Last week, a Johnny Cash tribute album called Forever Words was released, and it features an all-star lineup putting music to poems and letters written by Cash. The record includes contributions from Chris Cornell, Elvis Costello, and a bunch of others, including Kacey Musgraves and her husband, fellow singer Ruston Kelly. The two teamed up for “To June This Morning,” a song based on a letter Cash wrote to his wife June Carter Cash in 1970, and the couple has turned a lovely poem into a super cute love song (which they’ve been performing as far back as last summer).
Kelly says in a behind the scenes video, “I actually put music to this poem 12 years ago when I was 16, and I thought it was so sweet and honest and true. I thought it would be a good idea if Kacey and I put a melody to that old poem.” Musgraves adds, “It’s just a sweet peek into what probably was, at times, a really chaotic lifestyle and it was a moment in time that was just really thankful.”
The video is preceded by a clip of the Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson collaboration “Forever/I Still Miss Someone,” which features Nelson on guitar and Kristofferson on vocals. John Carter Cash, Cash’s son who organized the album, says that both pieces, which are the first two songs on the album, are about hope:
“To me, the essences of the tracks ‘Forever/I Still Miss Someone’ and ‘To June This Morning’ are both of hope. My father wrote the poem ‘Forever’ weeks before his passing. ‘To June This Morning’ has the same hope; the words were written in February of 1970, one month before my birth. Together they represent Dad’s enduring hopes, the beauty of faith and the belief in all the good to come… even in the face of his own mortality.”
Watch the video for the song above, and check out the behind-the-scenes clip below.
Forever Words is out now via Legacy Recordings. Get it here.
