Original subtitles

# Maybelline

# Why can't you be true?

# Oh, Maybelline

# Why can't you be true?

# You done started doing the thing you used to do

# As I was motivatin' over the hill

# I saw Maybelline in a coup de ville

# A Cadillac... #

In the 1950s and the early 1960s,

radio was segregated, like the rest of American society.

Rhythm and blues played on stations presumably for black audiences.

Country and western was heard on stations

presumably listened to by whites.

But in truth, on each side of the racial divide,

young people were tuning into and buying both.

A lot of times in this community or that community,

you were told, "You can listen to this, you can't listen to that,

"we don't listen to that, we don't listen to this."

But, you know, people that buy music,

listen to music, are a lot more open than you think they are.

# Maybelline, why can't you be true?

# You done started back doing the things you used to do... #

With its diverse and tangled roots, from Appalachian ballads

and gospel, to cowboy songs and the blues,

country music had always been a mixture of influences.

Now it would have to adapt again.

Two strong-willed women would come to Nashville

and become friends on their way to becoming legends.

# I go out walking... #

One was a brash and outspoken Virginian who would

specialise in tender songs of almost excruciating heartache.

The other was a coal miner's daughter from Kentucky,

whose music had an unapologetic twang.

But the sonic explosion that would both spring from country music

and rock it to its core would include a poor boy from Mississippi,

and a restless dark-eyed young man from rural Arkansas,

with an unmistakable deep voice

and a voracious passion for every type of American music.

Their new sound would originate not in Nashville

but further west in Tennessee, along the Mississippi River in Memphis,

where a pioneer record producer believed that this music

could be a way to bring the races together.

Only 240 miles apart but universes apart

when it comes to music.

# Train, train... #

Memphis has always had a little more soul, more horn driven,

more blues driven.

It's not a country town.

It's a river town.

# Coming round and round the bend... #

There's just a magic that comes up from the Delta

and that surrounding country, it's in the gumbo down there.

# Well, it took my baby

# But it never will again

# Never will again

# Oooh, whoo! #

In 1954, a newlywed couple arrived in Memphis

to begin their life together.

He was from Dyess, Arkansas,

22 years old and just out of the US Air Force.

His young bride was from San Antonio.

Johnny Cash had chosen Memphis because his older brother Roy

lived there, where he had a job at a car dealership.

Roy took my dad down to where he worked, there were

two mechanics in the bay, Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins.

Marshall told me that he looked up from the car he was working on

and he saw my dad standing in the doorway, this kind of skinny,

black-haired restless young guy.

And Marshall said a chill started at the top of his head

and went right down his spine.

It's like he knew, he knew something.

And, er, Dad came over to him and said,

"Roy says you boys play a little guitar."

And Marshall said, "Very little."

And he said, "Well, we ought to get together and play some time."

Music had always provided both solace

and an escape from the harsh realities of life for Johnny Cash.

He was born in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression.

The son of an Arkansas sharecropper, too poor to pay the state's

poll tax to vote, and a pious mother who played piano three times

a week at worship services in the Baptist Church.

His parents said they had been unable to agree

on a name for their third son,

so they settled on the initials, JR.

In 1935, they moved from South Central Arkansas

to the Dyess Colony, a resettlement community

created by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

It offered families a fresh start by providing homes,

20 acres of land and small stipends for food and clothing,

all of which the colonists repaid once they had cleared

the trees for their fields and began raising crops.

Young JR was picking cotton by the age of eight.

RADIO STATIC

DOOR CREAKS

FOOTSTEPS

Their home had no electricity

and their only luxury was a battery-powered radio.

# Keep on the sunny side of life... #

Their lives were really hard, and the radio at the end of a day,

even though it was limited because they had to save the battery,

that was the light in his life.

Hearing the Carter family on the radio, all of the blues and gospel.

# That boy is wandering alone... #

As a child, music was survival.

# At their home is waiting him there. #

JR had always looked up to his brother Jack,

who said his life's ambition was to be a minister.

But in 1944, Jack was killed when he was cutting fence posts

and the saw blade ripped into his stomach.

"I'm going to the light," he told the family as he died.

"Can you hear the angels singing?

"Listen, Mama, can you hear them?"

They had to work the cotton fields a day after Jack's funeral.

She would go a little ways and then drop to her knees and say,

"I can't go on."

And then they would sing a spiritual.

JR's relationship with his father, who could be cruel and distant,

was already strained.

