Kerfuffle Erupts at Carter Family Fold

UPDATE: The Bristol Herald Courier has a guest op-ed piece responding to Dale Jett's forced resignation from the Fold's board of directors. Jett doesn't have much to say about the details, but the writer makes it clear that Jett's loyalty to his family's heritage has never wavered: "I am first, a member of the Carter family."



According to an article in the Richmond Post-Dispatch, the Carter Family Fold board booted the grandson of Sara and A.P. Carter. Ron McConnell, a walking wealth of information on country music, alerted me to the story.

Apparently, the dispute is over a collection of audio recordings that Dale Jett, the country-music legends' grandson and a long-time member of the Carter Family Memorial Music Center's board of directors, gave to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


In December Jett was formally voted off the board. The article says:

At the heart of the dispute was an April 2007 agreement that Jett signed
with UNC. Under the deal, Jett sent about 4,000 audiocassettes containing 1,500
hours of live performances from the Carter Fold to the school's Southern
Folklife Collection, (board President Howard) Klein said.

"This began as a project to find the best way to preserve 30 years of tape
recordings from the Fold," Klein said. "I don't know when it changed into giving
the collection away. The board never knew about this."

Klein's account is disputed by Maxine Kenny, former project director for a
grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities to preserve the Carter
Fold's audio archives. Kenny, who left the project in response to Jett's
departure, said in a written statement that the board was notified of the
agreement with UNC in April, the month it was signed.

The dear Janette Carter - Jett's late mother - created the fold in 1974 in tribute to her parents A.P. and Sara and her aunt "Mother Maybelle." The threesome's 1927 recordings made in Bristol, Tenn. - along with Jimmie Rodgers - are usually referred to as the "Big Bang" of country music.


For folks who haven't been to the Fold, it's an amazing experience, a place filled with music lovers of all ages and from all around the world. Tucked into a corner of Poor Valley, Va. at the foot of Clinch Mountain, the Fold is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of old-time country and folk music with performances every Saturday night. The music is all acoustic and in the history of the Fold, Miss Janette granted exceptions and permitted plug ins for only two performers: Johnny Cash and Marty Stuart.


While I have never met Jett, I can say his sister Rita Forrester is a lovely, lovely woman. Within minutes of meeting her, I felt as if we'd been friends forever. On one of my visits, she made it possible for me to spend a Sunday afternoon with her mother, not long before Miss Janette passed away. I sat with her in her tiny living room filled with porcelain angels as she talked about her life and the history of her family. It will remain forever one of my most treasured memories.


As Ron McConnell said in an e-mail, "Let's hope (the controversy) gets worked out." I agree. I hate to see such a wonderful place be disrupted by disharmony.


For more information on the Fold and its events, go here.

Time Capsules from the Fallout Shelter...

The Louvin Brothers: Satan is Real

So, couple years ago, I’m standing in a Nashville bar. Up on stage a white-haired old man, a little unsteady on his feet, is singing and playing guitar. Next to me, a giddy kid in his early 20s shouts to no one in particular, “I’m watching Charlie fuckin’ Louvin!”

I look over at him and tip my beer bottle in salute. That’s right, I think. A piece of history right there in front of us. Charlie…fuckin’ … Louvin.

In the 50s, Charlie Louvin and his brother Ira were arguably the biggest country duo act in the business.

Born in the 1920s, the brothers were raised in an impoverished region of the Appalachian mountains in Alabama. As boys, Charlie (born Charlie Elzer Loudermilk) and Ira (born Lonnie Ira Loudermilk) grew up listening to the close-harmony country brother duets of the Blue Sky Boys, the Delmore Brothers and the Monroe Brothers. Ira took up the mandolin while Charlie picked up the guitar, and they honed their harmonies singing gospel songs in church.. Their first professional gig was playing the early morning show at a small Chattanooga radio station.

While they started out in gospel, by the 50s, the Louvin Brothers had successfully moved to mainstream country and were riding a string of top 10 hits. In 1955, after ten unsuccessful auditions, they were finally accepted into the Grand Ole Opry. Still, their gospel tunes remained a significant part of their appeal and were often sung at all-night church revivals in the south.

Satan is Real, a collection of gospel tunes sung in the brothers’ signature tight high-country harmonies, was their second all-gospel album and their most successful. The album was re-released on CD in 1996 - only a couple of years after Uncle Tupelo released its cover of the Louvin Brothers’ Great Atomic Power on the band’s March 16-20 1992 recording.

