Their love affair was immortalised in the film Walk The Line. But a new book about music legend Johnny Cash and his wife - by their own son - reveals the dark reality of life with...
Was this one of the most romantic proposals of all time?
Johnny Cash, with his rough-hewn outlaw image, was performing one of his legendary ballads before 7,000 people on stage in Ontario, Canada, when suddenly he stopped in his tracks and asked his petite co-star June Carter to marry him.
It was the union of two great musical legends - a union documented in the 2005 film Walk The Line, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon - and the start of a marriage that would last 35 years.
Cash, who with his deep brown voice invented rockabilly, and June, who wrote one of his greatest hits, Ring Of Fire, had performed together for many years on America's country music circuit.
Yet all the time they had battled against their growing love because both were married to other people and held deep religious convictions.
The story of how Cash finally left his first wife and four daughters in the Sixties just as June obtained her second divorce is part of music history.
June and Johnny moved in together to his idyllic lakeside house near Nashville, Tennessee, and were so happy there they christened the place Camelot.
Their idyll was complete when, in 1970, their only son was born. They called him John Carter Cash and doted on him - as he later did on them, growing up faithful to his musical heritage by becoming an award-winning record producer.
Now, just four years after his parents died within four months of each other, John Carter has written a poignant new book which offers a unique insight into the reality of living with these musical legends.
As John Carter reveals, there was a tragic downside to their enduring love story - the drugs, the infidelities and the slanging matches - a side which the public never saw.
While June threw her energies into retail therapy and prayers, her husband popped enough pills to fell anyone with a lesser frame, sometimes sleeping so deeply the family feared he was dead.
Fabulous wealth, fine homes, celebrity friends, nothing could deter the brooding Cash from his self-destructive urges.
For little John Carter, it was a see-saw existence.
On the one hand, his parents' money brought him a fairytale life; on the other, he was witness to his father's distressing binges.
Cash's musician friends claimed that, when they all took drugs together, Johnny was the life and soul of the party.
But John Carter says that at home Cash would either stare into space or sink into depression, yelling abuse.
Throughout it all June Carter remained astonishingly supportive. Yet as her son now reveals, even she was unable to escape the family curse in the end.
One by one, she watched her daughters by her first two marriages and then her beloved son with Johnny all descend into addiction alongside her husband.
She, too, succumbed to drug abuse in her final years, which hastened her death.
Yet throughout, the music continued. Cash was one of the best-loved country singers of all time and his wife was a star in her own right when they met.
Born in a remote country valley in Virginia, June Carter became a child radio performer, singing alongside her sisters and her mother Maybelle, who was known as the Queen of Country Music.
At the age of 14, she claimed she saw tongues of fire on the day of Pentecost and believed the Holy Spirit entered her body.
June's faith was one of the most important elements in her life and Cash, with his gospel singing background and his habit of dressing in black, resembled a country preacher. It was inevitable she would be attracted to The Man In Black.
They first performed together in 1956 - she was already married to Grand Ole Opry star Carl Smith and had a young daughter - and from the start June was in awe of bad boy Cash, even though he was so drunk the day after their first concert that he refused to carry on the tour.
When her marriage fell apart, she first went to New York to study acting. But she was soon drawn back to Nashville.
Before long she was making frequent stage appearances with Johnny Cash, who was now so famous he had his own television show. And in 1961 she made her own first appearance on the show.
Yet June was wary of getting personally involved.
Not only was she married again - this time to a stock car driver, with whom she had had a second daughter - but so was Johnny, albeit unhappily.
In 1954 Cash had tied the knot with his Catholic childhood sweetheart Vivian Liberto, who lived in California with their four daughters. They led almost separate lives and Cash rarely visited as he and his band performed on the road.
They were the original rock rebels, setting the record for wanton destruction on tours. They liked to trash hotel rooms with a chainsaw which Johnny carried in his car. He was also taking drugs.
Life on tour was so disorientating that he travelled with a bag full of magic potions to wake him up or send him to sleep.
And Cash consumed vast quantities. He was once arrested crossing the border into Mexico with 668 amphetamine tablets and 475 tranquillisers.
He finally became such a hopeless junkie that one evening on stage he smashed 60 footlights with his microphone, showering glass over his audience.
But if audiences were willing to forgive him, June wasn't. Whenever she caught Cash popping pills she would wait for him to fall asleep and then flush his stash down the toilet. Johnny would promise again and again to kick his habit but he always went back on the stuff.
Even when he bought an apartment in Nashville in order to be closer to her, he shared it with legendary hellraiser, bassist Waylon Jennings, and the two egged each other on in their drug-taking.
