A Conversation with Carlene Carter – HuffPost 4.9.14
Mike Ragogna: Carlene Carter, your Musical Shapes is one of my favorite albums ever. Just clearing the air here.
Carlene Carter: [laughs] It’s one of my favorites, too.
MR: You have a new album, Carter Girl, that takes you back to your roots. What does being a Carter Girl mean to you?
CC: Basically, I grew up watching Carter girls on stage watching my grandmother, my mom and my aunts perform. They used to say, “Okay, Carter girls, you’re on!” I kind of just thought that that’s what it was, because we show up, suit up, get out there and do our thing and it’s all about the music and carrying it around all over the country and playing it for people. That’s being a Carter girl.
MR: Did you always want to do a project like this, but felt like now was the exact right moment?
CC: Yes, exactly. For the longest time, I always tried to put something Carteresque or a Carter family song on every album that I’ve done. It was a matter of respect for me to wait until I felt like it was the right time for me to be carrying it on, while mom and Helen and Anita were still living. I love being a part of the Carter family but it never felt like I should do a tribute record until a certain amount of time had gone by. Also I think it’s the right time for me emotionally, creatively and everything. It was a challenge for me because, having written everything I’ve done so far–ninety-five percent or so was my own composition–to be covering those songs is quite intimidating because I wanted to own them and I wished that I had written them. Having to pick from almost five hundred songs at my fingertips, that took some time for me to go through. I think when I whittled it down to fifty, I thought I was on to something.
MR: So all these songs clearly mean something to you. I’m sure you have stories that are connected with a couple of these songs. Are there a couple that you can go into?
CC: Part of my task is that I was charged as a young child to always carry on the Carter music and to keep it alive. I was told that would be my job someday, to never let it go lost. I also wanted to include some songs that people had not heard, that weren’t the usual suspects. I didn’t want to do “Wildwood Flower,” not that I wouldn’t want to do it, but it’s one of the most famous ones, with “Circle Be Unbroken.” But then there were ones like “Gold Watch And Chain” and “I Ain’t Gonna Work Tomorrow” that I performed with them and just remembered them playing those songs all my life. I discovered “Little Black Train,” I picked it out mainly due to the lyrics. The same with “Blackie’s Gunman,” I used the box set In The Shadow Of Clinch Mountain and I kind of made it my little bible, my little discography of Carter family stuff. It’s all right there in the box. It was inspiring to look at my grandmother’s picture and Aunt Sara and Uncle A.P. and also my house is filled with photos of mama and Helen and Anita. I wanted to try and cover a bit of the three generations as far as the three different Carter families that came along. Maybelle was constant in the first two and of course the girls, Helen, Anita and mama, they became the second generation of that. Then of course myself and my cousin Lorrie, she sings on the record, too. Being a Carter girl means you get thrown on stage. In picking the songs, a lot of the times I just picked them because I liked the lyrics and I liked the story. That was one thing about the songs that I found completely to be true, they’re timeless. They stand the test of time. They’re not hokey 1920s and 30s sounding things. With my spirit and my voice and the way that I perform them it’s a different kind of thing. I try to stay true to the songs, though. I love the fact that when we recorded the album Don was amazing. We tracked live with me singing live and me playing live, so all of my vocals and my guitar playing are all live from the beginning, I didn’t go back and overdub.
MR: Which was reminiscent of how you performed with The Carter Family.
CC: Right! They would redo it rather than go back and fix something. If you were in the studio with them they would just say, “Oh no, I need to do that.” I remember my grandma telling a story about when they went to Bristol to record those first recordings in 1927, she said, “I didn’t get that right, I need to do that again,” and they were sort of like, “We can’t do that again, we only have this many pieces of wax.” She’s always been such a perfectionist, particularly about her playing, I just loved the stories about that and now I’m loving the stories that I have when I play live, I can tell people about where I heard that song first or why I like it. I think it draws people into it more when they really understand that it’s not just me doing a bunch of covers of Carter family songs, there’s a lot more to it. It’s a heartfelt record. There’s also the balancing act of how so many of the songs are gospel oriented. At one point one my lists was pretty much all gospel songs and I thought, “Well that’s all good and everything,” but so many of their songs are about unrequited love or heartbreak but fiesty stuff, too, like “Blackie’s Gunman.” I always liked that Sara and Maybelle would sing those songs in the male point of view. I always said, “I want a little girl named Nellie.”