Since then, hipsters have been working to reintroduce Charlie Louvin’s stellar career to a new generation. In 2003, Carl Jackson produced a tribute album Livin', Lovin' Losin': Songs of the Louvin Brothers. And a year ago, Charlie released his own batch of re-recordings on a CD bearing his name, which features performances by Jeff Tweedy and Superchunk's Mac McCaughan.

Still, even with all the recent attention, it’s worth revisiting the original recordings for a glimpse at The Louvin Brothers before they were outside-the-mainstream trendy, back when they were merely straight-up popular, before they were re-interpreted by irony-fueled youngsters.

Because the thing I've always wondered about them is how much of their act was unabashed sincerity – and how much were they putting us on?

Their genius is in the fact that you can never quite tell. And that’s why their original stuff is so much fun.

The original cover of Satan is Real bears the over-the-top cover art of Ira and Charlie dressed in white and gesticulating before a sea of flames and a cross-eyed gap-toothed cardboard cutout devil. Charlie tells the story that Ira came up with the cover concept himself. But in their exuberance, they got carried away and the two were almost killed by the flames and chunks of exploding rock.

The first tune, Satan is Real, features Ira’s spoken testimony, accompanied by the soft strains of organ music, as he witnesses to Satan’s awesome power:

“Preacher, tell them that Satan is real too. You can hear him in songs that give praise to idols and sinful things of this world.”

Confession: Hank Williams III’s Straight to Hell has been in heavy rotation on my I-pod lately and I have trouble listening to the Louvin Brothers’ original version of Satan is Real without hearing in my head Hank III’s own medley version in which he sings, “The sheriff wants to kill me ‘cause I fucked his wife.”

Ain’t hard to figure out where that boy’s coming from.

Certainly Ira, known for his drunken brawls and drug abuse, would have earned Hank III’s outlaw respect. After the brothers broke up in 1963, Ira’s third wife shot him three times during a serious drinking binge. He survived the shooting, only to die, along with his fourth wife, in a car crash in 1965.

So you really gotta wonder when he sings, as he did on The Christian Life:

I won’t lose a friend by heeding God’s call
For what is a friend who’d want
you to fall
Others find pleasure in things I despise
I like the Christian
life

I think if you listen really, really carefully, you might hear in the background the soft-subtle sound of a wink.

Or maybe not.

You can buy Satan in Real here.

Madalyn's BonesGURF MORLIX - DiamondsTo Dust(Blue Corn Music)

So, I'm listening to Gurf Morlix's terrific song about Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the Austin atheist famous for ending - through a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision - the subjection of this nation's children to forced Bible readings and prayer in public school.

Morlix sings, "The last thing she wanted was for them to roll back the stone, and be praying over Madalyn's bones."

The ding of my e-mail inbox alerts me to a "Prayer Alert" from the Institute for Creation Research. (Tracking evangelical attacks on public education is kind of a hobby of mine.) The alert asks supporters to pray that it's proposed graduate program on creation science - which teaches us that science proves dinosaurs bobbed up and down on Noah's Ark and the Earth is 6,000 years old - is approved in Texas.

Sigh. Some things never change.

Morlix's latest CD, Diamonds to Dust, is filled with subtle references to this acknowledgement ... of time marching on, but of nothing changing ... not really. The last time he sings the chorus, Morlix changes the phrase slightly: "The last thing she wanted was for them to roll back the stone. Now they're praying over Madalyn's bones."

In his typically understated way - He has made a career out of being the sideman to some of the greatest talents in the business - Morlix weaves quiet tales of living and dying that are no doubt too subversive for the cheery confines of corporate radio.

Which is a sin ... If you believe in that sort of thing. If you're not much into religious dogma - as Morlix hints in his lyrics that he might not be - you could believe that the lack of mainstream airplay is just simply and terribly wrong.

For in his spare lyrics and production are some beautiful and provocative observations.

Morlix is best known as Lucinda Williams' long-time collaborator until a parting of the ways over the recording of her Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. But the rest of Morlix's discography reads like a must-have list of the best of Americana music. Over the years, he has played guitar and other instruments and produced for such artists as Eliza Gilkyson, Mary Gauthier, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Blaze Foley, Slaid Cleaves, Julie Miller, Robert Earl Keen, Buddy Miller...The full list can be found here.

Diamonds to Dust, is Morlix's fourth solo CD and was released in 2007 by Blue Corn Music. It spent six months in the top 40 of the AMA Americana charts and has been a consistent favorite of music critics. A professional musician for other folks since 1966, Morlix has clearly found his voice.

