With backing from Hollywood-based Risk Records, Hamilton released Press On in April on her independent label Small Hairy Dog. Recorded at the Cashes’ home studio — a converted log cabin set deep in the woods on the couple’s estate — the album embraces the homespun aesthetic June learned from her mother, aunt and uncle. With plenty of relatives and friends pitching in, including master guitarist Norman Blake, the record harks back to the family picking parties June knew while growing up in southwestern Virginia.
The Cashes’ son, John Carter, co-produced the album (with J.J. Blair); two of the couple’s erstwhile sons-in-law, Marty Stuart and Rodney Crowell, played on the record; and June’s daughter, Rosie, sang harmony on three tracks. June also duets, her pitch wavering on occasion, with her husband on “The Far Side Banks Of Jordan”, a moving witness to the couple’s belief that they will be reunited after they’ve died and gone on. “I believe my steps are growing wearier each day/Got another journey on my mind,” warbles Cash in his craggiest baritone. Penned 20 years ago by Nashville schoolteacher Terry Smith, the song is very much in the spirit of “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”, the Carter Family perennial that closes Press On and, in many respects, serves as the record’s statement of purpose.
Press On also includes two other Carter Family songs, “Diamonds In The Rough” and “Meeting In The Air”. But unlike Wildwood Flower, the 1988 reunion album June made with her sisters and her daughter Carlene, Press On is more than a Carter Family tribute record. Most of its 13 songs, eight of them written or co-written by June, revisit events unique to her life.
“I Used To Be Somebody”, the song that touched Hamilton so deeply, finds June looking back wistfully on the 1950s. “I used to be somebody/Dear Lord, where have I been/I ain’t ever gonna see Elvis again,” she mourns, alluding to the time when the circles she ran in included Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and Elvis Presley. These weren’t just passing acquaintances: June is Hank Williams Jr.’s godmother; she and Cline were confidantes; and she was like a big sister to Elvis, among other things, teaching him to tune a guitar, spurring him to get his first motorcycle (June had hers first and has the pictures to prove it), and coaching him as he crammed for his first Hollywood screen test.
“I tried in two weeks time to teach Elvis everything that I had learned during the whole time I had gone to school,” June recalls. “When he first started, he was way over the top. And I thought, ‘Please, Elvis, don’t embarrass me. Please don’t take a bad movie. You could do a part like Brando. Don’t do this to me.’ But he did. And do you know that I have never, to this day, seen one of his movies all the way through. I was disappointed because I knew an Elvis that was capable of doing so much more.”
“I Used To Be Somebody” also reflects on June’s days as a drama student in Manhattan in ’56 and ’57, a move brought about at the urging of director Elia Kazan, who had heard about June from a colleague, screenwriter Budd Schulberg. “Budd had come to a show that I had done in Sarasota, Florida, with Elvis,” remembers June. “He and Kazan were fixing to do a movie called A Face In The Crowd. [The film, about a country bumpkin turned TV star, featured Andy Griffith in his big screen debut, and Knoxville native Patricia Neal as his co-star.]
“Kazan didn’t know too much about country music and asked Budd if he should go see Elvis,” June continues. “But Budd said, ‘I’m not so concerned about Elvis Presley. June Carter is who you need to go see. She’s the most unusual girl I’ve ever seen. I have never laughed so, I have never cried so, I have never had the time I had when she was onstage.’
“So Kazan came to see me one Saturday night at the Opry. I didn’t know it was him at first. All I knew was there was this strange little man who kept following me around. He had a camera, and he kept taking my picture, all kinds of ways. Finally, he walked up to me and said, ‘My name is Elia Kazan and I wonder if you’ll come with me and go get a little something to drink.’ So we went across to Linebaugh’s, down there on Lower Broad, and got a coke and he said, ‘I’m going to make a movie in New York. I need to go around and see what country music is like. Will you take me to some of the country places around here?’
“Kazan stayed in Nashville for two weeks and then said, ‘I really wish you would come to New York City. I want you to go to school.’ I said, ‘Gosh, I have a little girl. What am I gonna do?’ ‘You’ll take her with you,’ he said. ‘And if you don’t have the money, I’ll send you.’ I said, ‘Oh, I have the money. If I go, I don’t wanna be beholden to you in any way. I’m also a good old girl, and I’ll stay that way, thank you. And Mother Maybelle will skin you alive if you try to make it any other way.'”
In New York, Kazan took June everywhere with him, exposing her to culture and cultures she’d never imagined. “I was thrown into this group of people,” she says. “I didn’t know what they believed, or if they even believed in God at all. I’m not a Pentecostal. I was raised in the Methodist church, but one of my first memories was looking for Jesus’ face in the clouds — looking there, just searching for it — and I never once ever thought there was any other way. And here I am praying, not just saying the blessing before every meal, but praying for every person I met.”
As June’s comments suggest, these were heady, often conflicted, times for a young, God-fearing woman from Appalachia. To compound matters, June had just split with her first husband, honky-tonker Carl Smith, the man with whom she had her first daughter, Carlene. This emotional roller-coaster notwithstanding, June held her own in the drama classes of Sandy Meisner, who groomed Gregory Peck, Robert Duvall and Mary Steenburgen for their Oscar-winning careers. “I think I could have been a good actor,” June maintains, and as anyone who saw her with Robert Duvall in the opening scene of The Apostle can attest, she is indeed a gifted improviser.
“Bobby paid me a great compliment,” says June, referring to Duvall, who often stays with the Cashes when he’s in Nashville. “He said, ‘This is my first movie to direct, and I really would be so happy if we could do our part first, so I’ll be comfortable.’ And so we did. We improvised it. I must’ve sung I don’t know how many songs. He loved ‘Far Side Banks Of Jordan.’ That’s the one John and I did on this album. It’s my favorite song to sing with John.”
