Janette & Joe Carter - Last of Their Kind

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Janette & Joe Carter - Last of Their Kind

Postby mach1 » Tue Nov 16, 2004 6:13 am

Janette & Joe Carter - Last of Their Kind (CD, 2004)
Image
Since 1974
Janette and Joe, the children of Sara Carter of American
music's celebrated Carter Family, have been holding
Saturday-night concerts in Hiltons, Virginia, where their
father Alvin Pleasant Carter ran a store for many years
after his marriage
to their mother ended.

In 1976 the Carter
children built a barn/concert venue on the property,
calling it the Carter Fold ("fold" defined as "gathering
place"), where they continue to perform every
Saturday night along with other traditional mountain
musicians.

In 2004, Janette was 81, Joe 77.

They have
recorded only rarely, so Last of Their Kind is a happy
occasion, notwithstanding the consideration that few
of their songs keep on the sunny side.

The tone is autumnal to wintry, and a sense of history
and mortality extends from the title onward, to hang on
nearly every note and lyric.

A. P., Sara, and Maybelle are all gone, and so are
Maybelle's children who shared stages with their
mother, uncle, and aunt as the Carter Girls
(June, Helen, and Anita).

Johnny Cash died in September 2003,
just a few months after his beloved
June.

The influence of the original Carters, often called the
first family of country music, on modern Nashville
music -- much of it no longer "country" by any
conceivable definition -- is for all practical purposes
nonexistent. It is left to bluegrass bands, old-time
outfits, and folk singers to keep the legacy and the
repertoire alive.

Joe and Janette represent the last generation of
actual Carters to do so.

Joe and Janette's approach is as unadorned as it could
get this side of field-recorded unaccompanied singing.
She plays autoharp, her brother guitar.

Here, under Johnny and June's son John Carter
Cash's unobtrusive production, they are joined
on occasion by Laura Cash (John Carter's wife)
on fiddle or guitar, Jerry Hensley or Larry
Perkins on guitar, and Dennis Crouch on
stand-up bass.

Theirs are old, cracked voices, and they make no
concession to any conventional notion of prettiness
or perfection. Either you accept them that way, or
you don't.

Five of the songs are from the original Carters. They
include "Little Darling, Pal of Mine" (Woody Guthrie
adapted its melody for a song of his own, "This Land
Is Your Land"), "Stern Old Bachelor" (as close to
humor as Janette and Joe get), and an especially
touching "The Poor Orphan Child," in my hearing
the album's finest moment.

In other hands a song with a title like "Pole It, Reba,"
one of Joe's originals, would be a bawdy barroom sing-along,
but here it's a slight ballad about an outlaw and his Cajun
wife's flight via peerow down a Louisiana river.

A more fully realized Joe composition is
"Through the Eyes of an Eagle," a vividly
imagined gospel song in which God watches
over tragedies that unfolded during the
settling of the West.

--///..\


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mach1
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