Now, it worsened.

Once, after drinking heavily, Ray Cash told his teenage son,

"Too bad it wasn't you instead of Jack."

JR retreated into books about American history

and the poems of Edgar Allen Poe, went on solitary walks at night

and returned from one to tell his mother he would honour

Jack's memory by becoming a gospel singer.

After graduating from high school in 1950,

Cash joined the Air Force and listed his name as John.

He was stationed in Germany where he monitored the high-speed

Morse code transmission of Soviet bombers for three years.

In off hours he learned to play some basic guitar chords, filled

sheets of paper with song lyrics, dreamed of starting his own band,

and wrote daily letters to Vivian Liberto,

a pretty and petite Italian-American girl

he had met during his training at an Air Force base near San Antonio.

Cash returned to the States in the summer of 1954.

He and Vivian were married.

It was then they decided to make their move to Memphis.

Soon, he and Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins were gathering

each night at Grant's home to play music,

some Hank Williams songs, but mostly gospel,

while their wives played cards in the kitchen.

Their skills were limited, the only instrument any of them

played was the guitar

and no-one was particularly good at it.

# Well, that's all right, Mama... #

The most popular tune on Memphis radio that summer was a song

written by Arthur Big Boy Crudup,

a Delta blues musician whose original release had enjoyed

only limited success on rhythm and blues stations.

But this new version was sung by a white teenager with long sideburns,

slicked back hair and an almost angelic tenor voice.

His name was Elvis Aaron Presley.

# That's all right, Mama

# Anyway you do... #

He'd been born in Tupelo, Mississippi,

and like JR Cash, grew up listening to every kind of music on the radio,

from hillbilly tunes and gospel music he loved as a boy,

to the blues by Muddy Waters.

In 1954, Presley was driving a truck in Memphis

when he stopped at 706 Union Avenue,

the home of tiny Sun Records.

Its owner, Sam Phillips, had previously recorded

rhythm and blues artists like BB King and Howlin' Wolf.

Phillips had paired Elvis with two musicians from a hillbilly band

called the Starlite Wranglers,

but initially was unimpressed with the tunes they were playing,

until they started fooling around with Big Boy Cruddup's

That's All Right Mama.

# I'm leaving town, baby

# I'm leaving town for sure

# Well, then you won't be bothered with

# Me hangin' round your door

# But that's all right... #

"It's not black, it's not white, it's not pop, it's not country,"

Phillips said when he shared it with a local DJ,

who played it over and over as calls flooded the station for more.

Phillips quickly scheduled another session.

Once again, Presley struggled to come up with something distinctive.

# Blue moon of Kentucky

# Keep on shinin'... #

They all knew Bill Monroe's lilting waltz, Blue Moon Of Kentucky,

and started clowning around with it.

# Blue moon

# Blue moon

# Blue moon, keep shinin' bright

# Blue moon, keep on shinin' bright

# You're gonna bring me back my baby tonight

# Blue moon, keep shining bright... #

"Hell," Phillips said when they finished, "that's different."

# Keep on shinin'

# Shine on the one that's gone and left me blue... #

The single that Sun Records rushed out became a regional phenomenon.

Rhythm and blues stations played That's All Right,

while country stations focused on Blue Moon Of Kentucky.

It was enough to earn Presley an invitation

to play at the Grand Ole Opry.

The audience responded politely at best, while some Opry regulars

grumbled that he had desecrated Monroe's classic song.

The first time I heard Elvis Presley, I hated him.

Because I was into bluegrass music,

and I was bluegrass to the bone back then.

And he sang Blue Moon Of Kentucky,

one of my favourite Bill Monroe songs, and...

HE IMITATES ELVIS

..and I thought, "What's he doing to my song?" You know.

# Shinin' bright

# Whisper on high

# Love said goodbye

# Blue moon of Kentucky... #

Monroe didn't like it much when he first heard it,

he thought they were not doing the right thing by way of his music,

until the first royalty cheque came.

And then I believe Monroe's tune went to, "I told him, if there's

"anything in this world I can do to help you, you just let me know.

HE CHUCKLES

# I've been travelling over miles

# Even through the valleys too... #

Presley and his music seemed too radical for the Opry

and they did not ask him back.

# Baby, trying to get to you... #

In late 1954, Phillips arrived at work

to find Johnny Cash sitting in the doorway asking for an audition.

