Customer Reviews

In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Most Carter Family fans will already own a good portion of the recordings in this massive 12 CD box set, but many rare, essential recordings make this project truly exciting. Plus, this box set contains an invaluable, exquisite book and all the recordings are nicely remastered. The Bear Family label has a phenomenal reputation due to their attention to detail; surely putting this project together has been one their greatest challenges yet.

This box set features all 265 extant Carter Family major label recordings, plus 16 interesting radio transcriptions. This makes for a grand total of 281 sides. Now, 243 of these 281 sides feature unique songs and the remaining 38 are remakes. The 281 recordings are as follows: 133 sides recorded between 1927 and 1934 for Victor, 40 sides recorded in 1935 for ARC (20 of them remakes of Victor sides), 20 sides recorded in 1936 for Decca, 16 sides recorded in 1936 for the Associated Recorded Program Service and issued as radio transcriptions (10 of them remakes of Victor sides and the other 6 remakes of material recorded for Decca the previous day), 40 sides recorded from 1937-1938 for Decca (2 of them remakes of Victor sides), 20 sides recorded in 1940 for ARC/Columbia, and 12 sides recorded in 1941 for Victor.

Of the 281 recordings, 214 have previously been made available on 13 CDs released by Rounder (9 volumes of the series "Their Complete Victor Recordings"), Columbia/Legacy ("Can The Circle Be Unbroken"), MCA ("Country Music Hall Of Fame"), Old Homestead ("1936 Radio Transcripts"), and County/Sony Music Special Products ("Clinch Mountain Treasures"). What are not found on those 13 CDs, and what are mostly only available in this box set, are 23 ARC recordings from 1935 (9 of them remakes) and 44 Decca recordings from 1936-1938 (2 of them remakes).

This box set is filled out with 3 early Victor alternate takes, 4 early ARC alternate takes, a 1963 interview with Sara Carter and Maybelle Carter, 4 home recordings from 1968 featuring Sara Carter and Maybelle Carter, and a 1973 interview with Maybelle Carter.

Then there is the book! It is hardbound and contains 220 pages. In it, there is a hand written introduction by Johnny Cash, biographies and song notes by Charles K. Wolfe, song transcriptions (lyrics) by Phil Wells, and a detailed discography by Tony Russell and Richard Weize. There are dozens upon dozens of photographs of people, places, phonograph records, handbills, and so on; reportedly every known photograph of the original Carter Family is featured. The Bear really outdid themselves with this one.

One frustrating aspect to this box set is that a few song titles in the discography are not identical to those used elsewhere in the book and on the jewel case tray cards.

The sound quality of the earliest Victor recordings is reasonably good here, especially as compared to the Rounder CDs featuring same. There a fair amount of surface noise present here, but I prefer this to the high pitched squeal heard on the Rounder CDs.

The Carter Family has often been called the first family of country music, and no better argument for this claim can be made than this massive 12 CD set. Recorded for a variety of record companies between 1927 and 1941, this set includes all of the studio recordings made by the trio before they went their separate ways. The box set includes a 220 page, hardcover book that includes all known photographs of the Carters, as well as program notes, song lyrics, an essay from noted country music scholar Charles Wolfe, and a discography. For the uninitiated, the Carter Family were from the Clinch Mountain area of Virginia. The group consisted of leader A.P. Carter on backing vocals, wife Sara Dougherty Carter on lead vocals, guitar and autoharp, and Sara's cousin Maybelle Addington Carter on lead guitar and harmony vocals. When the Victor recording company placed adds in Virginia and Tennessee newspapers in the summer of 1927 for musical talent, dozens of local acts appeared and many were recorded. The Carter Family was chosen, as was the soon-to-be legendary Singing Brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers. These recording sessions, often called the Bristol (TN) Sessions, are cited by many as the birth of country music as we know it, incorporating old time string band and folk music with such later developments as blues, ragtime and jazz.

Both the Carters and Rodgers went on to sell hundreds of thousands of 78 RPM records in the late twenties. The Carter Family traveled and performed widely, and their careers even survived the Great Depression. After recording dozens of sides for Victor, the Carters moved on to ARC, Decca and Bluebird. All of the music was memorable, and all of it is preserved here. The sound is rough in spots but better than any previous reissues. Only the Victor sides (about half of this compilation) have been reissued in their entirety, so this is the first CD reissue for many of these recordings. The Carter's mid-Thirties work is some of their finest, and its a pleasure to finally have all of these sides reissued.

The Carter Family's music influenced many other musicians in the Thirties and Forties, and they continued to be a force in later decades as well. The folk revival of the Sixties so a particular renewal of interest, and as late as the 1970s Johnny Cash featured Maybelle Carter and her daughters (including Cash's wife, June Carter) in his recordings and stage shows.

The German company, Bear Family Records, has done their usual excellent work in compiling this release. Sure, its expensive, and its a lot of music from a single act, but serious scholars of American music will consider this set essential. The Carter Family's legacy has never seemed greater than it does on this fine set.

There is little to say about the music that folks looking at this set don't already know. It's nice to have all Carter recordings available in a package of this quality. I also believe the remastering is an improvement on the Rounder series and the book has some interesting information and is very good quality. This set does indeed anchor any collection of old time or early country music.

It pains me to give a slightly negative review to such a great collection. But as someone who takes this music seriously, I can't believe how poorly this has been edited. There are innumerable discrepancies between the song notes in the book and the CDs: song names are different (e.g., "My Virginia Rose" becomes "My Virginia Rose is Blooming"), songs are located on different discs than they're supposed to be (e.g., "On a Hill Lone and Gray" and "The Cuban Soldier"--does this mean the songs did not appear in those recording session indicated in the notes, or are they just included on the wrong CD?), and by far the most troubling, some songs listed in the notes don't seem to be on the CDs at all (e.g., "What does the Deep Sea Say?", "Be Careful Boys, Don't go Too Far.")

I can handle a few typos, but this is shoddy and unacceptable (in an otherwise fantastic release). What happened to the missing songs above?

Obviously such mistakes make it problematic as a scholarly resource.

This is it. A superb box-set. Bear-Family did it again ! A must for any ( Original ) Carter Family-fan.

Since my youth I have had an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. The original of that interest first centered on the blues, then early rock and roll and later, with the folk revival of the early 1960's, folk music. I have often wondered about the source of this interest. I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. The subject of the following review is an example.

With the recent Johnny Cash movie biography Walk the Line the Carter Family has again come into greater public prominence. And rightly so. The trio performing simple country (or better rural) music mainly composed by A.P. Carter evokes, if not a simpler time, then in any case, a simpler type of music. While I cannot listen endlessly to such music at one sitting about one-half a cd at a time works. Why not the whole cd? There is a very similar melody and guitar line to their work in most songs. The value of each song sometimes gets lost in the basic repetition.

A note on subject matter- The bulk of the songs concern home, hearth lovesickness and religion as might be expected from mountain people. And that is okay. This reviewer, although not a religious man, can appreciate the simple, fundamentalist but very personal religion evoked here. Not to romanticize the simple rural folk of the past but I do not believe that the religious sentiments expressed here are the same as those of religious fundamentalists today who want to ram a theocracy down our throats in the United States today.