In one traumatic incident as a 10-year-old, Cash tearfully witnessed his parents fighting for hours and hours at their second home in Jamaica. They just had an odd way of showing it sometimes. They accepted each other totally unconditionally.” “My parents’ love for each other lasted throughout their whole life,” Cash said. Johnny Cash had been ill for years, but no one expected him to outlive his wife, who had always seemed far healthier. Due in stores June 5, it is instead a poignant tribute to his mother, who gracefully lived in her husband’s larger-than-life shadow publicly, but ran the show at home.Ĭash’s parents died within months of each other in 2003. “Anchored in Love: The Life and Legacy of June Carter Cash” (Thomas Nelson $24.99), though, is no Kitty Kelley-style exhumation of two beloved country music icons.

Although the young Cash got to travel the world, meet presidents and live in luxury, his childhood was filled with constant fear that his parents would divorce.Īdding to the insecurity, financial woes in the 1980s - when his father’s recording career was at a low ebb - forced his parents to sell jewelry so that they could pay their large domestic staff. With two junkies for parents, not to mention half-sisters who got hooked on drugs, it’s no surprise that he eventually became an addict himself.

The 35-year marriage of the two disparate personalities looked like a fairy-tale union from the outside, but “the reality is that the suffering continued and it worsened, if anything, throughout the years,” Cash said in an interview. John Carter Cash, 37, has written a book recounting his father’s lifelong struggle with drugs and revealing for the first time that his mother also was a major pill-popper, often paranoid that her third husband was unfaithful. If you thought Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, lived happily ever after when the final credits rolled for 'Walk the Line,' the movie about their early romance, their son would like to set you straight. Johnny Cash performs in New York in this Apfile photo.

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