MR: You did a nod to their approach with Elizabeth Cook.
CC: Yeah, she just had the perfect voice to fill out the Carteresque harmony. I wanted it to sound like that. Between her and my cousin Lorrie I felt like we achieved that. She came in to sing on a couple songs and ended up singing on six of them. Elizabeth is a total honorary Carter girl and she’s also one of my dearest friends in the world. She’s just a joy to work with. She gets it, and that meant something. The same with the gals that are all on the record. When we first started this project, I started working with Randy Hoffman, who’s my manager. That came from Bob Merlis, I said, “I’ve got this idea, I’ve got this record,” so I came up with Merlis and I said, “I think I’m going to need a manager to get the right people in here.” I didn’t want to just throw it together, I wanted it to have a chance that people would actually hear it instead of me just by myself in the house. So all of the ducks got in a row, but my list of people I thought ought to be on the record was quite extensive, but the first six people that I had on my list were on the record. So at that point I said, “That’s great.” My husband Joe [Breen], my cousin Lorrie, Vince Gill, and Willie [Nelson] and Kris [Kristofferson] because they were so much like family to me and they knew my grandmother. They’ve known the family forever, so they’re kind of like Uncle-Brothers.
MR: From the way it was crafted and planned and sounds, this package may possibly be the most important of your career, really brining out the most “Carter” in thisCarter Girl.
CC: That was one of the biggest reasons I wanted to work with Don Was. I had always thought that he brings the artist across, their personality and their talent. He actually captures that on records when in this day and age a lot of that gets lost in the mix. When we recorded, except for working with the Carter family I had never really recorded that way. I did this with Musical Shapes, too, where we just went in and put it down and that was it. That’s kind of what we did, but obviously to get all the right people in the right place at the same time it didn’t work quite that way. I had to send tracks to Vinnie for him to put his voice on but like two hours later I’d get back and it’s done. It was awesome. But Don was great about saying, “We’re playing with you,” because I kept trying to fire myself from playing the guitar and he said, “No, no, we’re playing with you. You’re playing really good.” I was trying my best to represent granma’s guitar style as best I could. I kept saying, “I’m sure there’s somebody else who could play this better than me,” but every guy in the room was going, “No, we’re playing with you!” That was because of Don’s approach to it. That’s why I wanted him. That’s why he’s the guy. Plus he’s awesome to work with. He’s a great person, and he got it. He understood what I was aiming at.
MR: By the time you’d finished working on the record, did you feel that Don really “got” The Carter Family?
CC: Oh, absolutely. We knew each other on a casual basis and always really liked each other. There’s always a big smile when we’d see each other, and I had my first meeting with him and Randy and we talked about my idea I said, “I’d really like you to be a part of this and do this record with me,” and he just said, “Yeah, yeah.” I was like “Whoa!” I had this little wish list of things that I wanted to happen, and one of the other things I wanted to happen was I wanted to be on Rounder. I thought that they were the right label for me. That came to pass, and I wanted to work with Bob Clearmountain my entire career and Don brought him along. Every bit of the way in the two years from when we started tracking up until right now, no matter if it took a few months to get to a certain point, it wasn’t like a long period of time that we spent making the record. We had gaps in there because, obviously, he’s super busy. He really got me to trust my instincts a lot more than I’ve had other producers allow me to do. He said, “You go off and do the overdub.” Some of the time I was there, but for the most part I kind of went off and did the harmonies. He said, “You know what you want it to sound like. If I don’t like it or we don’t agree on it then we’ll talk about it and fix it.” Well everything just kind of clicked along. Everybody brought something special to the record. The musicians were the exact right bunch of guys, I went down to Nashville and my friend Sam Bush was playing and I was like, “Oh, I’ve got to get Sam on here.” A couple of days later, I go into the studio with him and we put that down. I got my cousin Lorrie in and then I had Elizabeth come a few days later and Don come. Part two of really reiterating to myself why Don was the right guy had to do with Elizabeth’s album Welder, I thought he captured her personality and her talent on the record. You could just hear her pprerence there instead of just somebody singing the notes. I like the fact that I feel like I got to be myself. It would have been a complete disaster if I’d just tried to recreate these songs exactly the way they were recorded when they were written. To go back and sound like A.P. and Sara and Maybelle I think that would’ve been kind of sacrilegious in a way, because it’s about the progression of The Carter Family music as it goes on and keeping those songs alive.
