Johnny Cash wrote it early one winter morning in 1970, at home with June, about a month before their son was born. Nearly five decades later, that son, John Carter Cash, was the one hearing about it for the first time. The person who showed it to him was Ruston Kelly, a Nashville songwriter who had first read it as a 16-year-old and had already written music for it. The song became “To June This Morning,” recorded by Kelly and Kacey Musgraves for the 2018 album Johnny Cash: Forever Words.
A Love Poem in a Fan’s Memorabilia Book
Kelly didn’t find the poem in an archive. He found it printed in a Johnny Cash fan memorabilia book when he was a teenager. At the bottom was the time and date Johnny had written it: 7 a.m., February 4th, 1970.
The poem describes about as ordinary a moment as a married couple can share. According to the official account from the Cash estate, Johnny wrote it as June came down the kitchen stairs that morning, eight months pregnant. The poem is about coffee, footsteps on the stairs and a simple good morning. There is no drama in it at all.
In a behind-the-scenes video for the song, Kelly said he put music to it at 16 because he found it “so sweet and honest and true.”
The poem was not well known. When John Carter Cash published Forever Words: The Unknown Poems in 2016, a collection of 41 of his father’s unpublished poems, “To June This Morning” was not among them.
The Morning at John Carter’s Coffee Table
About twelve years after Kelly first wrote that melody, John Carter Cash called him out to his place. John Carter was gathering artists to set his father’s unpublished writings to music, and he had a reason for wanting Kelly and his then-fiancée, Kacey Musgraves.
Kelly later told MusicRadar that they sat at John Carter’s coffee table, drinking coffee, when John Carter said it plainly: the two of them reminded him of his mom and dad, and that was what the project was missing. He wanted them to sing on it.
Kelly told him he already had a song. John Carter had never seen the poem. Kelly told Rolling Stone what happened when he read it:
“When he saw it, he started tearing up and said, ‘On that date, my mother would have been eight months pregnant with me.'”
John Carter Cash was born on March 3, 1970. He later described the words as written in February of 1970, “one month before my birth.” Speaking about Kelly and Musgraves, he told Rolling Stone, “Here’s a young couple running parallel lives with where my mother and father were.”
Why the Comparison Hit Home
For Ruston Kelly, the parallel was personal. He has spoken openly about his past struggle with pills, and the two met in 2016 after a songwriter show in Nashville. Talking about the song, he said he didn’t want it to be a romanticized version of his own story. But he also said that when he met his wife, she gave him “a reason to stay clean.”
Musgraves heard the poem as a glimpse of calm inside a life that was often chaotic, one thankful morning written down on paper.
Two Voices, a Guitar and a Banjo
Kelly and Musgraves sang the song in public before the album was even announced. On July 9, 2017, at an intimate concert at Blackberry Farm in East Tennessee, they performed it as a duet with Kelly on acoustic guitar. Musgraves posted the clip and explained that it was an actual poem Johnny Cash wrote in 1970 that they had put to music.
They married that October. By the time Johnny Cash: Forever Words came out on April 6, 2018, they were newlyweds. The recording stayed as simple as the poem: Musgraves described it as a live take with only acoustic guitar, banjo and their two voices.
“To June This Morning” sits second on the album, right after “Forever/I Still Miss Someone,” where Kris Kristofferson recites one of the last poems Johnny Cash wrote while Willie Nelson plays. John Carter Cash said both tracks carry the same thing: hope.
The black-and-white music video was filmed at what remained of Johnny and June’s home on Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville, Tennessee, the house that burned in 2007. “It just felt like sacred ground,” Musgraves told Stereogum.
What Came After
The parallel John Carter Cash saw did not last the way Johnny and June’s marriage did. Kacey Musgraves and Ruston Kelly announced their divorce in July 2020, and both have since spoken kindly of each other in public.
The friendship that began over coffee did last. When the marriage ended, John Carter Cash invited Kelly to stay at the bungalow in the mountains of Virginia that had belonged to his grandmother, Mother Maybelle Carter.