One of the CD's most moving songs is Blankets, which was inspired by the passing of Morlix's friends Warren Zevon and former roadie Chris Slemmer. A tribute to the grace with which Zevon left this world, the song features Patty Griffin's soaring harmonies that contrast well with the gritty realism of Morlix's voice:

...there's something you can't never know, is how you feel when the anchor let's go.

I've never wondered 'bout how it would be. I've wandered the world like I was holding the key.

I'm beginning to shiver. I'm beginning to see. If you got a blanket, won't you put it on me.

Morlix also includes a haunting cover of Bob Dylan's anti-war song With God on Our Side. But as I was listening to this song, I was startled by one particular reference that I swore had to be taken from Gen. Tommy Franks response to the press when asked about dead Iraqi civilians, "We don't do body counts."

I actually checked the lyrics to see if Morlix might have updated them for relevancy. He didn't. He didn't need to. Time doesn't change.

The reason for fighting I never did get

But I learned to accept it, accept it with pride

For you don't count your dead when God's on your side.

You can listen / buy Gurf Morlix's Diamonds to Dust here.

Ranting to the words of Hank Williams III...

...Well, I think I'd rather eat the barrel,
Of a double-barrel loaded shotgun,
Than to hear that shit they call pop-country music,
On ninety-eight-point-one.

I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone says it better.


Tune into one of those country music stations (Radio is so dead.) and it's the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy, nothing but a sea of vapid insipidness. We endure either the zany antics of the Redneck Woman ... (For the record, Gretchen, leaving your Christmas lights on year round and saying, "Hell yeah," does not qualify for redneck status. Stab your boyfriend in the neck with a fork, then maybe we've got something.)

... or the utter emasculation of manhood:

And I know in the big picture
I'm just a speck of sand
and God's got better things to do
than look out for one man.
I know he's heard my prayers
cause he hears everything,
he just ain't answered back
or he'd bring you back to me.
God must be busy.

Ahhh, Brooks and Dunn? You're such pussies.

And while I'm on the subject, in keeping with the utter lameness of what passes for Nashville music, no cliched urban phrase may ever be claimed by a country singer until all shred of what might have once passed for cool is wrung out of it so that even your parents are well enough aware to banish it from their vocabulary, and won't use it even in an ironic sense.

As Trace Adkins croons, "...that honky tonk badonkadonk..."

I predict that in 2010, some Nashville songwriter will pen a song which will feature "Fo' shizzle, ma nizzle." As in, perhaps, "...Her steak can really sizzle" Seriously.

Aren't there any ... Oh, what's the word? ... Stirring? Provocative? ... country music songs out there anymore? Aren't there any real songwriters left in Nashville?

Well, as Hank Williams III (God bless his genes) tells us, "They're too busy kissin' ass on music row."

Or as Kev Russell of The Gourds once put it to his fans, "Nashville is the Death Star and Austin is the Federation Rebel Base."

Shimmy, shimmy cocoa puff, Dog.

BRIANNA LANE - Let You In(Pay My Rent Music)

Down-to-Earth Americana Goodness

On her MySpace page, Brianna Lane lists a number of female singers that she sounds like: Shawn Colvin, Jonatha Brooke, Suzanne Vega, Aimee Mann. The list goes on.

But she misses the one singer who immediately jumps to mind - at least my mind. On her third self-released CD, "let you in," Lane croons with the same sweet I'm-just-taking-my-time-here-so-grab-that-bottle-of-whiskey-and-join-me style of Rickie Lee Jones.

Her intimate just-this-side-of-breathless voice plays well off the confessional narrative of her lyrics. In True North, Lane uses lovely lyrical imagery as she sings of wandering through the desert. "We were angels caught in the windstorm. We lost our halos. We lost our true north...We were shouting, Jesus saves you. No one listenin' to the preacher."

Lane describes herself as belonging to the "alterna-folkie" genre - and her songs do indeed remind one of the above referenced Shawn Colvin and Jonatha Brooke. She grew up in Minnesota, but for the past three years she has been touring non-stop.

Evan Brubaker produced the all-acoustic "Let you in," as well as Lane's second CD, "Radiator." But "Let you in" differs markedly from the electric-guitar-and-drum instrumentation of Lane's previous effort. Her latest CD features upright bassist Keith Lowe who has worked closely with Bill Frisell, Laura Veirs, Fiona Apple and Dave Mathews. Seattle's Zak Borden plays some very pretty mandolin and singer/songwriter Jonathan Kingham adds dobro and banjo to a few tracks.

To listen to sample tracks, visit Lane's MySpace page at: http://www.myspace.com/briannalane

You can listen / buy Brainna Lane's Let You In here.