There was something in his voice and I guess Sam heard it.

He thought maybe he could make lightning strike twice.

John wanted to be a gospel singer and Sam said,

"I can't sell gospel records.

"Write something that's not gospel and I'll cut it."

Cash put a simple melody to a poem he had written about coming home

on the train, Hey, Porter,

and began to practising with Luther Perkins on a borrowed

electric guitar and Marshall Grant, who was learning to play bass.

"There's something squirrelly about you guys," Phillips said,

when he heard the stripped down style.

But he admitted, "It's different."

# Hey, porter, hey, porter

# What time did you say?

# How much longer will it be until I can

# See the light of day?

# When we hit Dixie will you tell that engineer

# To ring his bell

# And ask everybody that ain't asleep

# To stand right up and yell... #

They called themselves Johnny Cash and The Tennessee Two.

Hello, folks, this is Johnny Cash,

and I'd like to introduce you to the other two boys here.

This is Luther Perkins over here hitting all those hard notes

on that guitar.

LUTHER PLAYS CHORDS Oh, go, Luther.

And Marshall Grant hitting the low notes on this bass fiddle over here.

# And I have to strain my eyes... #

His voice is singular.

Tennessee Two, that's like a punk band.

You know, if you think about it, it's like,

it's just like, the bass is so percussive

and Luther Perkins just playing like the four notes that seem to...

..he seemed only know four notes.

I literally think they sound like punk rock records.

I mean that as the highest compliment.

I mean, they are just so vivid.

# Hey, porter, hey, porter

# Please open up the door... #

For a while, Johnny Cash

and his fellow Sun Records artist Elvis Presley

were sent out on tours together,

mostly in the south and south-west,

opening for better-known country stars.

# Let's rock, rock, rock

# Well, let's rock, rock, rock

# We're gonna rock all our blues away... #

Out on the road, Johnny Cash and Presley became friends.

Elvis called Cash Old Man, because Cash was three years older.

Cash called Presley The Shaky Kid,

and sometimes impersonated him on stage.

# Well, it's down at the end of Lonely Street

# At Heartbreak Hotel...

AUDIENCE SCREAMS

# You'll be so lonely

# You'll be so lonely

# You could die. #

The term used to describe the music that had been born at Sun Records

was rockabilly

and it was beginning to catch on.

# It's one for the money, two for the show

# Three to get ready

# Now go, cat, go

# But don't you step on my blue suede shoes... #

Carl Perkins was from West Tennessee.

He became a close friend of Johnny Cash after both men discovered

they had scars on their fingers from picking cotton.

Cash told him a story about a man he had met in the Air Force who

prided himself on his spiffy clothes and always said,

"Don't step on my blue suede shoes."

Perkins turned that into his first big rockabilly hit.

Elvis would make it even bigger.

# Well, it's one for the money Two for the show

# Three to get ready Now go, cat, go

# But don't you step on my blue suede shoes

# Well, you can do anything

# But stay off of my blue suede shoes... #

I think... I think people in the beginning

didn't know what to do with him.

Is he playing country, is he playing pop?

He was doing Bill Monroe's bluegrass song,

and then That's All Right Mama was a rhythm and blues piece.

And then, by the time he got down to Don't Be Cruel, he was gone.

# My blue suede shoes. #

Meanwhile, Johnny Cash stayed put.

He was doing well enough to buy a house in north-east Memphis

for his growing family.

Vivian had given birth to two daughters, Roseanne and Kathy.

The Louisiana Hayride had made him a regular, and

Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins quit their jobs as auto mechanics.

In July of 1956,

he made his first guest appearance at the Grand Ole Opry,

where someone backstage told a reporter,

"He'll be better than Elvis because Johnny's a true country singer

"and Presley isn't, and never has been."

A new single of Cash's had just become his first number one

country hit.

It was for Vivian, who had become worried that on his tours

he would succumb to one of the well-known temptations of the road.

Talking about Vivian's concerns with Carl Perkins,

Cash had said that as a married man, "I walk the line."

Perkins replied, "That's your title."

# I keep a close watch on this heart of mine

# I keep my eyes wide open all the time

# I keep the ends out for the tie that binds

# Because you're mine

# I walk the line

# Mmmm

# As sure as night is dark and day is light

# I keep you on my mind both day and night... #

The song came from my mother's fear, you know,

"You're going out on the road and these girls are coming up to you."

And he wrote, I walk the line.

