NEW YORK - Advertising writers in Florida were planning to pitch hemorrhoid-relief products with a commercial featuring Johnny Cash's classic song Ring of Fire, but his family says there's no way they'll let it happen.
"We would never allow the song to be demeaned like that," Cash's daughter, singer Rosanne Cash, told the Tennessean in Sunday's editions.
Ring of Fire was written by Cash's wife, June Carter Cash, and Merle Kilgore, who is now Hank Williams Jr.'s manager. Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash died last year.
TV producer Sula Miller of Big Grin Productions in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said she came up with the idea when she was struggling with that uncomfortable medical condition and heard the song on the radio.
At the time, Kilgore said he thought the idea was funny, and that he often joked about hemorrhoids onstage whenever he'd introduce Ring of Fire, which includes the words "burns, burns, burns."
But Cash's family isn't laughing.
"He (Merle) started talking about this moronic tie-in without talking to any of us," Rosanne Cash told the newspaper. "The song is about the transformative power of love and that's what it has always meant to me and that's what it will always mean to the Cash children."
Kilgore said it wasn't his intention to upset the family.
*SW2K*
