A footnote is worth a thousand words.

This is a detailed and highly readable biography of The Original Carter Family -- a group which, perhaps more than any other in all the world, defined the course of American "old-time country" music and its offshoots -- bluegrass, "classic" country, modern country. The hundreds of songs they recorded included many classics, and their style -- in particular, the guitar work of Maybelle Carter -- helped set the course for almost all musicians after her. For more than half a century -- through the lives of Maybelle, Sara, and A. P. Carter, and Maybelle's daughters Helen, June, and Anita Carter, and June's husband Johnny Cash -- they helped shape American music.

This book doesn't cover that very well. There are plenty of vital Carter Family songs that I don't recall hearing mentioned ("The Storms Are On the Ocean," "Give Me the Roses While I Live," "Gold Watch and Chain," "Hello Stranger," and "When the World's On Fire" are just a handful of examples). As far as discographic information goes, forget it. Also, the descriptions of the Carters' musical style is, let's just says, pretty meaningless if you haven't heard it; it's clear the authors aren't actually interested in musical technique. And the book really doesn't make clear how different the music of Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters was from the Original Carter Family (bluegrassers, you may insert an accordion joke here), and how the later Carters continued to turn more and more pop and less and less old-time country. This book isn't history; it's biography.

Of course, biography has its place, and that place is very important. Indeed, I wanted this book more for biography than history, because I wanted information about the personality traits of the Carters -- and found, indeed, some very intriguing information about A. P., the member of the Original Carter Family who didn't really play an instrument but who collected and edited most of their texts. The information about A. P., if accurate, is tremendously interesting and significant. If it's true.

But there's the rub. If it's true. There is no documentation! None, nada, nothing. At best, there may be a statement that "so-and-so says," but even that is rare, and most of what we read here is completely un-sourced.

Admittedly there is, in this case, a complete lack of written documentation; there are no diaries, no family histories, none of the things biographers love. The authors admit to have gotten their information from talking to people who knew the Carters. But this book was written twenty years after Sara and Maybelle died; it was written a century after many of the events it describes. Who was still around to tell these stories? And what checks did the authors make on those very old memories? No way to tell. At a number of places (e.g. in descriptions of the way the earliest Carter recordings were made), we know that the book is wrong (the recordings were made electrically, not acoustically). So I find it very hard to trust this book.

If you just want information about the Carters, this is probably the best source out there. But don't treat it as gospel. At best, it's someone else's sermons on a gospel text. ( )

I've always been curious about the Carter Family and their music, but I wasn't expecting such an interesting story with such good writing. ( )

Don't read too many 'show-biz' biographies but I found the entire story so fascinating that I gave it 4.5 stars. Well worth the price for anyone with more than a passing interest in the real roots of country music. I bought a 5-CD compilation of Carter Family original recordings about half-way through this book and it really transformed the experience! To read a description of the very first song recorded at Bristol in 1927 (Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow Tree) is one thing but to actually hear it (with the inevitable scratchy recording) is well, nearly transcendent. Buy them both! ( )

An impressive biography of the Carter Family, one of the earliest country music acts in the US. The book traces the history of the original three members of the group (A.P. Carter, his wife Sara, and his sister-in-law Maybelle), the quasi-replacement group of "The Carter Sisters" (Maybelle and her daughters), and short biographies of various people whose lives intersected (among them Ralph Peer, Jimmy Rogers, Dr. John R. Brinkley, and Johnny Cash) with the family. Their story is almost made for TV: a poor family that had no music industry connections happens to audition during the famous Bristol Sessions (going in through the fire escape so not to be embarrassed by their clothing), their resulting popularity, followed by their fading away into obscurity only to be found again by a later generation. The author is clearly a music fan but does not shy from the more difficult parts of the history, like Sara's divorce from A.P. which effectively ended the (original) group.

I did have a few minor complaints. First, there are a few places where the author just dumps song titles out with very little context. For readers without a strong knowledge of the Carter Family discography, there's no way to tell if there were certain themes amongst those songs. (Likewise, the author would sometimes hint about a song, perhaps calling it "sorrowful," without providing the lyrics to back up that statement.) Second, the book had folksy language in some odd places. For example, in describing a distant relative, "He'd been a bit of a heller when he was young, even took a drink now and then. But when [he] got religion, he got it whole hog." There were enough of those quirky phrases that made them stand out. Finally, although the book talks about the 60s folk revival "finding" the Carter Family and re-introducing them to music fans, there's not a lot about the Carter Family Fold, the museum/stage where the family's music is still performed. But these were just small points in an otherwise important book for those interested in the history of country music.

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LT Haiku:

Gives the sunny and
Not so sunny sides of life
Of Carter singers. ( )

Fascinating biography of the Carter Family. Besides the family history (which is interesting in its own right, with the unrequited love and people dying of tuberculosis all the time), he talks about folk music, the early recording industry, and the folk revival of the 60s and 70s. I didn't know a lot of this stuff. I hadn't realized that Maybelle Carter was active for so long. ( )