How to play “ring of fire”

Cash’s version became one of his biggest hits, staying at No. 1 on the country chart for seven weeks. It was certified gold by the RIAA on January 21, 2010, and by September of that year had amassed over 1.2 million paid downloads. It was named the fourth-greatest country song by Country Music Television, while Rolling Stone called it the greatest country song and the 87th-greatest song of all time. In 1999, Cash’s version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

The lyrics compare the passions of love to a “ring of fire”. The narrator describes being burned, and the flames rising, as he continues falling a long distance (“down, down, down”), using the vocabulary of “falling in love”. The song concludes without resolution.

Some sources claim that June Carter had seen the words “Love is like a burning ring of fire” underlined in an Elizabethan poetry book owned by her uncle A. P. Carter. She worked with Merle Kilgore on writing a song inspired by this imagery, as she had seen her uncle do in the past. In her words: “There is no way to be in that kind of hell, no way to extinguish a flame that burns, burns, burns”.

The song was originally recorded by June’s sister, Anita Carter, on her Mercury Records album Folk Songs Old and New (1963) as “(Love’s) Ring of Fire”. Mercury released Anita’s version as a single and it was a featured “pick hit” in Billboard magazine. After hearing Anita’s version, Johnny Cash claimed he had a dream where he heard the song accompanied by “Mexican horns”. The mariachi horn sound had recently been popularized on American radio with 1962 hit song “The Lonely Bull” by Herb Alpert. Cash said, “[…] I’ll give you about five or six more months, and if you don’t hit with it, I’m gonna record it the way I feel it.” Cash noted that adding trumpets was a change to his basic sound.

When the song failed to become a major hit for Anita, Cash recorded it his own way, adding the mariachi-style horns from his dream. This sound was later used in the song “It Ain’t Me Babe“, which was recorded around the same time. Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters are prominently featured in the Cash recording singing harmony. Cash tinkered with a few of the original phrases in Anita Carter’s version of the song. Cash’s daughter Rosanne said, “The song is about the transformative power of love and that’s what it has always meant to me and that’s what it will always mean to the Cash children.”