Excellent, but surprisingly unannotated collection of Carter Family songs
As the soundtrack to Beth Harrington’s like-titled documentary, these songs sing the story of the Carter Family’s seminal invention and their on-going influence. But as a standalone volume, this virtually unannotated set provides little in the way of context or connections. The sources, circumstances and even years of these recordings are not provided, and the three-page liner notes history of the Carter Family does little to explain where these songs came from, what they meant to the Carters, or how these particular performances (including five from the Original Carter Family, one from Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, and one from Maybelle and Sara Carter) thread into the story.
The selections are excellent, including performances by John Prine, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Rosanne Cash and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. And the programming is surprisingly smooth, given the disparate qualities of the recordings; but one can’t help but wish there was some background, particularly on the song origins and their path into the Carter Family catalog. The little publishing information that’s provided on the booklet’s back is so microscopic as to be nearly unreadable, and though tracks 1, 5, 14 and 16 trace to The Unbroken Circle, the origin of others remain obscure. The music may speak for itself, but as the mate to a rich documentary and book, the lack of provenance is disappointing. [©2015 Hyperbolium] 