The Winding Stream: The
Carters, the Cashes & the Course of Country Music
dir.
Beth Harrington; 2014. One hour forty
minutes
The
hippie-country group Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was always mediocre, barely on par
with some of today’s “Americana” kids, most of whose anemic output would make Alvin
Pleasant Carter roll in his grassy Virginia grave. The only reason anyone
remembers The Dirt Band at all was their uncommon good sense (and commercial acumen)
to, in 1972 , make a triple LP with some of traditional country music’s finest,
and I don’t mean that goofball Hee Haw
crowd. Will The Circle Be Unbroken featured
(among others) Doc Watson, Roy Acuff, Jimmy Martin, Brother Oswald Kirby,
Vassar Clements and the overlooked Mother Maybelle Carter, showing the younger
generation just what traditional music was all about by showcasing their own signature songs (Circle being one of Maybelle’s).
When
I say Mother Maybelle was “overlooked” I speak first hand. My age group was the
follow up to the original hippies, a decade later. In “high” school, we
listened intently to The Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers as they ushered in
what was then called folk-rock. We revered Bill Monroe, Merle Travis, Earl
Scruggs (who we already knew, vaguely, from the Beverly Hillbillies theme song) and Ralph Stanley when he was a
mere youth in his, uh, fifties. The
Circle Album (as we called it) was in heavy rotation but we always thought
Maybelle rather...quaint. We didn’t know how innovative her simultaneous picked-lead
and strummed-rhythm style was (“the Carter Scratch”) nor understand her roots
with the most influential country band ever recorded.
Or
perhaps it’s better to call the Carter family a traditional rural band. “Country”
conjures up either glittery images of classic artists like Tammy Wynette or
“working man” poseurs like George Strait. Neither of these fit the definition
of country music from those days. Well, there was in fact no such thing as
“country” then. It was marketed as “traditional” but looked down upon (even by
record company execs) as “hillbilly” music: backward, outmoded and fit only for
the uneducated.
With
cousin Sara and Sara’s husband A.P., Maybelle was the instrumental anchor of
the now neglected Carter Family. They were the pop stars of their age for
country folk. I mean real country
folk who butchered their own hogs every fall and mail-ordered shoes from a
Sears Roebuck catalog whose pages also served as outhouse tissue. Poor though
they were, enough folks managed to have radios and hand-cranked Victrola
phonographs (which were outmoded even then) to share the music and their admiration
of the Carter Family as “one of our’n”.
Director
Beth Harrington (a behind-the-scenes PBS stalwart and former member of the latter
Modern Lovers) does an admirable job despite a few missteps. For example, interspersed
throughout, we’re told multiple times in vague terms by featured musicians how
the Carters influenced them and the course of country music. Curiously, Harrington
devotes more time to these people covering the original songs rather than letting
us hear the, uh, originals play the originals. If that last phrase sounds
redundant, it is and to some degree so are John Prine, George Jones, Sheryl
Crow, Kris Kristofferson, and the Carolina Chocolate Drops. They all do a fine
job (especially the last) but it’s almost as if the filmmaker doesn’t trust the
audience to appreciate eighty year old recordings except in snippets. I suppose
she’s trying to emphasize their influence over their output but the Carter’s
actual work is curiously often unnoticed in the race to canonize them.
Too,
there’s the misguided use of colorized and animated vintage photographs of the
Carters “playing” their songs. Such parlor tricks serve absolutely no purpose
whatsoever: annoying at best and at worst, a visual that further serves to
distract from the beautiful original recordings. Call me a Luddite (true) but
it’s just one more example of how ubiquitous useless computer tricks have
become. No one ever seems to ask, “What’s the point?” To me it’s just one more
disservice to an audience, again not trusting we can be content with content sans
bells and whistles. This ugly trick makes me out and out yearn for the now
passé Ken Burns approach of slowly zooming in and out of old photographs.
Complaints
aside, there’s still some great stuff here. We’re shown just how the Carters played
hundreds of live radio shows on powerful Mexican border stations that flaunted
Federal transmitting rules. We see how they sold 1000s of 78 rpm shellac records (the pre-vinyl format), quite a feat
during the Great Depression when their audience was not the type that saw much
hard cash, or if they did usually spent it on staples they couldn’t make or raise
themselves, like nails and coffee.
It
was a time of change. America was still mostly rural but the lure and power of
the city was eclipsing the workaday countryside. Part of the Carters’ appeal was
reaffirming traditional ideals, the value and
values of country life, things which were being shunted aside in favor of steel,
The Jazz Age and “progress”. This is just what the more well-known WoodyGuthrie did later when the urban takeover was real and irreversible but even he
(an inveterate song collector like A.P.) gained much of his material from the
Carters.
Obsessed
from an early age, A.P. Carter relentlessly traveled thousands of miles to
learn traditional songs before they were forgotten, all the while forgetting
his own wife and children. He wanted it all: lovesick blues, jailhouse laments,
hillbilly waltzes, pre-Bluegrass instrumentals and stern lesson-learned gospel.
Age-old tunes sung in the fields, the hard rock coal mines or while rocking the
cradle. Songs vocally passed through generations, some with obscured roots in the
British Isles. These melodies and lyrics have been mixed, matched and reused
countless times to form the basis of what we now call folk music and country
music. For this The Carter Family must
be thanked but their performances must also be heard and appreciated.
But
the story doesn’t stop here. As popular tastes changed and the troubled A.P.
and Sara slowly withdrew from performing (going the very untraditional route of
divorce, mostly unheard of among “good” church people in those days), Maybelle
forged ahead recruiting daughters June, Helen, and Anita to form The Carter
Sisters in 1943. Radio dates and records
followed as as well as the de rigueur
and well-received Grand Old Opry appearances. By 1950, Johnny Cash entered the
picture, intractably pursuing June to eventual marriage despite both of them
being already wed. See: Ring Of Fire,
Cash’s most overplayed song, followed closely by Folsom Prison Blues.
In
the ‘60s, Cash used his fame and ill-fated TV show to advantage. It was
ill-fated because he was too controversial a figure in the Vietnam era, a true
outlaw unlike drunken louts like Hank Williams Jr or Waylon Jennings. To his
great credit, Cash used his brief media power to spotlight heroes like PeteSeeger who was widely thought to be a communist traitor. Cash especially took pleasure in bringing the
family act that he adored back to wider acclaim. Being part of that family now by
marriage was just a bonus. In interviews recorded just weeks before his death,
Cash’s humble awe and reverence is plain to see and a decided highlight of the
film.
Despite
the flaws, Harrigton’s admiration is also apparent as she brings The Carter
Family story to a wide audience at just the right time when hundreds of indie
rock kids are unplugging to clumsily pick up thrift store banjos and ukuleles.
This piece originally appeared in unaltered format in The Albuquerque Free Press.
