Beth Harrington’s New Documentary “The Winding Stream” about the Carter Family
December Carson
Posted On January 1, 2011
Re-posted from the The Winding Stream website:
These three didn’t just play the music emerging from their hill country upbringing. They invented it. A.P. was both song collector and composer, crafting and arranging snippets of ancient, musty melodies into commercial American popular music. Maybelle took the then-underplayed guitar and made it into the cornerstone of country instrumentation that we know today. And Sara became the first well-known woman’s voice in country music, stamping it with the eerie Gothic quality we find in so much of the country canon.
The stream these three created has turned into a rushing river and has moved through several generations of musicians, both inside their family and without. There would be no Folk Revival of the ’60s without the Carters, no country–rock bands of the ’70s, and no alt-country hipsters of our present era. The Carters crossed styles, crossed genres, crossed generations.
And yet, the Carters suffered periods of obscurity, with AP and Sara divorcing and – despite trying to keep the act alive – all three going their separate ways. AP died never fully realizing the impact he had on American music. Sara moved to California vowing to live a quiet life with her new husband, AP’s cousin Coy. Maybelle, fiercely devoted to music, struggled to envision what the next step would be.
The Carter story might have ended there. But it didn’t. No one would have guessed that a young man, who, at first blush, seemed more renegade than reverent adherent, would be the one to lift up the Carter legacy. That man was Johnny Cash, and his love for the Carter music dated back to nights as a boy in Dyess, Arkansas listening to the Carter Family perform on the air (at that point featuring the next generation of Carters, including little June Carter), their melodies blasting across the Mexican border into his bedside radio. It was a wonderful twist of fate when Cash, as a Sun Records artist, first met Mother Maybelle and her girls, the Carter Sisters and vowed to June that “I’m gonna marry you someday.”
The Winding Stream – a 90–minute documentary shot in High Definition – tells these stories and others through narrator–less interviews; this saga is punctuated with studio performances by celebrated roots music practitioners like Johnny and June Carter Cash, George Jones, Rosanne Cash, Sheryl Crow, Kris Kristofferson and others. The film’s goal is to illuminate the foundation–forming history of this multi–generational musical family. Country music would not be what is without them.
Here’s a clip from the documentary: The Carter Family on Border Radio
Directed by Beth Harrington:
Beth Harrington is an award-winning independent producer, director and writer, born in Boston and transplanted to the Pacific Northwest. She has been making media professionally since 1977. She most often focuses on work that explores American history, music and culture. Harrington’s independent production Welcome to the Club – The Women of Rockabilly, a music documentary about the pioneering women of rock and roll, was honored with a 2003 Grammy nomination. Her love of history and popular culture is evidenced in her Italian-American themed documentaries, most notably The Blinking Madonna & Other Miracles and in her Emmy-nominated films, Kam Wah Chung, Searching for York, and Beervana. Other works of note include programming for PBS such as History Detectives, Digital TV: A Cringely Crash Course, and Aleutians: Cradle of the Storms. She has also served as an Associate Producer with WGBH and The Documentary Guild making films for NOVA, Frontline and The Health Quarterly. All of Harrington’s films have appeared on public television.
Funding for The Winding Stream: Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and The Faerie Godmother Fund.
