Short Film Clip - Mountain Dew- The Carter Family In Film- A PBS Documentary Review

 

Film Clip

Will The Circle Be Unbroken, The Carter Family. PBS

I have reviewed the various CD’d put out by the Carter Family elsewhere in this space. Many of the thoughts expressed there apply here, as well. The recent, now somewhat eclipsed, renewed interest in the mountain music of the 1920’s and 30’s highlighted in such films as The Song Catcher and Brother, Where Art Thou necessarily had to create a renewed interest in the Carter Family. I might add that the success of the Walk the Line about the relationship between the legendary Johnny Cash and one of the next generations of Carter’s, June expanded on that base.

What this PBS production has done, and done well, is put the music of the Carters in perspective as it relates to their time, their religious sentiments and their roots in the simple mountain lifestyle. I have mentioned elsewhere and it bears repeating here that this fundamentalist religious sentiment expressed throughout their work does not have that same razor-edged feel that we find with today’s evangelicals. They took their beating during the Scopes Trial era and turned inward. Fair enough. That thy also produced some very simple and interesting music is the product of that withdrawal.    

 

From the Pen Of Peter Paul Markin- Will The Circle Be Unbroken- The Songs Of The Carter Family

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Carter Family performing the old-time Under The Weeping Willow Tree.

In my jaded youth I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. The origin of that interest first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House , Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James. Then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Roy, Big Joe and Ike, and later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, folk music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, Joan Baez, etc.

I have often wondered about the source of this interest. I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully rooted in any of the niches mentioned above, or others. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music and so on. The subject of the following review, The Carter Family, and their influence on mountain music is an example.

With the relatively recent spate of mountain music films, George Clooney’s Brother, Where Art Thou, The Song-catcher and the Johnny Cash movie biography Walk The Line the Carter Family has again come into greater public prominence. And rightly so. The original trio (A.P., Ruth, May belle) performed simple country (or better rural) music mainly composed by A.P. Carter that evoked, if not a simpler time, then in any case, a simpler type of music. While I cannot listen endlessly to such music at one sitting about one-half a CD at a time works. Why not the whole CD? There is a very similar melody and guitar line to their work in most songs. The value of each song sometimes gets lost in the basic repetition.

A note on subject matter- The bulk of the songs concern home, hearth lovesickness, the vagaries of nature (god’s nature) and religion as might be expected from mountain people (and not just mountain people come to think of it). And that is okay. This reviewer, although not a religious man, can appreciate the simple, fundamentalist but very personal religion evoked here. The god evoked against hard times, hard struggle and righteousness against a seemingly intractable land and forward, ever forward. Not to romanticize the simple rural folk of the past but I do not believe that the religious sentiments expressed in old time mountain music are the same as those of religious fundamentalists today who want to ram a theocracy down our throats in the United States today. Those were people awestruck by the tasks before them and did not need to be “born again” (or see every last citizen in that condition) to appreciate that burden.