Carlene Carter Comes Full Circle

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When she got a little older, Carter started being part of the act. “There was a period of time when I was about 16 or 17 when I started going out with Grandma and Helen and Anita, my cousin David, who was Helen’s son, and my cousin Lorrie (Lorrie Frances Davis) who was Anita’s daughter.” Mother June had married Johnny Cash at this point and gone on the road with him. But when Carlene stepped onstage at least one of her aunts wanted her to be a surrogate for her mother, which often proved difficult.”Helen thought I was just mama. She’d go into these weird comic acts where she’d say ‘Tell us about the old hen out at the barn.’ And I would go, ‘What?’ I would have no idea what she was talking about. She thought I knew mama’s old corny jokes.” (Before she hooked up with the man in black, June Carter was quite the corn pone country comic, chewing scenery, hiking up her skirt to show off her boomers when she did some frenetic clogging onstage and delivering down home humor in the vein of Minnie Pearl.) “So I wound up on the hot seat a lot. She’d say, ‘OK, do the mudhole!’And I’d have to remember how to do that, which is one of mama’s silly little things that she used to do. They just threw us in the frying pan and you had to learn how to do it pretty quick. Helen would pick out a song that I had never heard and the funny thing about these was that a lot of them I just kinda knew by osmosis. And others, I found once I had sang with them I had never really learned all the verses. I only ever knew one verse and the choruses,” she says, laughing. “’Cause that’s what you get when you got that many people up there singing.”

She’s obviously studied up on the lyrics for the record, but some of the songs get a partial makeover, like patriarch A.P.’s. “Lonesome Valley,” remade with the co-writing help of Al Anderson as “Lonesome Valley 2003”with Vince Gill singing Family-style harmony on the heartbreaking tribute to her mother and stepfather’s passing. “Woke to the sound of my baby sister crying like the day she was born,” Carter mournfully announces as she relates the tale of how she “Talked to God and Jesus and all them guys” but figured out by the chorus that you got walk that lonesome valley all by yourself.

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As long as he was alive, stepfather John tried to make sure that she knew how to walk the walk onstage and off. “I got to stand on the side of the stage and be on the stage and watch a real entertainer every night” she says. “He also was a great daddy to me and Rosie.” Even though they didn’t get married til Carter was 12, he was very much a part of her life from the time she was about 8 or 9 years old. “But they were both still married to other people, so it was kind of awkward. He was just Johnny Cash that mama worked for. But he and I had a wonderful, loving close relationship.” He called her Sparkle, and told her from the time he first met her what great potential he thought she had. “He said, ‘You can go on stage and have ’em eatin’ out of your hand like your mama can.’ I didn’t want to hear any of that stuff because it was too weird for me,” Carter says, “but he meant it as a compliment.” But his main piece of advice to his stepdaughter was that it was always about the songs. “Always, always, always about the songs. That was another important thing, that in the family was not that we had to be songwriters, but it was part of being a musician. You could own it. And the other thing he did instill in me is be unique. Be your authentic self. Don’t try to be like everybody else. Just go out there and be yourself, always. Don’t try to fit in, because that’s like trying to stick a round peg in a square hole. If you know anything about me, you know that’s been true,” she laughs.

But in 1979 during a gig at New York City’s Bottom Line to promote Two Sides to Every Woman, Carter found out that being unique has it’s drawbacks. She introduced her song, “Swap Meat Rag” from by saying “If this song doesn’t put the c**t back in country, nothing will.”

She doesn’t hesitate to talk about it, but with one stipulation: “Don’t put that c-word in there,” she says, laughing nervously. “Oh gosh, that’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done publicly. I was young, it was a joke that I had told the guys in the band, and it just popped out and I honestly, truly did not know my parents were in the audience or it would have never happened. And I was living in England and that word was thrown around a lot in a much more kind of ha-ha way than it’s perceived in America. For that I’m truly sorry and I hate that my grandkids will probably get asked about it.”

No word on that as of yet, but when stepsister Rosanne was asked in a tweet if the quote was hers, she said, “No! That was Carloonie Carter.”