Cash divorced his wife in 1966 and finally bought the lakeside house he wanted to share with June. But still she wouldn't marry him unless he got free of drugs. The breakthrough came when she told him she would not work with him again unless he kicked his habit.
Cash used to tell a story of how, after that ultimatum, he went into a vast warren of caves intending to lie down and die.
With him he took his guitar, but when he put it down in the dark he couldn't find it again. Lost in the caves, he finally got down on his knees and prayed to God to show him the way out. And when his prayers were answered, he found the strength to throw off the drugs. He then asked June to marry him in 1968 on stage.
Life for June from now on would be very different. She moved both her daughters into Cash's house and her stepdaughters and parents were always welcome.
When Cash lived there alone, it had been sparsely furnished. June, who had a mania for collecting furniture, filled it with period pieces and with staff, who attended the couple's every whim.
She loved being Johnny's wife, even though their life held many surprises. Once he told her that 24 people would be coming for lunch. Instead 76 showed up.
And to begin with, Cash made it easy for her. Having adopted her Christian values, there was a brake on his wild behaviour, though as his son points out, his father was not above going to church and coming home to take drugs.
In public Cash wasted no opportunity to preach the gospel. He and June made a movie, Gospel Road, and their friends included TV evangelist Billy Graham.
The Cashes were at the high point of their fame when in the 1970 their son was born.
But they did not let the addition to the family slow them down. Little John travelled all over the world with his parents, who took him on stage even before he could walk.
By now the celebrity couple had homes all over the U.S.
They also bought a legendary old estate, Cinnamon Hill in Jamaica, built by an ancestor of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Cash romantically copied out the Browning poem 'How do I love thee' and gave it to his wife.
But by the time John was seven his magical youth was at an end. Cash was heavily back on drugs and his eye was wandering.
He was fighting with June and she considered leaving him for good, running away to London to stay with her daughter, who was married to British rocker Nick Lowe.
Then just as it seemed they were set to divorce, they decided instead to reaffirm their love by renewing their marriage vows.
From now on the couple would never be apart, although Cash's drug-taking continued. At home the great man would sit for hours in a trance, barely functioning.
John Carter often shared his father's room when they travelled and he would listen to Cash's laboured breathing as he slept off an overdose. Once Cash stopped breathing for so long that John, aged 12, had to help his mother haul him into a cold bath to bring him round.
June bore the brunt of it all. No matter how much she tore the home apart trying to find where Cash had put his pills, there would always be another hiding place she could not find. By now her daughters were also consuming quantities of hard drugs.
In 1983 Cash had become so ill he required surgery for digestive problems in Nashville's Baptist hospital.
Then he overdosed on the pills he had smuggled into the hospital.
Finally, he agreed to treatment - and went into the Betty Ford clinic in California along with the whole family.
But this was not the end of the Cash family's troubles. By the age of 14, John Carter had started drinking himself into oblivion and was soon popping pills just like his father.
And Cash's own resolve did not last long. Within two years he was back on drugs and a victim of diabetes and a chronic nerve complaint.
Still, June was a tower of strength - until one day in 1993 she, too, succumbed to a drug habit. Just before she was due to go on stage in Missouri, John Carter found her collapsed in her dressing room.
The years of holding everything together had become too much.
From now on, she and Johnny often took drugs together.
Cash would spend hours just sitting silently with his wife. And though they were no longer the beautiful couple, their records were still popular.
For the son who was in thrall to both of them, there were still blissful moments.
One of his most treasured memories was the sight of his parents singing the Far Side Banks Of Jordan together, looking deep into each other's eyes, their heads almost touching.
Though Cash was now confined to a wheelchair, each morning he hauled himself over to his studio to record some of the best music of his career.
June still sang in public, often with her daughters and granddaughters, but time was taking its toll on her music-making, as arthritis and heart disease made it impossible for her to play the instruments she loved.
By now the Cashes were both so ill they kept their own suite on the top floor of the Nashville Baptist hospital.
It was there that June Carter Cash died unexpectedly at the age of 73 in 2003 after an operation for a heart valve replacement.
Two thousand people turned up to the funeral lovingly arranged by Cash, who afterwards steeped himself in work to obliterate the pain of his wife's death.
But it became obvious he could not go on for long without June. Tough man Cash was inconsolable. He refused to sleep in their bed and gave away all the furniture she had bought.
Fulfilling a pact with June, he made a couple of surprise performances at her home town in Virginia.
But it was almost too painful to watch as he read a tribute to his wife before singing their hit Ring Of Fire. Cash barely made it to the end of the song.
And, less than four months after June's death, his body finally gave up in the same hospital suite where she had died.
The love affair was over.
• Adapted from Anchored In Love by John Carter Cash, published by Thomas Nelson on September 10 and distributed by New Holland Publishers at £8.99. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0845 606 4213.
