Over the years, June has appeared on TV dozens of times, including episodes of “Gunsmoke”, “Little House On The Prairie” and “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman”. She also has starred in several feature films, but nothing, she says, gave her as much satisfaction as an actor as when Meisner, her former teacher, asked her to be the one who presented him with his Kennedy Center award.
“It was the greatest compliment that Sandy could have paid me,” beams June. “Robert Duvall, Mary Steenburgen, Gregory Peck — these wonderful people that he taught were all in Washington to watch him get this Presidential award, and he had to choose someone to give it to him. And of all these people who won Academy Awards, I was the person he chose. That let me know, according to Sandy Meisner, that I could have won an Academy Award, if I had chosen to go that way.”
June’s considerable acting resume aside, in country circles, it is for her comedy, be it her famous “mud hole gag” or her unforgettable “Aunt Polly,” that people revere her.
“I’ll never forget June Carter in this chartreuse-green chiffon dress, doing her comedy bit,” says Opry star Connie Smith. “She kept me in stitches. Her timing is so great.” The queen of country comedy, the late Minnie Pearl, went one better, having once said that June, who started doing routines as a kid, had the best timing of any comic she had ever known.
“My uncle A.P. used to say, ‘We don’t have any comedy on the show and it would really be great if you would do something,’ June recalls. “So here I was, this little bitty kid, and I got this big board, a plank, and put it under my arm. I’d just walk across the stage. They’d be trying to sing some of their funnier songs and I’d just walk across the stage pulling that plank. And they’d turn around and look at me until my Uncle A.P. would finally say, ‘What are you doing?’ And I’d say, ‘We’ll, I’m looking for a room. I’ve got my board.’ That was my first bit.
“So I did these improvisations. I could just talk about anything and it seemed to be funny. I had a great following. People would want to hug my neck and pinch me. They’d send me cakes in the mail. They’d crochet me bedspreads.”
This humor is evident throughout Press On, notably on June’s many between-song asides, but nowhere so much as on “Tiffany Anastasia Lowe”. The song is a cautionary tale that June wrote for her granddaughter, Tiffany, an aspiring Hollywood actress besotted with the movies of director Quentin Tarantino (whose surname June pronounces “Tarantina”).
“Quentin Tarantino’s women sometimes get stuck with a hypodermic needle,” June sings. But before she can add, “They dance a lot and lose a lot of blood,” she breaks into a belly laugh, an unguarded and utterly beguiling moment that brings to mind the associative, and often hilarious, monologues of Woody Guthrie and the young Bob Dylan.
The former comparison couldn’t be more fitting, given that Guthrie’s “originals” appropriated many a Carter Family tune, and quite a few lines of verse. “If you want to sing a Woody Guthrie song, I can sing you the Carter family song where he got it,” smiles June, noting, among other examples, how “This Land Is Your Land” draws heavily on the Carters’ “Lulu Walls”.
“Woody’s widow even acknowledged as much at his induction to the Songwriters Hall of Fame,” June adds. “Woody would always write to Uncle A.P. At one point, Uncle A.P. sent a him a telegram and Woody carried it ’til it was worn out in his billfold.”
When pressed — and not without also citing Mother Maybelle’s picking and the trio’s harmony singing — June says the Carter Family’s role as a repository of Anglo-Celtic ballads is her forebears’ most significant contribution to the music of the 20th century. “Uncle A.P. collected a lot of the ballads as they’d come across the mountain, or from different parts of the country,” she says. “There would be people from Ireland, from Scotland, from some of those places, that might have a poem, or even just a piece of a poem. Somewhere, they had to survive.”
As testimony to the ongoing power of this canon — one to which all country music, and much rock and pop, of the past 70 years refers — June framed her new album with a pair of Carter Family songs (“Diamonds In The Rough” and “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”).
“I put bookends on it,” she says. “My heart and soul is still a part of what my family was. I dedicate so much of what I’ve done to my mother, and to my Aunt Sara. They were both committed to doing the same kind of thing when they were together, to continuing on with it. I owe them so much, and still do.
“I think God put his hand on the Carter Family and said, ‘Okay, you can be A.P. Carter, you can be Maybelle Carter, you can be Sara Carter,'” June continues. “God also put his hand on people like Hank Williams, and said, ‘You can be Hank Williams,’ and to Johnny Cash, ‘You can be Johnny Cash.’ And God put his hand on Elvis Presley and said, ‘You can be Elvis Presley.’ But God has done that very few times. And God has been good enough to let me stand in the shadow of all these people — people that have either been very close to me, or that have been my blood. And somewhere God has said, ‘Okay, June, you are a part of this some way.'”
When ND contributing editor Bill Friskics-Warren pastored a small church on the Cumberland Plateau in the late ’80s, just about the only titles he recognized in the congregation’s shape-note hymnal were Carter Family songs.
