Carter Family – Give Me The Roses While I Live

Three volumes remain to be released in Rounder’s exemplary reissue series of the Carter Family’s complete Victor recordings, but installment six here represents, more profoundly than any other, the Beginning of the End.

As noted in previous issues of No Depression, Volumes 3 and 4 already show cracks in the Family’s foundation, with Sara Carter’s beautifully plaintive voice — politely exuberant on the trio’s earliest recordings from the late ’20s — getting heavier and thicker as she eases into middle age. Here, that natural process is egged on by the fact that she was losing interest in both her musical career and her husband, A.P., the man most responsible for that very career.

Always less enthusiastic about the music they made than either A.P. or Maybelle were, Sara finally acted on her emotions in 1933, first by divorcing A.P. and then by refusing to rehearse new material for the Carters’ annual session that June. Ignoring advances from both A.P. and the Carters’ manager, Ralph Peer, Sara finally acquiesced after receiving a letter from Peer’s wife Anita, herself a divorcee, pleading with Sara to at least stay with the Family on a professional level. The recordings that resulted reveal a slight amount of tension and an audible lack of enthusiasm (though certainly not on the tremendous yodeling harmonies the ex-spouses share on “Home by the Sea”) in contrast to the unity and energy so apparent on their first recordings from 1927. Sixty-four years later, these problems remain an interesting footnote to the music left behind.

Ah yes, the music. Be it rousing gospel material like “The Sun Of The Soul” and “I Wouldn’t Mind Dying”, sentimental songs such as “Will The Roses Bloom In Heaven” and “Two Sweethearts”, or ready-made material sent in by fans such as “Broken Hearted Lover” and “The Winding Stream”, this is as definitive a collection of Carter recordings as one could wish for. Perhaps more so, as it also includes Sara’s rendition of “I Never Will Marry”, a song she had known since her youth. With her personal troubles at the time in mind, this “fair damsel” had certainly earned the right to make such a “pitiful sound” as this lover’s suicide note. After all, since she had already laid down the cynical “Single Girl, Married Girl” during happier times and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” was still 30 years away from being written, what other song would be more fitting, coming from this woman’s throat?