Was this one of the most romantic proposals of all time?
Johnny Cash, with his rough-hewn outlaw image, was performing one of his legendary ballads before 7,000 people on stage in Ontario, Canada, when suddenly he stopped in his tracks and asked his petite co-star June Carter to marry him.
It was the union of two great musical legends - a union documented in the 2005 film Walk The Line, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon - and the start of a marriage that would last 35 years.
Cash, who with his deep brown voice invented rockabilly, and June, who wrote one of his greatest hits, Ring Of Fire, had performed together for many years on America's country music circuit.
Yet all the time they had battled against their growing love because both were married to other people and held deep religious convictions.
The story of how Cash finally left his first wife and four daughters in the Sixties just as June obtained her second divorce is part of music history.
June and Johnny moved in together to his idyllic lakeside house near Nashville, Tennessee, and were so happy there they christened the place Camelot.
Their idyll was complete when, in 1970, their only son was born. They called him John Carter Cash and doted on him - as he later did on them, growing up faithful to his musical heritage by becoming an award-winning record producer.
Now, just four years after his parents died within four months of each other, John Carter has written a poignant new book which offers a unique insight into the reality of living with these musical legends.
As John Carter reveals, there was a tragic downside to their enduring love story - the drugs, the infidelities and the slanging matches - a side which the public never saw.
While June threw her energies into retail therapy and prayers, her husband popped enough pills to fell anyone with a lesser frame, sometimes sleeping so deeply the family feared he was dead.
Fabulous wealth, fine homes, celebrity friends, nothing could deter the brooding Cash from his self-destructive urges.
For little John Carter, it was a see-saw existence.
On the one hand, his parents' money brought him a fairytale life; on the other, he was witness to his father's distressing binges.
Cash's musician friends claimed that, when they all took drugs together, Johnny was the life and soul of the party.
But John Carter says that at home Cash would either stare into space or sink into depression, yelling abuse.
Throughout it all June Carter remained astonishingly supportive. Yet as her son now reveals, even she was unable to escape the family curse in the end.
One by one, she watched her daughters by her first two marriages and then her beloved son with Johnny all descend into addiction alongside her husband.
She, too, succumbed to drug abuse in her final years, which hastened her death.
Yet throughout, the music continued. Cash was one of the best-loved country singers of all time and his wife was a star in her own right when they met.
Born in a remote country valley in Virginia, June Carter became a child radio performer, singing alongside her sisters and her mother Maybelle, who was known as the Queen of Country Music.
At the age of 14, she claimed she saw tongues of fire on the day of Pentecost and believed the Holy Spirit entered her body.
June's faith was one of the most important elements in her life and Cash, with his gospel singing background and his habit of dressing in black, resembled a country preacher. It was inevitable she would be attracted to The Man In Black.
They first performed together in 1956 - she was already married to Grand Ole Opry star Carl Smith and had a young daughter - and from the start June was in awe of bad boy Cash, even though he was so drunk the day after their first concert that he refused to carry on the tour.
When her marriage fell apart, she first went to New York to study acting. But she was soon drawn back to Nashville.
Before long she was making frequent stage appearances with Johnny Cash, who was now so famous he had his own television show. And in 1961 she made her own first appearance on the show.
Yet June was wary of getting personally involved.
Not only was she married again - this time to a stock car driver, with whom she had had a second daughter - but so was Johnny, albeit unhappily.
In 1954 Cash had tied the knot with his Catholic childhood sweetheart Vivian Liberto, who lived in California with their four daughters. They led almost separate lives and Cash rarely visited as he and his band performed on the road.
They were the original rock rebels, setting the record for wanton destruction on tours. They liked to trash hotel rooms with a chainsaw which Johnny carried in his car. He was also taking drugs.
Life on tour was so disorientating that he travelled with a bag full of magic potions to wake him up or send him to sleep.
And Cash consumed vast quantities. He was once arrested crossing the border into Mexico with 668 amphetamine tablets and 475 tranquillisers.
He finally became such a hopeless junkie that one evening on stage he smashed 60 footlights with his microphone, showering glass over his audience.
But if audiences were willing to forgive him, June wasn't. Whenever she caught Cash popping pills she would wait for him to fall asleep and then flush his stash down the toilet. Johnny would promise again and again to kick his habit but he always went back on the stuff.
Even when he bought an apartment in Nashville in order to be closer to her, he shared it with legendary hellraiser, bassist Waylon Jennings, and the two egged each other on in their drug-taking.
Cash divorced his wife in 1966 and finally bought the lakeside house he wanted to share with June. But still she wouldn't marry him unless he got free of drugs. The breakthrough came when she told him she would not work with him again unless he kicked his habit.