I'm going to stay true to you.

Of course that wasn't true!

# I keep a close watch on this heart of mine... #

Backstage at the Opry, after singing I Walk The Line,

Cash met for the first time someone whose voice

he had once heard on his family's radio back in Dyess, Arkansas.

# I walk the line... #

It was June Carter.

# I got a feeling because I'm blue

# Oh, Lord, since my daddy said goodbye

# I don't know what I'm going to do

# All I do is sit and cry

# Oh, Lord, that last long day

# He said goodbye

# Well, Lord, I thought I would die

# He'll do you, he'll do me

# He's got that kinda loving

# But, Lord, I love to hear him

# When he calls me... #

When she moved to Nashville in 1959, Patsy Cline seemed more like

a throwback to country music's past than a bridge to its future.

Many of her songs had honky tonk themes, like cheating.

She could yodel as well as Hank Williams.

And she attempted to be as big a star as he had been.

Virginia Patterson Hensley had been born

near Winchester, Virginia in 1932

and dropped out of high school at age 15 after her abusive father

deserted the family.

# I've loved and lost again... #

She began singing in bars and supper clubs

to help support her mother and siblings.

Her rich voice had a remarkable power that impressed everyone

who heard it.

# I've loved and lost again. #

By 1954, she was appearing regularly

on a country television show in Washington DC.

She married a businessman named Gerald Cline,

changed her first name to Patsy, and signed a recording

contract with a small independent label, Four Star, which she later

learned was notorious among insiders for cheating its artists.

But the studio it used was in Nashville where Owen Bradley

instantly recognised her talent,

despite the mediocre songs her contract required her to sing.

# People point us out

# And shake their heads in shame... #

We tried rock and roll on the country songs,

we tried Western swing,

we tried a pop piano sound on it.

They tried everything but the songs weren't there.

After a string of singles failed to sell,

Four Star insisted that she record a new song.

Cine resisted at first, "It's nothing but a little old pop song,"

she said, "I hate it."

But under Owen Bradley's guidance,

she turned Walkin' After Midnight into something special.

She sang it on a televised talent show

and the exposure pushed the song to number two on the charts.

# I go out walkin'

# After midnight

# Out in the moonlight

# Just like we used to do

# I'm always walkin'

# After midnight

# Searchin' for you... #

Divorced from Gerald Cline, she remarried and had a daughter.

The Grand Ole Opry offered her a spot in its cast.

On tour, she quickly became known not just for her powerful voice

but also for her equally powerful personality.

She argued with everyone, swore like a sailor,

walked out of concerts if promoters didn't pay her and her band on time.

# I'm lonesome as I can be

# I go out walkin'... #

Oh, yes, well, let me tell you, you didn't mess with Patsy.

She'd tell you in a New York minute what she thought,

and what she was going to do and how it was going to be done.

By 1959, Johnny Cash was a star

and he had moved Vivian and his growing family from Memphis

to a sprawling house in Southern California.

Only five years earlier

he had been making 50 a week as an appliance salesman.

Now, he was on track to bring in 250,000 a year.

Like every other singing star, Cash spent most of his time

travelling from one performance to another.

Every night, he would call Vivian to say how much he missed her

and the girls, to reassure her that he was being faithful.

Though in truth, Marshall Grant found it necessary

to constantly remind his friend that he was a married man.

"But the road," Cash said, "meant adventure, creativity and freedom."

# Now I taught the weeping willow how to cry

# And I showed the clouds how to cover up a clear blue sky... #

He was addicted to it, you know?

If he was home more than ten days, he started to get very restless.

Had to get back out there again.

They would get in a car and drive 200 miles and do a show,

sometimes drive and do two, three, four shows a day.

Then drive all night, get someplace, do it again,

afternoon show, evening show.

Drive all night, over and over.

Well, somebody finally said to Dad when he was at the point

of utter exhaustion, here's how you get through it.

You take this pill.

That was it.

That's how he got through it.

One of Cash's signature songs was Folsom Prison Blues.

Many fans assumed the song had been drawn from his own

personal experience.

Cash had never served time in prison

but felt a special connection with those who had.

# But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die... #

On New Year's Day, 1959,

Cash performed that at California's maximum security facility

at San Quentin.

Sitting in the audience was a young inmate

who had already busted out of juvenile detention centres 17 times.

