Janette and Joe Carter Biography

Janette and Joe Carter Biography

 Since 1974 Janette and Joe, the children of Sara Carter of American music's celebrated Carter Family, have been holding Saturday-night concerts in Hiltons, Virginia, where their father Alvin Pleasant Carter ran a store for many years after his marriage to their mother ended. In 1976 the Carter children built a barn/concert venue on the property, calling it the Carter Fold ("fold" defined as "gathering place"), where they continue to perform every Saturday night along with other traditional mountain musicians. In 2004, Janette was 81, Joe 77. They have recorded only rarely, so Last of Their Kind is a happy occasion, notwithstanding the consideration that few of their songs keep on the sunny side. The tone is autumnal to wintry, and a sense of history and mortality extends from the title onward, to hang on nearly every note and lyric. A. P., Sara, and Maybelle are all gone, and so are Maybelle's children who shared stages with their mother, uncle, and aunt as the Carter Girls (June, Helen, and Anita). Johnny Cash died in September 2003, just a few months after his beloved June. The influence of the original Carters, often called the first family of country music, on modern Nashville music -- much of it no longer "country" by any conceivable definition -- is for all practical purposes nonexistent. It is left to bluegrass bands, old-time outfits, and folk singers to keep the legacy and the repertoire alive. Joe and Janette represent the last generation of actual Carters to do so.

Joe and Janette's approach is as unadorned as it could get this side of field-recorded unaccompanied singing. She plays autoharp, her brother guitar. Here, under Johnny and June's son John Carter Cash's unobtrusive production, they are joined on occasion by Laura Cash (John Carter's wife) on fiddle or guitar, Jerry Hensley or Larry Perkins on guitar, and Dennis Crouch on stand-up bass. Theirs are old, cracked voices, and they make no concession to any conventional notion of prettiness or perfection. Either you accept them that way, or you don't. Five of the songs are from the original Carters. They include "Little Darling, Pal of Mine" (Woody Guthrie adapted its melody for a song of his own, "This Land Is Your Land"), "Stern Old Bachelor" (as close to humor as Janette and Joe get), and an especially touching "The Poor Orphan Child," in my hearing the album's finest moment. In other hands a song with a title like "Pole It, Reba," one of Joe's originals, would be a bawdy barroom sing-along, but here it's a slight ballad about an outlaw and his Cajun wife's flight via peerow down a Louisiana river. A more fully realized Joe composition is "Through the Eyes of an Eagle," a vividly imagined gospel song in which God watches over tragedies that unfolded during the settling of the West.