In the early 1970s, when Loretta Lynn shared the road with Johnny Cash, there was a small job that came with the tour. While June Carter Cash sang, somebody had to mind her little boy. More than once, that somebody was Loretta Lynn. Decades later, the same boy, John Carter Cash, sat behind the console and produced the last four studio albums Loretta Lynn ever made.
Backstage with the Cash family
John Carter Cash was born on March 3, 1970, the only child Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash had together. His parents were at the height of their fame, and he grew up on tour buses and in the wings of theaters. Sometimes Johnny would finish “A Boy Named Sue,” tell the crowd he had grown up and had a son of his own, and bring the boy out to sing with the family.
The rest of the time, he needed looking after. In his 2007 memoir about his mother, Anchored in Love, John Carter Cash recalled that Loretta Lynn used to babysit him backstage when she performed on his father’s shows. Her own memory of it was simple:
“June would be up there singin’ while I watched John Carter.”
Years later, Loretta Lynn told TIME that June would trust her son with just about anyone in the building, and would hand him over with a quick “Here, hold Johnny. Take care of Johnny.” Loretta Lynn remembered him as a good kid.
The cabin in Hendersonville
The turnaround began in 2007. Loretta Lynn, then 75, started making regular trips to the Cash Cabin Studio, the recording studio Johnny Cash had built on his property in Hendersonville, Tennessee, in the late 1970s. By then John Carter Cash looked after the place, and he had already produced his mother’s final recordings before her death in 2003.
He produced the sessions alongside Loretta Lynn’s daughter Patsy Lynn Russell. The work went on quietly for years. Only in 2014, when Loretta Lynn signed a multi-album deal with Sony’s Legacy Recordings, did the public learn how much music had piled up in that cabin.
Ninety-three songs, and the ones her mother taught her
The number surprised people. Loretta Lynn told TIME she had cut 93 songs. Reports from the sessions put the total at more than 90, and some later accounts said it went past 100.
Many of them reached back to the very beginning. Loretta Lynn explained that she had spent her career writing new songs and never went back to the ones her mother taught her as a little girl in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. Now, recording on her own terms, she wanted the younger generation to hear what she sang as a child.
So the sessions included old Appalachian ballads like “In the Pines,” “I Never Will Marry” and “Black Jack David,” a song the Carter Family had made famous. That last one carried a quiet connection of its own: the Carter Family was John Carter Cash’s grandmother’s family. There was also a fresh recording of “Whispering Sea,” the first song Loretta Lynn ever wrote.
Full Circle
The first album from the cabin arrived on March 4, 2016. It was called Full Circle, and it was Loretta Lynn’s first studio album in 12 years. She was 83.
Alongside the mountain songs were new versions of her own classics, including “Fist City,” plus a duet with Willie Nelson on “Lay Me Down” and a track with Elvis Costello. It landed the same day PBS premiered the American Masters documentary Loretta Lynn: Still a Mountain Girl.
Full Circle debuted at No. 19 on the Billboard 200, the highest position any Loretta Lynn album ever reached on that all-genre chart, and it went top five on Billboard’s country albums chart. It also earned a Grammy nomination for Best Country Album.
What the cabin gave us
Three more albums came from those sessions, all produced by John Carter Cash and Patsy Lynn Russell: the Christmas record White Christmas Blue later in 2016, Wouldn’t It Be Great in 2018, and Still Woman Enough in 2021. That last one turned out to be Loretta Lynn’s final solo studio album.
Loretta Lynn died on October 4, 2022, at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. She was 90. Reports after her death said dozens of songs from the Cash Cabin sessions had never been released.
When Rolling Stone asked her about working with the boy she once minded backstage, she remembered the Cash family handing him to her during shows, then summed up the whole story in a single line:
“So now he’s recording me.”
Do you remember the first time you heard Loretta Lynn sing? Was it on the radio, on a record at home, or in person?