photos from the LIFE archive

"June Carter spent her early years as a self-described tomboy. She'd milk cows or gather kindling wood at her family's Maces Springs, Va. home, or take delight in riding on a motorcycle with father Ezra Carter. Once, Ezra ran the motorbike into a ditch, shooting his daughter into a cornfield. 'I survived with only scratches and an eager yearning to do anything my father did, to follow him and do anything his boy would have done. Only I wasn't a boy. I was a girl. But I really tried hard not to be. I wanted to be Daddy's boy.'"—June Carter Cash, in an excerpt from Along My Klediments.