+ another review by Fred Kovey

The British composer laureate Ralph Vaughan Williams traveled the byways of England to collect folk songs which he transformed into some of the most beautiful classical music of the 20th century. In those simple ballads and chanteys Vaughan Williams found the heart and soul of his country, and consequently laid hold of the national spirit that distinguished his work. Philosophically, he believed the true artist must get in touch with his own culture and ethnicity in order to produce works of genuine value.

It is doubtful that Vaughan Williams ever heard of A.P. Carter or the Carter Family, but in them the great composer shared a vital kindred spirit. The Carter Family is hailed as "the first family of country music," but even this title falls short of describing their influence. The Carter Family assimilated traditional idioms and established models of style and performance that continue an incalculable inspiration for folk, bluegrass, and southern gospel music some seven decades later.

Alvin Pleasant ("A.P.") Carter was an eccentric odd-jobber from the rugged hill country near Clinch Mountain in southwestern Virginia. He was raised in a strict Christian home, and his early fiddle playing was banned because the violin was viewed as the Devil's instrument. He turned to gospel quartet singing, the effect of which would unexpectedly result in a colossal transformation of popular country music. When A.P. met Sara Dougherty (who, according to legend, was sitting on her front porch playing the autoharp and singing "Engine 143") and the two began harmonizing -- vocally, though not so successfully in matrimony -- a trailhead was marked for a new style of country music. From henceforth tightly harmonizing vocals would be preeminent. The heyday of the string band was over.

However, musicianship itself was not lost, but rather enhanced by the third key ingredient to the Carter Family sound. Sara's cousin Maybelle Addington (who married A.P.'s brother Ezra, and was mother of June Carter Cash) literally revolutionized acoustic guitar. She developed what came to be known as "Carter picking," a style that involved playing the melody on the bass strings with the thumb while strumming the rhythm on the treble strings. The "Carter picking" technique would eventually become the standard for bluegrass players, but precious few have ever executed as flawlessly and with as intense, though seemingly effortless, syncopation. Only the street-preaching gospel blues artist Blind Willie Johnson had a more thunderous thumb in that day.

Columbia/Legacy has released a new, 20-bit digital remaster of Carter Family classics recorded in sessions held in New York City in 1935 and Chicago in 1940. The track "Cannon Ball Blues" is frankly worth the price of the whole collection. Mother Maybelle's guitar quite literally chugs the part of a well-oiled locomotive, all the more astounding considering that this, like every other song in the Carters' catalog, was recorded in a single take.

By the time these recordings were made Sara Carter had drastically pitched her voice down to a hauntingly grave alto. Her dead-pan delivery gives even the upbeat songs an ominous shadow, fittingly so given that the Carter Family's fame peaked during the Great Depression.

If Maybelle Carter was the Family's innovative equivalent to Jimi Hendrix, A.P. Carter was its Syd Barrett. At once engaging and distant, A.P. would nervously pace about the stage during live performances, occasionally leaning into the microphone to add an eerie, quivering, and unpredictable bass vocal. This idiosyncrasy has become standard for many southern gospel bass singers and can be observed today in such groups as the Primitive Quartet and The Principals.

Apparently A.P. was as peculiar off the stage as on, and reportedly tried to drag an intact saw mill behind his car to the family farm with a disbelieving Sara looking on. Their marriage fell apart in the late '30s, but the trio continued to perform into the '40s. The Carter Family's widespread acclaim came via broadcasts over 100,000 watt XERA on the Mexican border. From there the whole North American continent was educated in hillbilly music.

A.P.'s greatest contribution was not his intermittent vocals or ability to land recording dates; rather, he was the consummate collector of mountain folk music. While nearly all the Carters' repertoire credits A.P. as the writer, most were actually public domain songs he heard in the hills and hollers of southwestern Virginia and east Tennessee. He arduously reworked these into the air-tight Carter style. Thanks to A.P. Carter, America recovered music from the nineteenth century that would certainly have been lost without his exacting preoccupation. Among those timeless pieces are "Wildwood Flower," "Keep on the Sunny Side," "Single Girl, Married Girl," and "Blackie's Gunman." In addition, the Columbia/Legacy edition features the delightful "Sinking in the Lonesome Sea," an old British sea chantey transformed by Scotch-Irish picking and pace.

Not only did the Carter Family sing traditional songs, but they sang them traditionally. Sara delivered her vocals in a thick-as-mud southern Appalachian dialect that nary a Hollywood or Broadway actor has adequately imitated (for example, "air" for "hour," "warsh" for "wash," and "kwar" for "choir"). Their austerity was not a put on: the Carter Family was the genuine article. They never smiled for their scant few publicity shots, they rarely toured, and they seldom promoted themselves. Yet, thousands of enthusiastic listeners across the continent were endeared to the hard but simple lifestyle the Carters represented. Fans wrote to the Family as if they were close kin. Internal strife aside, the Carter Family was the embodiment of the American will to not only survive the Great Depression, but sing its way through it.