“Jackson” by Johnny Cash with June Carter

Johnny Cash and June Carter took "Jackson" to the country charts in 1967, singing it together on their album Carryin' On With Johnny Cash & June Carter, with Don Law and Frank Jones producing. The song was already four years old by then: Billy Edd Wheeler and Jerry Leiber wrote it in 1963, and the credits also carry the name of actress Gaby Rodgers, Leiber's wife at the time, whose name he borrowed as a pen name.

Wheeler said the idea hit him while he was reading the script of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a play he was too broke to see on Broadway, and that Leiber told him to throw out his opening verses and start from the end, climax first. In Cash and Carter's hands it climbed to No. 2 on Billboard's country singles chart.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.