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Cash moved to Columbia records in 1958, where he had more menacing hits, including the admonitory Ring of Fire ("Love is a burning thing,/And it makes a fiery ring /Bound by wild desire,/I fell into a ring of fire"). Some think this was the time of prime Johnny Cash. "He was at his most powerful in the early '60s," says writer-publisher Jack Hurst, author of a book on the Grand Ole Opry. "Back then he was so deeply into the amphetamines that he had lost an awful lot of weight. He looked like a wraith, but a powerful wraith. He was like a prowling tiger onstage. You could see the man fighting demons. This was around the time he was recording Ballads of the True West, and I think he saw visions of himself as an outlaw, with a noose around his neck. He re-created this in his own persona. Against the other side of him it created this huge dramatic tension." Inside Cash, the churchman and the outlaw were having a brawl.
Being on the road for weeks, driving from one town to the next, was exhilarating and exhausting. Country star George Jones, 72, recalls the days when Cash hired him, the Statler Brothers, Stonewall Jackson and other scrounging singers to fill out his tour bill. "Lord, I don't know what we would have done without him," Jones says. "He was our meal ticket." The nonstop nights on the road led to drug and alcohol binges. "We went through those hard times together," Jones says. "We would try to help each other pull through. We'd get together in the dressing room after a show, talk about the mistakes we were making--the pills, the booze, what have you. His first wife Vivian was a wonderful lady. She went through a lot of hell with him. I know she couldn't stand it any more."
It takes a sinner to appreciate the blinding glare of grace. Cash saw the light in 1967, when he began spending quality time with June Carter, of the legendary country clan the Carter family. Carter urged Cash, who was trying to kick his addiction to prescription drugs, to attend services with her at the First Baptist Church of Hendersonville, Tenn. "He said he didn't think he was ready for that," recalls the church's minister Courtney Wilson. "But she told him they could go late and leave early. They came late and sat in the back." That day marked the revival of Cash's churchgoing and the beginning of his great love. He and Carter were married in 1968.
He was even closer to June than to Jesus, but his two loves were connected. "They had a deep, really mystical bond--their love for one another," says Hirshberg, who collaborated with author Mark Zwonitzer on Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music. "It was deeply undergirded with both religion and a total sense, a real deep-down-where-it-counts belief that God had brought them together. They considered their marriage--the fact that they had found each other--to be a miracle of their faith. Their marriage was an absolute religious experience for both of them."