Cash would ultimately pass away on September 12, 2003 at the age of 71 of complications from diabetes, less than four months after June Carter Cash passed away. But along with his wife, he left behind one of the all-time great love stories in country music.

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