Carter Family – In The Shadow Of Clinch Mountain (12-CD box)

With all due respect to the labels that have helped to keep the recorded legacy of the original Carter Family in print during the CD era, this new release on Germanys Bear Family label leaves them all in the dust.

Here, on eleven CDs, are all 287 surviving tracks recorded between 1927 and 1941 by the original trio of A.P. Carter, his wife Sara, and their sister-in-law Maybelle. A twelfth disc consists of two interviews one from 1963 in which musicologists Ed Kahn and Mike Seeger interview Sara and Maybelle (A.P. passed away in 1960) that also includes four previously unreleased numbers performed by the two women, and one from 1973 involving Maybelle and the Nashville studio all-stars who played on her then-current LP.

Finally, there is an exhaustive 220-page hardcover book with text by noted music historian Charles Wolfe that: 1) chronicles the Carter saga (complete with not only every known photo of the group, but also a veritable cradle-to-the-grave photographic history of each member); 2) gives the history of each song; 3) lays out the lyrics of each song (including transcripts of the two Depression-era skits recorded with Jimmie Rodgers); and 4) offers the sessionography/discography that comes expected with each Bear Family CD. It comes complete with reproductions of 1960s-era LP jackets, and an example of every 78 label variation that graced the groups releases throughout the globe.

As is the case with most career retrospectives, the earliest tracks tend to be the most exciting. The first six, recorded by Ralph Peer in the Tennessee/Virginia border town of Bristol in August 1927, are fueled by a nervous energy similar to that which drove Elvis Presleys Sun sessions over a quarter-century later.

While the remainder of the initial Victors (1928-1934) are somewhat less charged, they remain essential listening to anyone seriously interested in the coalescing of 20th-century American music. Songs of dead mothers and lovers, outlaws, disasters, god, heaven, and home are all here, alongside endearing novelties and even the occasional cowboy song, once the influence of 30s-era pop culture begins to set in. Such music was a balm to a mainly rural public uncomfortable with the wild New Orleans jazz of Louis Arm_strong and the offstage sexual antics of Hollywood cutie Clara Bow, and later beset with drought and Depression.

Once the group began to re-record many of its signature tunes for budget labels in 1935, the energy level understandably drops (as do the keys of the songs, to accommodate Saras deepening voice), but a renaissance occurred when they signed to Decca the following year. The new labels insistence on new material seemed to recharge the group, and they delivered 60 masters over the next two years (many appearing on CD for the first time here), including this magazines namesake tune.

Not long after, however, the group was torn apart by divorce and changing trends in folk and hillbilly music. Though dozens of trends have come and gone since, it is nigh on impossible to find recorded music as simple, clear, and enjoyable, yet also so historically rich. Play loud.