Johnny Cash had blown his voice

the night before at a New Year's Eve party in San Francisco

and he had nothing but a whisper,

but with that only, he was able to totally subdue the crowd,

and in competition with strippers and all kinds of things,

eight hour show.

And I was really worried for him

because the men are cruel in San Quentin.

They don't applaud unless they like you, but they were crazy about him.

# Well, if they freed me from this prison

# If that railroad train was mine

# I bet I'd move it all a little farther down the line

# Far from Folsom prison

# That's where I want to stay... #

He identified with us

and he was the kind of guy that might have been in there with us,

things had gone the wrong way for him.

Merle Haggard decided that if he ever got out of prison

he would try to follow in Johnny Cash's footsteps.

By 1961, despite her brief success with Walkin' After Midnight,

Patsy Cline hadn't had a hit in four years.

Her family was barely getting by. They didn't even have a telephone.

People were told they could reach her by leaving a message at WSM.

But once she was freed from her contract with Four Star Records,

she signed on with Decca.

Owen Bradley immediately began looking for a song

that could help her appeal to both country and pop markets.

He called on two of Nashville's hottest songwriters,

Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard.

"The essence of a good country song," Howard once said,

"was three chords and the truth."

The song they wrote was set to a familiar country beat.

Cline had at first objected to Bradley's insistence on the addition

of the Jordanaires, whose voices she feared might overwhelm her own.

# I fall to pieces

# Each time I see you again... #

I was driving into the closest little town, I heard that record.

I was going through that,

I had just broken up with this guy.

I had gone to a party,

and at first I wasn't going to go

and then it's like, "No, I'm going. I'm going to have a good time."

Well, I had a great time until I saw him.

And then I just fell to pieces.

When I heard that record, I'm like,

"Who knows what I'm just living through? Who knows that?"

I just can't believe there's somebody out there that can write

a song about how you feel when they don't even know you.

With I Fall To Pieces, Patsy Cline scored her first

number one country hit.

# You walk by

# And I fall to pieces. #

We're on a session, she's upstairs with Owen in the control room.

She came down those steps, sassy. Sassy.

She put her hand on her hip, cocked her hip,

threw her head back and said, "Boys, they say I got a hit.

"Ain't nobody taking my frigidaire and my car now."

Thank you very much and howdy, friends and neighbours

and everybody here in the Opry House.

We've got a great big show for you.

Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys take the lead.

# From the great Atlantic Ocean

# To the wide Pacific shore

# From the queen of flowing mountains

# To the south bell by the shore

# She's mighty tall and handsome

# She's known quite well by all

# She's the combination on the Wabash Cannonball... #

Well, there was one person in that Hollow

had one of those little tiny radios,

and on Saturday night, everybody would end up at that one house,

and we'd listen to the Grand Ole Opry.

Daddy, when he got his job in the mines, in the coal mines,

we got a Philco radio.

And that was the greatest thing ever happened to us was that radio.

I'd go to sleep every night with that radio,

with a blanket over the top of me.

Sometimes I'd be froze to death but I'd listen to the radio.

Loretta Lynn was born on April 14th, 1932 in a cabin

in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky.

The oldest girl in a family of eight children,

she grew up wearing dresses made from flour sacks

and tending to her younger siblings,

singing them to sleep in a rocking chair.

When Bill Monroe would start to sing bluegrass,

Mommy would hit the floor and start dancing.

And when Mommy would hit the floor and start dancing

you'd see Daddy with his head down, and he'd look up and go...

..and then put his head back down.

He would grin and put his head back down.

At age 15, she met Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn,

a 21-year-old war veteran who outbid everyone else

for her pie at a schoolhouse social.

He was the first boy she ever kissed and they married within a month.

She and Doolittle moved to Washington state

near the Canadian border where he had found work on a ranch

and she had four children in quick succession

while the couple scraped to get by.

Hearing his young wife sing around the house,

Doolittle bought Loretta a £17 guitar from Sears.

She taught herself to play it, composing songs of her own

and playing them to her children.

I'd line them up, I'd line these kids up

and I'd sing and sing and I'd say,

"Now which one of the songs do you like?

"Do you think Mommy can sing?"

And everyone would say, "Yeah, Mommy, you can sing."

Soon she was performing with a small country band for 5 a night

at a local tavern,

and won a talent contest on a Tacoma TV show.

A wealthy lumber man offered to finance a recording

of a song she had written, I'm a Honky Tonk Girl.

