June Carter Cash: The Woman, Her Music and Me at Summerhall – Edinburgh Fringe review

It’s a tale as old as time – a prolific, genre-defining (and genre-defying) female artist soars into the cultural mainstream, only for her male partner or co-performer to bask in the limelight as she’s relegated to the side-stage. 

So is the case with June Carter Cash – a musical legend of her own making, but still, to this day, not even an inductee in the Country Music Hall of Fame. The multiple Grammy Award-winning writer of “Ring of Fire”, ignored in favour of the husband she shared her name with.

Writer and performer Charlene Boyd shakes things up in this new Fringe production, created alongside the National Theatre of Scotland and Grid Iron Theatre Company. Not simply telling Carter Cash’s story and performing some iconic tracks, she also explains how she, Boyd, finds her own sense of release in exploring the artistic life of this legend – flying across to the US for a fact-finding extravaganza, leaving her children behind just as the world opens up after the waves of the pandemic ebbed.

Spread across the cavernous Dissection Room, one of the largest spaces at Summerhall, audiences are seated casually in a big melange, while a raised dias houses a small band.

By emphasising the reverence for the music legend and enthusing so unequivocally about her life and family, Boyd flattens the experience somewhat – at times it feels like the scales tip too far into discovery and away from self-discovery. It’s Boyd’s own lived experience that is more interesting to the show at hand, but feels frantically inserted at occasional moments. There needs to be a bit more “me” on offer.

Aside from that, the show feels like it could benefit from more anger – it is almost insulting that Carter Cash is so marginalised in the world of country music (a genre with interesting connections to Scottish folk tales, as it turns out). That said, director Cora Bissett lets it all flow nicely: a pleasant afternoon offering at the Fringe, by all accounts.