All in the Family

by Jasmine Odessa Rizer

(special thanks to Mary Richardson)

Once upon a time, before there were the Beatles, there was a man named Ralph Peer who went around recording folk music in the country. Ralph Peer turned up a lot of music, but he is best remembered for stumbling across Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.

You may not have heard of the Carter Family, or you may have heard their name, but know nothing about them. Chances are, though, that you've heard of at least one member of their long and impressive lineage. It includes four generations of girl singers, and, by marriage, it also includes Johnny Cash. There's a lot of music to discuss there, so I'm going to begin at the beginning. The original Carter Family, the one that I am usually thinking of when I say, "the Carter Family," consisted of A.P. Carter, his wife Sara, and Sara’s cousin Maybelle, who was also married to a Carter. A.P. collected most of the songs that the group performed, and harmonized on most of their recordings in a booming, quavering voice, occasionally taking the lead. Sara sang lead on most of the recordings in a voice that immediately freezes the listener with its sincerity and unaffectedness--not to mention its thick country accent. If, like me, you had your first taste of country music in the shiny country pop that generally gets played on the radio, the Carter Family will initially sound like people from another planet. Still, their songs are so heart-wrenching in their subject matter--and Sara’s delivery is so deceptively cheerful--that it is hard to stop listening. Maybelle sang as well, and invented the style of guitar playing known as the "Carter scratch," which was emulated by Woody Guthrie, among others.

In between recording songs about love and heartbreak, Maybelle found time to give birth to three daughters, Helen, June, and Anita, who performed on the radio with her in later years.

Some of you have probably heard of June. She married Johnny Cash.

There’s probably nothing I can say about Johnny Cash that hasn’t already been said. Just go out and buy one of his records if you don’t have any. If you’ve had enough patriotism for the time being, what with the E-L-E-C-T-I-O-N being only a few months over, you can always skip albums like Ragged Old Flag and head straight for one of his American Recordings--the ones that made all the execs on Music Row think he had lost his mind, until the rest of the world listened to them and said, Hot dang, this man is still a genius. My personal favorite is American Recordings IV: The Man Comes Around, though I have never been able to sit through the apocalyptic title track. I prefer to listen to his cover of Nine Inch Nails’ "Hurt," the mischevious-yet-heartbreaking Cash-penned "Tear-Stained Letter," and his jaw-dropping reading of the cowboy ballad "Streets of Laredo."

Cash’s early material should also be investigated by anybody who listens to that mighty rumble on the American Recordings and wants to hear more. You’ve probably all heard of these songs – "Ring of Fire," "I Walk the Line," "Four Feet High and Rising." You’ve heard of them for a reason. They kick the butts of most other songs.

"Ring of Fire," by the way, was written by the lady I mentioned earlier, June Carter. She sang with her mother and sisters for years, made an album of duets with Cash shortly before she married him, and toured extensively as part of her husband’s band after their marriage. What made a lot of folks sit up and take notice, though, were two solo albums she made years later, when she was a grandmother. These albums cover everything from devotion to God to the burning agony of forbidden love.

According to Johnny’s daughter Rosanne, when Carter and Cash married--bringing several daughters apiece to their union--there was no question of step-mothers and step-fathers. Their collective offspring belonged to both of them.

Two of those offspring, Carlene Carter and Rosanne Cash, went on to make impressive musical careers of their own. Carlene co-authored the haunting "Easy From Now On," and, more recently, she contributed a peculiar but delightful slice of Irish-tinged country to The Chieftains’ Further Down the Old Plank Road. Rosanne has written and sung any number of powerful songs, from "Seven Year Ache," the tale of a man whose loneliness cannot be killed by any number of adoring women, to "Western Wall," whose heroine stuffs her prayers in the cracks of what I assume must be the Wailing Wall because she’s "got nothing to lose."

Since her record is on an indie label and hard to come by, and since I couldn’t get the sound clips that I found to play on my computer, I will have to plead ignorance about the music of Tiffany-Anastasia Lowe. The daughter of Carlene Carter (who was sixteen when she gave birth to Tiffany-Anastasia) and Nick Lowe (who later married Carlene Carter, and adopted the girl), this attractive lady has an EP out entitled Queen of Everything, and has been known to cover the Boomtown Rats’ "I Don’t Like Mondays" at her live engagements. Appropriate, considering how well "I Don’t Like Mondays" falls in with her family’s legacy of songs about murder, mayhem, and emotions powerful enough to put a body six feet under the weeping willow tree. If I ever get my hands on a copy of The Queen of Everything, maybe I’ll have to squeeze a review of it somewhere into a future edition of "Treasure Box." In the meantime, I think I’ve recommended enough listening material to keep you busy for a while.