Cash used to tell a story of how, after that ultimatum, he went into a vast warren of caves intending to lie down and die.
With him he took his guitar, but when he put it down in the dark he couldn't find it again. Lost in the caves, he finally got down on his knees and prayed to God to show him the way out. And when his prayers were answered, he found the strength to throw off the drugs. He then asked June to marry him in 1968 on stage.
Life for June from now on would be very different. She moved both her daughters into Cash's house and her stepdaughters and parents were always welcome.
When Cash lived there alone, it had been sparsely furnished. June, who had a mania for collecting furniture, filled it with period pieces and with staff, who attended the couple's every whim.
She loved being Johnny's wife, even though their life held many surprises. Once he told her that 24 people would be coming for lunch. Instead 76 showed up.
And to begin with, Cash made it easy for her. Having adopted her Christian values, there was a brake on his wild behaviour, though as his son points out, his father was not above going to church and coming home to take drugs.
In public Cash wasted no opportunity to preach the gospel. He and June made a movie, Gospel Road, and their friends included TV evangelist Billy Graham.
The Cashes were at the high point of their fame when in the 1970 their son was born.
But they did not let the addition to the family slow them down. Little John travelled all over the world with his parents, who took him on stage even before he could walk.
By now the celebrity couple had homes all over the U.S.
They also bought a legendary old estate, Cinnamon Hill in Jamaica, built by an ancestor of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Cash romantically copied out the Browning poem 'How do I love thee' and gave it to his wife.
But by the time John was seven his magical youth was at an end. Cash was heavily back on drugs and his eye was wandering.
He was fighting with June and she considered leaving him for good, running away to London to stay with her daughter, who was married to British rocker Nick Lowe.
Then just as it seemed they were set to divorce, they decided instead to reaffirm their love by renewing their marriage vows.
From now on the couple would never be apart, although Cash's drug-taking continued. At home the great man would sit for hours in a trance, barely functioning.
John Carter often shared his father's room when they travelled and he would listen to Cash's laboured breathing as he slept off an overdose. Once Cash stopped breathing for so long that John, aged 12, had to help his mother haul him into a cold bath to bring him round.
June bore the brunt of it all. No matter how much she tore the home apart trying to find where Cash had put his pills, there would always be another hiding place she could not find. By now her daughters were also consuming quantities of hard drugs.
In 1983 Cash had become so ill he required surgery for digestive problems in Nashville's Baptist hospital.
Then he overdosed on the pills he had smuggled into the hospital.
Finally, he agreed to treatment - and went into the Betty Ford clinic in California along with the whole family.
But this was not the end of the Cash family's troubles. By the age of 14, John Carter had started drinking himself into oblivion and was soon popping pills just like his father.
And Cash's own resolve did not last long. Within two years he was back on drugs and a victim of diabetes and a chronic nerve complaint.
Still, June was a tower of strength - until one day in 1993 she, too, succumbed to a drug habit. Just before she was due to go on stage in Missouri, John Carter found her collapsed in her dressing room.
The years of holding everything together had become too much.
From now on, she and Johnny often took drugs together.
Cash would spend hours just sitting silently with his wife. And though they were no longer the beautiful couple, their records were still popular.
For the son who was in thrall to both of them, there were still blissful moments.
One of his most treasured memories was the sight of his parents singing the Far Side Banks Of Jordan together, looking deep into each other's eyes, their heads almost touching.
Though Cash was now confined to a wheelchair, each morning he hauled himself over to his studio to record some of the best music of his career.
June still sang in public, often with her daughters and granddaughters, but time was taking its toll on her music-making, as arthritis and heart disease made it impossible for her to play the instruments she loved.
By now the Cashes were both so ill they kept their own suite on the top floor of the Nashville Baptist hospital.
It was there that June Carter Cash died unexpectedly at the age of 73 in 2003 after an operation for a heart valve replacement.
Two thousand people turned up to the funeral lovingly arranged by Cash, who afterwards steeped himself in work to obliterate the pain of his wife's death.
But it became obvious he could not go on for long without June. Tough man Cash was inconsolable. He refused to sleep in their bed and gave away all the furniture she had bought.
Fulfilling a pact with June, he made a couple of surprise performances at her home town in Virginia.
But it was almost too painful to watch as he read a tribute to his wife before singing their hit Ring Of Fire. Cash barely made it to the end of the song.
And, less than four months after June's death, his body finally gave up in the same hospital suite where she had died.
The love affair was over.
• Adapted from Anchored In Love by John Carter Cash, published by Thomas Nelson on September 10 and distributed by New Holland Publishers at £8.99. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0845 606 4213.