“It’s haunted me all my life, Carter says. “So for that I’m really sorry, Rose. She would never do anything like that. I was just full of piss and vinegar and my mom blamed anything I did that was a little off color on my father(country singer Carl Smith) and said, ‘That’s just the Smith in you.’ ”

And even though Johnny Cash believed otherwise, Carlene swears she didn’t know her parents were there till after the show. “As soon as I came off stage my band says, ‘Hey! Saw your parents in the audience. They’re right in front.’ And it was just in that spot where you can’t see from the light? And I couldn’t see them sitting there. Not in a million years would I have embarrassed them that way. So they come backstage and I just whispered in Mama’s ear, and I said ‘Mama, I am so sorry I said that word.’ And she looks me straight in the eye and goes, ‘What word, honey?’ Now John, on the other hand, was grittin’ his teeth pretty good, didn’t talk to me a whole lot for the next month, finally got over it. We all bust our britches some time or the other.”

She means that literally, referring to the time Cash split his pants during a white house engagement. Carlene’s mama warned her husband that she thought he was getting too big for his britches, all swole up about being selected to do the gig and that his overconfidence could lead to disaster. While taking his bows, he split his pants. “We all bust out our jeans, it’s not good. But that’s one of the only regrets of anything I’ve ever done on stage,” Carter says.

There was a lot of hoo-rah in the press for awhile with Playboy selecting it as the quote of the year, but Carter says it didn’t have any real negative affect on her career. “Honestly, I got more press out of it than I got out of any music thing I did.” Carter says that Elton John’s ex-wife and former singing partner Kiki Dee, whom Carter befriended in ’85 when the two costarred in the UK production of Pump Boys and Dinettes told her “’Dahling, measure it, don’t read it,’ in regards to anything to do with the press, and I’ve never forgotten that.”

But Carter needn’t worry about negative press for this effort. It’s a heartfelt, exquisitely done tribute to her family that encompasses three generations. “I was told as a young child that my job was to carry on the music, keep it alive,” she says. “And in doing that, becoming a songwriter too meant that my songs are Carter songs, it’s just a different generation, as was Mama and Helen and Anita’s stuff.”

She’s included husband Joe Breen in her musical family as well. Married to Carter since ’06, the former As The World Turns soap opera star appeared on Carters last album as well. “I call him ‘the voice,’” Carter says, noting that he studied opera at Julliard. “People in our neighborhood used to call him opera man cause he’d go out in the back yard and just start singing beautiful Italian operas. And they didn’t know his name, they just called him opera man: ‘Oh, you’re married to opera man.”

Carter says Breen was very supportive of her doing the record.’ “He kept saying,’It’s time, it’s time, for you to do this.’”

Carter had thought of it before, but just wasn’t ready. In ’05, she was doing a musical tribute to her mother, aunt and grandmother, a musical staged in Nashville called Wildwood Flowers: The June Carter Story. But since it was only two years after her mother had died, it was difficult for her to get through a performance without breaking down. Carter portrayed her mother, and cousin Lorrie played her mother, Anita. “Doing that play and having to channel my mother nightly was very emotional but healing at the same time because for a long time I couldn’t sing any of these songs without bursting into tears, because I just missed them so much, missed the voices,” Carter says. “When me and Lorrie would sing together we’d just be blubbering, and it would take us a long time to get to where we can actually smile through all of this and look at it in a different way instead of grieving through it.” She says it was important to have Lorrie join her on the Carter Girl project.”She absolutely needed to be on it. She was there just as much as I was.”

Carter is getting ready to go out and tour to promote the album with a one woman show, “tell lots of stories, which I have a ton of and let people in on what was really happening.” She intends to carry on the Carter Family tradition, bringing the timeless music to new generations. “I still get to do what I love to do, the only thing I know how to do,” she laughs. I’d be in big trouble if I couldn’t keep doing this. But honestly, I just love playin’ and singin’ and performin’. I love an audience, and every night’s different. That’s the greatest thing in the world.”

But she would like to be remembered for her own songs as well.”Any time I write a song, I hope I can touch somebody in some way that helps them have a better day,” she says. “And I always say a prayer before I go onstage with my little band. We all hold hands and I say: ‘Dear Lord, thank you for all the gifts that you have given us, and being able to play and sing and go out there. Now, please Lord, let us rock like hell!”

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