# Many nights I've laid awake and cried

# We once were happy

# My heart was in a whirl

# But now I'm a honky tonk girl

# So turn that jukebox... #

I liked the very first record she did.

# I'm just a honky tonk girl. #

I think that's the best she ever sung.

I love that record.

She had authenticity in it, she was hungry.

# And now I'm a honky tonk girl... #

She wanted out of that life she was in, sung her way out of prison.

To promote her record,

she and Doolittle started sending copies of it

along with a photograph of Loretta dressed in a cowgirl outfit

to disc jockeys and station managers around the nation.

In early 1960, they set off to do it in person,

going from station to station, sleeping in their car,

living on baloney and cheese sandwiches.

I had one little dress, Doo got it for me for my 17th birthday.

So I'd kept it all this time and kept that one dress,

so we'd go someplace, I'd get in the back seat,

change into my little black and white dress

and pull my jeans off and go in the radio station,

and then when I come back, I'd pull my dress off, hang it back up.

And we'd go on down the road to the next radio station.

That's how we did it.

I'm a Honky Tonk Girl hit number 14 on the country charts.

They decided to head for Nashville.

There, she pestered officials at the Grand Ole Opry

until they granted her a spot on the show.

Meanwhile, one of Loretta's idols, Patsy Cline,

was involved in an automobile accident that killed two people.

Patsy was catapulted through her car's windshield

and hospitalised in critical condition with broken bones,

a dislocated hip and a deep gash that sliced across her forehead.

Loretta was scheduled to be on Ernest Tubb's Midnite Jamboree.

I sung on the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, I Fall To Pieces,

and dedicated it to her in the hospital.

So she sent her husband down to town to get me

and bring me to the hospital, and that's where I met her,

was in the hospital.

Loretta and Patsy soon became close friends.

She started giving Lynn advice on her career,

money for rent and nicer clothes.

Cline slowly recovered,

appearing once at the Opry in a wheelchair

to show her fans she was mending.

I'm kind of out of wind, this is the first time I've worked

since I got out of the hospital.

LAUGHTER

What are you laughing about, you wasn't there.

Oh, me.

We'd like to slow things down so I can get my breath.

# I must make up my mind today

# What to have, what to hold... #

As soon as Patsy Cline felt up to it,

Owen Bradley brought her back to his studio to record a new album.

The song that produced the album's biggest hit

was a slow, soft lament Willie Nelson had written.

He had originally entitled the song Stupid but then changed his mind.

He called it Crazy.

I was at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville,

and Charlie Dick, Patsy's husband was there,

he and I were having a beer.

I had a demo of Crazy

and I got it on Tootsie's jukebox and played it and he heard it

and said, "That would be a great song for Patsy,

"let's go play it for her."

We went over to her house, it was about 12.30, one o'clock

when we got there.

I wouldn't get out of the car, so he went in and Patsy come out

and made me get out of the car and come in,

listen to the song.

I just thought it was a good song. You know when you write one,

you know whether it's good or not great,

but I always thought it was a really good song.

And I played it for Patsy Cline and she thought it was a great song.

"I'm glad you woke me up," Patsy said.

"I'm recording it."

But in the studio, as the musicians worked on their parts,

Patsy was having trouble.

She couldn't get Willie Nelson's unique phrasing on his demo version

out of her head.

And Willie had recorded it,

# Crazy, da-dum-da-ding-da-dong

# Crazy for feeling so lonely... #

Well, she got that tempo locked into her mind

and it was kind of Western, you know, so she came to the studio

and Owen slowed it down to,

# Crazy, ooh-ooh-ooh... #

That's us.

# Crazy for feeling so lonely... #

Well, she couldn't get it. She had dum-di-dum-di-dum in her mind.

Owen Bradley sent Cline home

while he and the musicians finished the background track.

Two weeks later, she returned to lay down her vocals over it

and in her first take delivered the kind of performance

they had been searching for.

# Crazy

# I'm crazy for feeling so lonely

# I'm crazy

# Crazy for feeling so blue... #

Released as a single, Crazy quickly crossed over to the top 10

on the pop charts, just as Owen Bradley had wanted.

When you hear her sing, it sounds to me like she is in the room,

right here, and you feel the emotion in every lyric.

If you can find that perfect song and then you marry it

with the voice that supposed to go with, it's timeless.

# Crazy

# For thinking that my love could hold you

# I'm crazy for trying

# And crazy for crying

# And I'm crazy for loving you. #

By the early 1960s, Johnny Cash was on the road more than ever,

away from his wife and four daughters.

