<Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> "Ring of Fire" excerpt From the album Ring of Fire: The Best of Johnny Cash . This sample a portion of the chorus . Flourishes from the mariachi are also featured . </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Td_colspan="2"> Problems playing this file? See media help . </Td> </Tr> <P> Although "Ring of Fire" sounds ominous, the term refers to falling in love--which is what June Carter was experiencing with Johnny Cash at the time . Some sources claim that Carter had seen the phrase "Love is like a burning ring of fire," underlined in one of her uncle A.P. Carter's Elizabethan books of poetry . She worked with Kilgore on writing a song inspired by this phrase as she had seen her uncle do in the past . She had written: "There is no way to be in that kind of hell, no way to extinguish a flame that burns, burns, burns". </P> <P> Cash's first wife, Vivian Liberto, offers a different conception of "Ring of Fire" in her book I Walked the Line . She contends that June Carter Cash was not a co-writer of the song: "To this day, it confounds me to hear the elaborate details June told of writing that song for Johnny . She didn't write that song any more than I did . The truth is, Johnny wrote that song, while pilled up and drunk, about a certain private female body part . All those years of her claiming she wrote it herself, and she probably never knew what the song was really about ." Liberto claims that Cash decided to give Carter co-writer status because "She needs the money". </P>

What is the burning ring of fire song about