MR: Right. I think my favorite song on here is “Tall Lover Man,” it reminds of one my favorite songs of yours, “Sandy.”
CC: I love that, too. You know, “Sandy” was about my sister marrying my second husband; they weren’t married very long. I tried to tell her, “You don’t really know him.” I was the first person she called when it was all over. When they were breaking up, she kept playing that song relentlessly. [laughs] But “Tall Love Man,” I’ve always loved that song. The thing that I love about it is that my little red-headed, blue-eyed mama wrote that song about killing a guy. There’s some great things in it phonically, “Loving me for sport, your life shall be short, she said to him.” Do you know how hard that is to do?
MR: Phonic gymnastics.
CC: Phonic gymnastics. But she just had such an imagination, one of the things that I did learn from her regarding songwriting is that there are no rules about it, every verse doesn’t have to be the same amount of measures, you can stick in an extra few syllables here and there, it doesn’t have to be all measured out exactly right. If you’re telling a story, you just go for it. She’s notorious for doing that. I always really, really loved that song. I actually had “Fifty Miles Of Elbow Room” set to be on the record when I realized I’d have two songs off of mama’s album and I thought that might be pushing it. But everything worked out just like it was supposed to. I got to do one of my Aunt Helen’s song’s, “Poor Old Heartstick Me,” which is just a great, solid country song. She had a lot of influence on me as a writer too because she would call me early in the morning and say, “Come over here, let’s write a song!” She’d just spend hours with me. She was the one who wanted to practice and show me stuff. She had time for that, and she always was ready to go. And my Aunt Anita was just such a wonderful singer and the sweetest woman in the world, I really wanted to pay tribute to her by doing “I’ll Be All Smiles,” but at the same time, I was a little bit scared because I’d heard her do it all my life and I thought, “There’s no way I can sing it like her.” Then I realized, “Wait a minute, I’ve just got to sing it like me.” It takes a tremendous amount of pressure off if you just go, “Oh, it’s all about me now.”
MR: [laughs] Exactly. Where there any a-ha moments as you sang their songs?
CC: Yeah! I would say “Tall Lover Man,” because I’d always liked it but I’d really, honestly never gotten the whole story of it. I never really listened that closely to it, I just thought it was a neat song, I never paid that much attention to it, but it’s crafted so well, I just took that drive in there that I love, I call it “military movement.” She was great. There were some other a-ha’s… “Give Me The Roses” was a gem that I had never heard them sing but my cousin Lorrie said, “Hey, why don’t you listen to ‘Give Me The Roses?'” I love it now and I want to live my life that way. “Give me the roses while I live.”
MR: And speaking of roses, you re-recorded “Me And The Wildwood Rose,” an original.
CC: Doing it again is perfect, because it means so much more to me now. I really wrote it from the place of missing my grandmother so much at the time she passed away in 1978, right around the time my first album came out. She meant a lot to me. I spent a large amount of my childhood with my grandma and my aunts. Mom traveled a lot with John and they were home a little bit more before they became The Johnny Cash Show with The Carter Family and everything. So I spent a large portion of my life with my grandma and my aunts taking care of me. But those memories of that and being in the car and the bass fiddle being down the middle of the car and us making a little bed on the floorboard and we’d get to the show and I have a very vivid memory of making a bed in the bass fiddle case and crawling in there and taking a nap. When mama moved to New York to study acting in the fifties when she and daddy broke up, my first bed in her apartment was a drawer. She had a big chest of drawers and the bottom drawer was my bed. I was a little bitty kid, but I can remember a lot of that stuff.