# Hear that lonesome whippoorwill... #

The tensions between him and Vivian were palpable.

"I wasn't going to give up the life that went with my music,"

Cash said later, "and Vivian wasn't going to accept that.

"So there we were. Very unhappy. There was always a battle at home."

Being the daughter of a really famous guy

was fraught with so much anxiety, partly because of my mother.

And she was so afraid of fame and she was afraid we'd be kidnapped.

She didn't want anything in the papers and she wanted a quiet life,

a contained life, and my dad did not have a quiet and contained life.

# The moon just went behind the clouds

# To hide its face and cry

# Did you ever see... #

After one road trip, Cash brought his whole band to the house,

along with Patsy Cline, who was now part of his tour.

Vivian became friends with Patsy

but not with another woman also appearing regularly with Johnny,

June Carter.

A lot of people were in the dark about it

but it was pretty evident to even me, a small child,

that there was something there between them, a special bond.

Cash soon added June's mother Maybelle

and her sisters into the act.

And when they appeared with him at a big show at the Hollywood Bowl,

Vivian took the girls to the concert.

After it was over, they watched as Johnny jumped into

a waiting Cadillac to drive off with June.

The look on Vivian's face, one band member remembered, was pure anguish.

# ..Could cry. #

By the end of 1962,

Johnny Cash and June Carter's affair had deepened,

but they were conflicted about it.

They were both still married to other people -

June, to her second husband - and both had children to consider.

# Love is a burning flame... #

June poured her feelings into a new song,

co-written with Merle Kilgore, that her sister, Anita, recorded.

When she wrote Ring Of Fire, it was about something real,

it was about true passion and true love and the scary factor of that.

You know, "I fell into a burning ring of fire," that is scary.

Anita Carter's Ring Of Fire was not a hit,

but in March of 1963, Johnny Cash decided to record it himself.

He wanted a fresh sound, maybe even Mexican horns,

and he turned to Cowboy Jack Clement,

a friend from his Sun Record days, now living in Texas.

And the phone rang and Johnny Cash wanted me to...

..he said he's going to cut a record in Nashville with trumpets on it.

And he wanted me to come up and help him figure it out.

So I flew up and I got in there and he had these two or three trumpets.

And they didn't know what they were going to do,

they had music but it was blank.

So I said, "Why don't you go..." HE SINGS INTRO TO RING OF FIRE

They wrote that down.

Then I said, "Go..." SINGS RING OF FIRE MELODY

# Love is a burning thing

# And it makes a fiery ring

# Bound by wild desire

# I fell into a ring of fire

# I fell into a burning ring of fire... #

Ring Of Fire spent seven weeks at number one on the country charts

and an album featuring it lasted more than a year

on the pop charts.

# The ring of fire... #

Vivian hated Ring Of Fire and tried her best to avoid the radio stations

that seemed to play it constantly.

She associated it with June Carter, whose voice could be heard

on the record singing backup with her sisters.

"The mere mention of her name annoyed me," Vivian would remember.

"I longed for the days when Johnny told me

"he'd always walk the line for me."

# The ring of fire

# The ring of fire. #

Country music has always been a family.

And when tragedy struck

and some people in Belle Meade or the fancy places in Nashville

couldn't really care less, I think

it just brought us together that much more because it hurt us all.

It was like one person, you know, got cut and we all bled.

Because of her recent success, Cline now travelled in a four-seat

Piper Comanche, flown by her manager Randy Hughes.

The small plane departed Kansas City

on the afternoon of March 5th, 1963.

West of Nashville, they flew into dense rain clouds.

Hughes was not trained to fly by instruments.

PHONE RINGS

I got a phone call about 7.15 that morning from the wife

of a dear friend of mine. She said, "Go turn on WSM right now."

So I turned on the radio

and operating announcers were talking and they were crying.

You could actually hear the tears in their voice

as they were telling their audience and the world

for the first time that this plane had gone down.

# Every night

# I go through

# Why can't I... #

After the funerals,

the Grand Ole Opry paid tribute in a memorial service.

The country music family was in shock,

but wanted to give their lost friends a proper goodbye.

Her loss would resonate in country music for decades.

But her signature song Crazy would go on to become the number one

jukebox tune of all time.

# Crazy

# I'm crazy for feeling so lonely

# I'm crazy... #