Kristen Vaurio has worked on documentaries about everything from Scientology to the National Enquirer to Robin Williams. For much of her previous work, she had to try hard to secure interviews; this time, for her directorial debut, June (premiering today on Paramount +), it was different. “The things I work on, people are not always super eager to talk about, but this time it wasn’t a stretch,” says Vaurio. “They all genuinely loved her. June is this glue that holds all of country music together.”
While many people know of June Carter Cash, often it’s first and foremost as Johnny Cash’s wife and less as a music superstar in her own right. The documentary rectifies that collective oversight and presents a lovingly crafted, richly detailed rendering of a life well lived, covering her career, family, music mentorship, and, yes, relationship with Johnny, something that has become (thanks to movies like Walk the Line) an American fable.
Carter Cash pushed back against conventional expectations since she was a girl performing on the road with her sisters and mother as part of the Carter Sisters. She divorced (twice) at a time when that was unheard of, emerging from each relationship with a stronger sense of who she was; she left the comfort zone of family and familiarity to move to New York in the ’50s and study acting at The Neighborhood Playhouse, crossing paths with icons like James Dean and Elia Kazan. (Her acting prowess would shine on screen years later opposite Robert Duvall in The Apostle.) She toured with Elvis Presley (he’s mentioned in her wistfully lovely song “I Used to Be Somebody”: “I used to be somebody / Dear Lord, where have I been / I ain’t ever gonna see Elvis again”), and she is responsible for writing what is arguably Cash’s most famous song, “Ring of Fire.”
After years offstage raising her children, she released Press On, an album that would be a career pinnacle at age 70. “I’ve been real happy paddling along after John, being Mrs. Johnny Cash all these years,” she says in a video clip to an audience celebrating that record’s release in 1999. “But I’m sure thrilled to be up here singing for you tonight.” Press On would earn Carter Cash her first solo Grammy. “She’s standing up there giving us a life lesson in what it means to stick it out,” says Mark Stielper, a friend of the Cashes who is now a Cash family historian, in the film.
Here, Vaurio shares about her path to Carter Cash and what she hopes viewers will take away from the film.
Vogue: June Carter Cash clearly has a very compelling story. How much did you know of her before you embarked on this project?
Kristen Vaurio: I probably knew as much as most people, maybe a little more. But once you scratch the littlest at the surface, you realize her life is such a wonderful, deep, and rich story. And it just instantly grabbed me. You watch just 30 seconds of her performing, that magical crackle to her onscreen, and you literally can’t look away.
It’s so true. She’s magnetic. But even though she has this serious country lineage, June herself still feels underrated and unappreciated.
I think about the celestial-body metaphor where it’s all bright stars. Johnny is one of the most charismatic performers that’s ever walked the earth, and she’s standing right next to him. And her mother is an unbelievable guitar pioneer. People make a big deal out of June not being the best musician in the Carter family, but the Carter family were all virtuosos; she was just in this orbit of incredibly bright stars.
And she was trying to make it as a solo artist during a time that seemed incredibly challenging for a woman to do that.
It was a really uphill time. Everybody exists, but they’re also in a time and a place. And when she was starting to strike out on her own and wanted to have a solo career, it was this in-between time, between when women were supposed to go back home and be homemakers and then after that came women like Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn. So June was stuck in this middle place where people were telling her that women didn’t sell and audiences wouldn’t come to see women. She had to go back to the drawing board so many times.
Her work ethic and her ability to constantly forge ahead was pretty astounding.
Honestly, she never saw anything different. She first saw all the women around her working, and they were the stars and breadwinners. That was the reason she probably was able to keep going—because she didn’t have to invent the idea on her own. It was something her mother and sisters very much did. And her father was also a big piece of it. He was extraordinarily bright, a self-taught engineer, and he played classical music all the time. John Carter Cash [June and Johnny’s son] showed me his grandfather’s books in his library, and there was one that stuck out to me from the late 1800s called: What Can a Woman Do. It was a radical feminist work written by this woman who started the first journalism school in Ohio. And she basically goes through every profession and said, yes, women can do this—they could be beekeepers, doctors, tailors—emphasizing how important it was for women to make their own money. That was probably June’s father’s manual for raising three girls.
June’s son, John, shared so many incredible details about his parents’ lives.
From the beginning, I was fortunate that Carlene Carter and John Carter wanted to tell the full story. And they were not afraid to go to some of these darker places.
We hear more detail about the art of her relationship with Johnny and the challenges in their marriage, which Rosanne Cash in the film says had an almost mythical quality for people. Did you want to peel back some of those layers?
With so many stories about romance, we see that the main struggle is for people to get together. And that’s how Walk the Line ends basically. And if we’re talking about a marriage, that’s the easy part; that isn’t the story. And these more complex stories, like theirs, are so much more interesting. And it wasn’t like June saved him and it was over; they struggled, and they worked so hard for years, and it was never a done deal. They had a very true and deep love, but their relationship was kind of a full circle, and they were both willing to put in a lot of work and forgive and get over the mistakes. I think that’s a far more compelling story than “happily ever after.”
There are so many lessons to be learned from their relationship and then also of course from June’s own life that the film highlights. There was that moment when sociologist Mary Bufwack spoke about how June kept this little girl in her growing and going, which really stuck with me.
June was so multidimensional, and she always lived her life as herself. And I think she was keenly aware of so much because she was in the public eye from the time she was eight. When Mary said that during our interview, it was really unexpected and wonderful. I have a daughter, and our cameraman Nathan was about to have a daughter, and everyone was just in tears. Because it’s a different world now for girls, but it’s also similar in a lot of ways. And June had this determination and freedom from the time she was little, and despite everything she went through, she managed to hold onto it until the end. It’s a super-valuable lesson for everybody to carry with them.
I love to think about how many people will know so much more about June thanks to this film.
Whenever I told people I was working on this film, they would know the Reese Witherspoon character or pause for a minute and you could see the gears spinning and they’d be like, “Oh, right, Johnny’s wife!” I don’t want anybody to have that answer anymore.