MR: How does it feel to have grown up as part of the Carter/Cash legacy that’s essentially become an American folk story?
CC: It has! I never really realized how big my grandmother was. She was just grandma. We went fishing, we went bowling, we played poker, we worked in the garden. We canned together. She was my grandma, but people were in awe of her and it wasn’t until–I’ve told this story to several people now–there was a period right after The NItty Gritty Dirt Band did “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” where we went out and played some shows with them and Helen and Anita and grandma asked Lorrie and my cousin David and me and Rosie to sing with the band, so we went out as The Carter Family and I played piano on some of it and the rest of it just sang, but we did “Country Roads” in C sharp on the piano, and I don’t know if you know anything about that, but that’s a mother f**ker. It was one particular show, after the great success of “Will The Circle Be Unbroken,” we were playing in Morgantown, West Virginia, and they introduced us. We’re all out on stage and then they introduced Grandma and she walks out on the stage and there’s five thousand…I guess you’d call them hippies then, there was pot smoke wafting everywhere and they were all sitting cross-legged on the floor of the place and they all stood up and gave her this standing ovation for what seemed like five minutes; it seemed like forever. “Wow! They dig grandma!” I so wanted to remember that stuff because then I suddenly realized that she was kind of a big deal even though, to me, it was just like business as usual. I was more intrigued by my friends who had daddies that came home at five o’clock and dinner was ready, that kind of stuff. I was like, “Wow, that’s interesting.” But now I really, really have great respect. I am in awe of the fact that music is still alive and breathing and people are still liking it. I just went out and played a couple of warm-up shows because I’m going out solo. I don’t think I’ve ever done that, when I really think about it. I’ve always gone out with at least one other person and played. I decided I’m just going to go do it alone and tell my stories and play my autoharp and play the piano and the guitar and do the best I can. Anyway, I did a couple of warm-up shows and people just loved the stories. They love what really happened or what this was about. If I fill them in a little bit on the history–A.P was madly in love with Sara, and even going back to Musical Shapes, that song “Appalachian Eyes” is about the story of her going off with Coy Bayes and Uncle A.P. being so heartbroken over that. I called it “Appalachian Eyes,” but she had brown eyes! [laughs]
MR: And again, going back to Musical Shapes, I personally feel that was an important album of sorts when it was released though I’m still not quite able to put my finger on why.
CC: I think it’s very simple. I wanted to play rocking country music and when I started out in the late seventies it took me a couple of albums to figure out how to do that. But working with Dave [Edmunds] and Nick [Lowe], they totally got the country part of it, but they had the rocking thing that went with it. So that was a wonderful album to make. Nick wouldn’t produce me for the second record, so I ended up in New York at The Power Station which was just alien to me.
MR: Ah, Tony Bongiovi.
CC: Yeah. They were great guys and everything, I think Springsteen was in there when I was doing the album and Clarence Clemons played on it but the boss had to come over and check out the song. Finally, Nick comes around and it really had to do with the Rockpile guys coming over and saying, “Hey, just because she’s your wife doesn’t mean you shouldn’t play music with her or you shouldn’t do this record. You’ve got to do this, dude. So I had originally gone over to record with Edmunds, but he was so in awe of me being a country girl from Nashville, he just wanted me to cut George Jones songs. But I had to go to England to really discover George Jones and get into what an amazing artist he was. He was just a guy that sat on the couch next to Tammy Wynette at our house. And I don’t mean that with any disrespect, I love him to death, but I was kind of sheltered. Growing up, I listened to rock music and so many different kinds of music but you can’t take the country out of the girl and for years I wrestled with labels over “Am I country, am I rock?” They couldn’t figure out what to do with me. So when I came back to Warner Brothers in the late eighties and fell in love, all I really did was say, “I’m country now.” I didn’t really change what I did. I just said, “I’m country.” It was just that statement. Then they said, “You can’t wear over the knee socks, they’re too much like stockings,” and all this stuff. I think I was always just a little bit ahead of where country was going. That’s okay.
