No one can embarrass someone quite like their parent, but as Johnny Cash learned while watching his stepdaughter, Carlene Carter, play New York City’s The Bottom Line in October 1979, the opposite can certainly be true, too. According to Carter, the daughter of June Carter and her first husband, Carl Smith, she had “never known such embarrassment.”
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To be fair, it didn’t seem like the Man in Black did, either.
Carlene Carter Unknowingly Embarrassed Johnny Cash
Carlene Carter, born Rebecca Carlene Smith, began her career in the late 1970s with the release of her eponymous debut. She combined her country roots with modern elements of hard rock and glam, leading newspapers like the New York Times to describe her as “the tough-talking, hard-core country beauty with a heart of gold somewhere down there beneath all the tawdry flash.” Tough-talking indeed.
Carter was performing at The Bottom Line in New York City in early October 1979 when, unknowingly, her folks showed up to watch her set. From the stage, she was none the wiser that Johnny Cash and June Carter were sitting in the crowd. Carlene got through a few covers and a handful of originals before getting to “Swap-Meat Rag,” which she later described to Rolling Stone as “a song about husband-swapping.” Speaking to the crowd, Carlene said, “If this song doesn’t put the c*** back in country, nothing will.”
Racy in any 1979 setting. But in front of your parents? It wasn’t until after the show was over that Carlene realized she had said her off-hand remark in front of her mother and stepfather. “Mama and John come backstage, and John was so red-in-the-face mad at me,” she later recalled. “The first thing I said was, ‘Mama, mama. I’m so sorry I said that word!’ And she goes, ‘What word, honey?’”
“I’ve never known such embarrassment,” she told Rolling Stone. “My sister, Cindy, told me later that John said, ‘Carlene looked right at me and said that.’ It was all just a rude portrait of my set, and it just came out. I got “Quote of the Year” in Playboy.”
Honoring Her Familial Legacy In Her Own Way
Carlene Carter talking about putting the c*** back in country might have been enough to make Johnny Cash blush. But it was a testament to how the young singer was choosing to honor her family roots, albeit in a way that was shocking to some of the more straight-laced attendees, stepfathers included. Carter had been a natural performer since her childhood days watching her mother, June Carter, on The Johnny Cash Show. “I just walked out, looked up at the microphone, and said, ‘I wanna talk in that!’” Carlene recalled to Rolling Stone in 1980.
And indeed, Carlene came from quite the stock. Her mother, of course, was a country icon. Her grandmother, Maybelle Carter, even more so. “I didn’t realize how much my grandmother had to do with country music in every sense until I was seventeen or eighteen,” Carlene said. “On one tour, they decided I should be in the Carter Family. We opened for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in Morgantown, West Virginia, and Mother Maybelle got a standing ovation when she walked onstage. Millions of kids in this huge place, and all of them knew who my grandma was. I just went, ‘Godd***.’ I learned a whole lot from her about getting along.”
Her stepfather had his own iconic legacy as the Man in Black (and as the man who bought Carlene her first electric guitar). So, as much as Cash didn’t enjoy the way Carlene expressed herself, there is something to be said about the fact that she was doing it, guitar in hand, just like the family that came before her.
Photo by Roberta Bayley/Redferns
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