PATSY YOUR ENTHUSIASM (5)
By:
July 16, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Country Music of the Fifties (1954–1963)! Series edited by Josh Glenn. Qobuz playlist here.
JOHNNY CASH | RING OF FIRE | 1963
The moment I heard this song, I knew it was about sex. C’mon: it had to be. How could it not? Granted, I first heard it when I was 19 or 20 — an age when young people think many things are about sex that aren’t necessarily about sex.
Still, to this day, I can’t think of a more vivid, explicit, dazzlingly porny euphemism in all of English-language popular music for… well, choose your orifice.
Johnny Cash begins, in that stentorian baritone:
Love is a burning thing
And it makes a fiery ring
Bound by wild desire
I fell into a ring of fire
The chortling mariachi horns add tequila-shot vibes and perhaps stereotypical Tex-Mex subtext (see also: Marty Robbins’ “El Paso”). The swaggering beat, via Cash’s wingmen the Tennessee Two — guitarist Luther Perkins and upright bassist Marshall Grant — are an almost comical foil to Cash’s preacherly vocal gravitas. And when he hits that bit on the chorus, “I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher/ and it burns, burns burns…” with women background singers adding “burns, burns, oo-oo”… Oh. My. Goodness. It’s probably triggered a hundred million giggling fits, and it still strikes me as hilarious, to be honest.
And yet. The Biblical metaphor it aims for was, and remains, quite potent — particularly, I’ll assume, for most of us raised as Christians, and many others, too. And perhaps therein lies the song’s greatness, in this balancing act between fiery hot sex and fiery hot guilt, artful enough to allow the song to not only be issued on a major label in 1963, but be played on country radio, top those charts for weeks, and become part of the music’s compositional bedrock. Somehow, I’ve just discovered, it seems to have taken decades for it to be certified gold by the RIAA — whatever the hell that means nowadays in real cultural terms — but its artistic standing is irrefutable. (At one point, it was named the best country song in history by Rolling Stone, whatever that means nowadays in real cultural terms.)
The backstory of “Ring of Fire”’s authorship, of course, makes it resonate even more deeply. How it was supposedly written, with help from songwriter Merle Kilgore, by country singer June Carter of the Carter Family — soon to be June Carter Cash — about Johnny Cash, during her early infatuation with the already-married entertainer. Or conversely, in the version told by Cash’s first wife Vivian, that “Johnny wrote that song, while pill-ed up and drunk, about a certain private female body part,” and gifted the publishing to Carter, ostensibly to help her with her finances, in effect a brilliantly musical dick pic.
To be honest, I don’t need to know the truth, in fact don’t want to know the truth. It just makes this song more of everything that it’s artistically about. And please, I definitely don’t need to know about Merle Kilgore’s conspiring to license the song for a Preparation H television ad. But for a deeply serious song that can also trigger giggle-fits, it somehow seems perfectly fitting.
PATSY YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn. Nadine Hubbs on Marty Robbins’ EL PASO | Elizabeth Nelson on Dave Dudley’s SIX DAYS ON THE ROAD | Lynn Peril on Jean Chapel’s WELCOME TO THE CLUB | David Cantwell on Porter Wagoner’s MY BONFIRE | Will Hermes on Johnny Cash’s RING OF FIRE | Mimi Lipson on Loretta Lynn’s I’M A HONKY TONK GIRL | Charles Hughes on Roger Miller’s YOU DON’T WANT MY LOVE | Eric Weisbard on Lefty Frizzell’s THE LONG BLACK VEIL | Steacy Easton on Jean Shepard’s A SATISIFIED MIND | Josh Glenn on Johnny Cash’s THE REBEL — JOHNNY YUMA | Carlo Rotella on Buck Owens’ CLOSE UP THE HONKY TONKS | Annie Nocenti on Patsy Cline’s THREE CIGARETTES IN AN ASHTRAY | Douglas Wolk on Lucky Starr’s I’VE BEEN EVERYWHERE | Will Groff on Ray Price’s NIGHT LIFE | Jonny Auping on Willie Nelson’s CRAZY | Brian Berger on Ernest Tubb’s THE YELLOW ROSE OF TEXAS | Jason Grote on Bill Browning and His Echo Valley Boys’ DARK HOLLOW | Peter Doyle on Willie Nelson’s FUNNY HOW TIME SLIPS AWAY | Sam Glenn on Johnny Cash’s BIG RIVER | Annie Zaleski on Patsy Cline’s WALKIN’ AFTER MIDNIGHT | Adam McGovern on Elvis Presley’s BLACK STAR / FLAMING STAR | Chris Spurgeon on Ricky Nelson’s BELIEVE WHAT YOU SAY | Stephen Thomas Erlewine on George Jones’ WHITE LIGHTNING | Devin McKinney on George Hamilton IV’s ABILENE | Mark Richardson on Elvis Presley’s BLUE MOON.
ALSO SEE: DOLLY YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25 of our favorite Country records from 1964–1973) | & more Country at HILOBROW, including short appreciations of Gene Pitney, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Buck Owens, George Jones, June Carter Cash, Charley Pride, and many others.
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