MR: Carlene, I literally asked Linda Ronstadt this about a half hour ago and now it’s your turn! What advice do you have for new artists?
CC: Oh, be unique. Be yourself. And every person is unique. Don’t try to be like somebody else. You’ll be miserable. You need to be yourself and don’t ever get a big head. Remain true to yourself and write songs. Try to write good ones, but write songs. And Linda Ronstadt was always a big influence on me! When I was twelve or thirteen, we went to see Kris Kristofferson open for her at The Troubadour, and mom and John and myself and Rosie went and they let me and Rosie in because we were with John and June. We got all dressed up and when Linda Ronstadt came on, she had a blue jean miniskirt on and a tambourine in her hand and she sang her ass off. I was like, “I wanna do that. When I grow up I want to do that!”
MR: Wow, what a great connection, I’m glad I obnoxiously phrased the question the way I did, thank you. So there’s that wild mélange at the end of the album, “The Winding Stream.” How did that come together and how special was that for you?
CC: That’s from a record that we had done. I worked with them for two years, around ’86 and ’87, and I was up in arms about the fact that The Carter Family didn’t have a record deal and they hadn’t done a record together–Helen, Anita and mom. I was just like, “Come on! We’ve got to go in the studio! We’ve got to get this going.” Cowboy Jack said–he called me The Dixie Darling–“Let’s strike up The Dixie Darling and get in there!” So we recorded like forty-four songs in the space of four or five days. If you go back into one of my old albums, I think it’s Little Acts Of Treason, “The Winding Stream” is on there and I ended up with some of the masters of those recordings to do with as I wanted. I just wanted their voices, so we took Cowboy’s acoustic guitar and we played along to all of us singing, that’s why John’s on there and mom and Helen and Anita. It was always one of my favorite songs that I played live when I worked with them and through the years any time I didn’t know what to do musically, didn’t know where I was going on the next record or had questions about it I would go back and infiltrate The Carter Family and get a dose of where I come from. It worked for me very well, maybe not in chart success so much, but it definitely was inspiring. I needed to be with my family at that point in time, and it was awesome. That’s where it came from, an album that I think only came out on vinyl and cassette. I think it was just called The Carter Family The Wildflower. But how many albums have been called The Wildflower? It was really cute though because on the cassette, it would say, “Helen, June and Anita and Carlene, playing their own instruments!” Like, “Wow, they’re girls that can actually play!”
MR: [laughs] You said “cute,” which reminds me, one of the “cutest” moments I’ve heard on record is when you got that telephone call from Nick Lowe and Paul Carrack and you accept the operator’s connection on “How I Wish That You Were Mine.”
CC: Oh that’s right! [laughs]
MR: Carlene, what do you think the legacy of The Carter Family will be like as the years go by?
CC: Well right now, I’ve got a couple of granddaughters. One of them, in particular that really plays the guitar. She’s just eleven but she’s crazy about it. She probably knows more historically than I do about The Carter Family. She wore my grandmother’s dress to this thing at school and won the best presentation for “Famous Women You’d Like To Be,” she put “Maybelle Carter” and showed them how to play “The Wildwood Flower” on the guitar, which I thought was really cute. My daughter’s always played music, but she’s raising kids and not ready to do it as much, she’s a mommy, but I’m thinking my grandkids are probably going to be the one to carry it on. Same with John Carter’s kids, too. His son Joseph has got quite a good voice and I think he will do well. Hopefully we’ll just keep passing it down. Janette Carter, she really kept the fold alive up in Virginia, and now Rita, her daughter, and Dale are trying to keep the museum going up there. Go up to Carter Fold and get a good dose of what it was like up there.
MR: Nice. So it looks like in thirty or forty years, we could have a Carter or Cash in every group in America.
CC: [laughs] Let’s hope so. That’s why I’m asking for more grandchildren.
Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne