Carlene Carter Fan Club: Press

(This article is from the archives of Baby Ride Easy, the Carlene Carter fan site run by Doug Stalnaker 2003-2008.)

"Carlene Carter's hillbilly royalty whether she wants to be or not," said Marty Stuart recently of his former sister-in-law. "She's really a descendant of the Queen of Country Music, Maybelle Carter."

It's true. As the daughter of country stars Carl Smith and June Carter and the stepdaughter of Johnny Cash, Carlene Carter has a musical pedigree second to none.

Yet she turned her back on her native Nashville in order to spend eight years honing a keen rock'n'roll sensibility in post-punk London. The result was that while her half-sister Rosanne Cash has evolved into a country superstar over the past decade, it has taken Carlene almost that long just to gain recognition.

But in 1990 she re-emerged on Reprise Records with the raunchy I Fell In Love and found success again last year with the quintessential country-rock album, Little Love Letters, both produced by her current beau, Howie Epstein. She's come a long way from Madison, Tennessee where she was born Rebecca Carlene Smith on September 26, 1955.

She took to music early, playing piano from six years old and taking guitar lessons from her grandmother, the legendary Maybelle Carter, at age 10.

"She didn't really teach me my first stuff," says Carlene, setting the record straight, "My Mom did. And then my Grandma taught me more things later. I didn't really realize the impact she'd had on country music, or that she was anything other than just a really cool grandma who went fishin' with me and taught me how to play poker and all those really fun things that grandmothers indulge their grandaughters in.

"I got a really good upbringin' from her," she continues, "And then when I got interested in playin' the guitar it was just a natural thing for her 'cause all of her kids had done that. It went without sayin'."

Some might think that following in the footsteps of a country music legend was a pretty tough road to travel. "If you ever really sat down and started thinkin' about that, it would be so overwhelming you might wanna run and hide," she laughs, "so you just don't think of it in those terms, because it's just your family.

"The Carter Family just got their (postage) stamp, and I look at that stamp and I look at my little Grandma's face on there and it just blows me away. She just didn't have any idea of what she had done. She was just this little woman from the mountains of West Virginia."

After leaving Henderson High School where she had been a cheerleader, Carlene was married at 16 to Joe Simpkins and had a daughter named Tiffany, but the marriage ended in divorce two years later. On leaving college, she worked for a while as a model, joining her mother and stepfather on the road later on, and singing on Johnny Cash's curiously-titled family album of 1974, The Junkie And The Juicehead Minus Me.

"Actually, I didn't really work with them on a serious basis," says Carlene, going on to recall some fond memories, "As a kid, joining in was a real normal process. Travelling with them, they always included us kids, myself, my cousin David, my cousin Laurie or my sister Rosie, whoever was there. We'd all jump out there and do our thing."

Around this time she met Jack Routh, a writer with Johnny Cash's publishing company. Within three months they were married and had a son, John Jackson Routh, but this union, too, was short-lived, and the couple separated in 1977. The same year Carlene moved to London with here new boyfriend Rodney Crowell and made an eponymous upbeat debut album that boasted contributions from ex-Brinsley Schwartz bass player and West Lond pub-rock luminary Nick Lowe, as well as Graham Parker and the Rumour. The album also included Crowell's Never Together, But Close Sometimes, which was a minor hit in the UK.

"One of the guys had worked with Brinsley Schwartz," she says, naming no names, "and he had this vision of putting a real straight ahead country blueblood with a British rock band and seeing what the hybrid would be like. And I was very interested in that because at that time country music was kinda goin' in a direction that I wasn't interested in. It was pretty milk toasty kind of, and a lot of long dresses and high collars. It was just not really what I wanted to do, and that's how I ended up in England.

"I came there to work with Dave Edmunds, and I actually ended up doin' a record with the Rumour. It seemed like a completely idiotic thing to be doin', but creatively it was really fun."

So how did New Wave London compare with her conventional Nashville background?

"It was so exciting and creative," she recalls animatedly. "I was given total freedom to experiment, to do whatever I wanted to do. Nashville's always been really big on parameters and setting boundaries on their artists: 'Oh, don't go over there because radio won't like it,' or 'Don't do this' and 'Don't do that'. And going to London I was suddenly completely free. I could do anything I wanted to do. And that lasted for a pretty long time."

Made in New York, her follow-up album, Two Sides To Every Woman, saw her struggling with a series of dance tracks, and it was while promoting it at a New York club that she introduced the song Swap-Meat Rag with the now notorius pronouncement, "If this doesn't put the c**t back into country music, nothing will."

This earned her Playboy magazine's Quote of the Year Award, but Johnny Cash and June Carter, who were in the audience at the time, were not amused.

1979 was also the year that Nick Lowe became her third husband. In addition to having his own hits with I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass, Crackin' Up, and Cruel To Be Kind, Lowe had produced many of Stiff Records' early artists including The Rumour, Elvis Costello and Dr. Feelgood, before forming Rockpile with Dave Edmunds. It was therefore not surprising that he should produce her next album, Musical Shapes, in 1980.

Despite the influence of some of London's heaviest rockers, Carlene didn't stray too far from her roots, as included on Shapes were a rocked-up, synth-backed version of Johnny Cash's Ring Of Fire, a duet with Dave Edmunds on Richard Dobson's Baby Ride Easy (a hit in the US) and the Carter Family classic, Foggy Mountain Top. How difficult was it to achieve a balance between post-punk and pure country?

"It wasn't difficult," she replies with an incredulous laugh. "It was just that it didn't fly on radio, or in Nashville. They wouldn't accept me as a country artist in 1979 or 1980. They said if I'd ever just straighten up and do a straight country album, I might be good."

The album also included her own Appalachian Eyes and Too Bad About Sandy. In the aftermath of k.d. lan, Nanci Griffith and Mary-Chapin Carpenter, it can now be seen as a blueprint for what would later be called New Country.

As a result, by 1980 Carlene was being hailed as one of the queens of the post-rockabilly age. Her next album, Blue Nun, was an explicit celebration of sex that subordinated her country influences to Lowe's obsession for 1960 R&B. Hardly surprising, as Lowe had co-written nearly half of the songs on it. It also spawned the single, Do Me Lover, which mad the US country chart that year. But, despite soulful help from Squeeze's Paul Carrack, the album was not as well-received as her earlier outings.

"Basically, I was just searching for a certain cross between what I felt naturally and what was happening in the world. It was normal for me to want to fit in someplace and I didn't fit in country, so the recore companies were suggesting that I go more rock. It was just kind of a dizzy time."

Just when she seemed to be rejecting her country roots for good and all, Carlene joined the Carter-Cash family on stage at the Wembley Country Music Festival during their 1981 UK tour to sing Will The Circle Be Unbroken. In the meantime, her own live shows were always first class, and included a now almost mandatory lineup of muscians from The Rumour and Rockpile, although by this time her marriage to Nick Lowe was on the rocks.

1983 saw the release of C'Est C Bon on Epic. Originally to be called Gold Miner's Daughter, it would be her last album until I Fell In Love seven years later. "Eventually, it got to where it worked against me," she recalls, "because I did four or five albums over there where I kept getting further and further away from where I felt the most comfortable."

The following year Carlene won acclaim for her role as a waitress in the London cast of Pump Boys And Dinettes starring Paul Jones and Kiki Dee. She also made a short film based on one of the songs from Shapes entitled Too Drunk To Remember, which was seen at the London Film Festival, and was to star in the London musical, Angry Housewives, in 1986.

But she quit during the first week of rehearsals, returning to the States later that year to tour with the Carter Family once more, and even recording with them on their Carter Family album release of 1988. "I'd worked with them several times throughout my life until I was about 30," says Carlene. "Then when I was about 31 or 32 I came back to America and worked with them for a couple of years.

"I wanted to do that then," she says reflectively, "because I was really payin' a lot of attention to what was goin' on and I wanted to learn about my heritage and stuff."

Then, in 1990, she made a devastating return with her first solo country album, I Fell In Love, enchanting both the music industry and the record-buying public.

Produced by Tom Petty's bass player, Howie Epstein, I Fell In Love was a celebration of Carlene's country music heritage and featured old friends Dave Edmunds, Kiki Dee, Albert Lee and Jim Keltner. Songs like Me And The Wildwood Rose and Guardian Angel demonstrated admirably her potential to be a fine country songwriter with a multitude of experiences to draw on.

The album won her a Grammy Award nomination in 1991 for Country Female Performance, as well as an Academy of Country Music nomination for Best New Female Vocalist the same year. Time magazine called it "a world-beater."

"Howie and I started workin' together about five years ago, and I Fell In Love came out three years ago," she says, bringing things up to date. "Country music had taken a little bit of a turn, and even though I Fell In Love was a very country song, it just had and energy to it that was a little edgy for them (Nashville). At first I think they thought, 'Oh gosh, what are we doin' here?' But it worked out real well."

Carlene's latest album, Little Love Letters, also produced by Howie Epstein, has placed her in the forefront of country music, and is probably her finest recording since the criminally ingnored Musical Shapes. It's a rich musical potpurri of rockabilly, country, rock and pop styles that highlight and underline here sharp-witted observations on real life in the 1990s.

From the opening detonation of Little Love Letter No. 1 and Every Little Thing through the bluesy ballads like the stunning Unbreakable Heart, the acoustic hot gospel number, Hallelujah In My Heart and the concluding Heart Is Right, every track on the album is polished to a professional brilliance. this is due not only to Carlene's vocal performances and material, of which all but one track was co-written by her, but also to some heavyweight musical assistance from Albert Lee, Benmont Tench (also one of Tom Petty's boys) and veteran bassist Willie Weeks. Her co-writers include Epstein, Tench, Al Anderson of NRBQ, her best friend of 17-years standing Anni O'Brien, and Radney Foster.

"I didn't know Radney real good but we became pretty good friends in a very short time," she says earnestly. "We've always kinda wanted to work together. He came over around noon and we ended up spendin' all day long talkin' our heads off in my kitchen, and somewhere in there we wrote I Love You 'Cause I Want To. All during that time Howie was callin' up and cheerleading us on through the writing session over the telephone from California. It was pretty funny way to be doin' it.

"By the time my kids came home from school Radney and I were standing up in the kitchen with our acoustic guitars, just rockin' out and dancin' around, and the kids said, 'Gosh, he's pretty fine!"

Carlene is now well-settled Stateside, with home in Nashville and on the West Coast, having finally made here peace with the country music establishment she once eschewed. But she still remembers the time she spent in the punk capital of the world and the friends she knew there. One of these is Bernie Taupin, who co-wrote the study in desolation, The Rain, with her.

"We've stayed friends since my London years," she says affectionately. "That's where I met him when I was doin' Pump Boys And Dinettes with Kiki Dee. Bernie came to the show and we've been friends for almost ten years.

"I have never presumed in our friendship that he would write with me," she continues. "I just got a melody in my head and I kept workin' on it, but I never could say lyrically what I wanted to say. So I called him up and said, "Do you have time? Are you in the frame of mind to do this with me?' And he sadi, 'Sure, come on over.' So I went over and played the song through his ghetto blaster, and he worked on it for a couple of days and called me up and said, 'It's done!' I think he captured lyrically what I was thinking when I was writing the music.

"He understood the feeling that I had very much. He calls himself 'The King of Pain'."

Throughout Little Love Letters, Carlene showcases her natural vocal abilitites, alternately seducing, wailing and rocking, generally reaffirming her individuality through a collection of unique and classy love songs. The album immediately captured the hearts of critics and public alike, with CMT-Europe viewers sending Every Little Thing to the top of the channel's Countdown chart last summer.

So, with an already chequered background, what's next for the former wild girl of country music?

"I think they want another album in September," she says with anticipation. "I'm already writing and collecting tunes. I've got probably half of it together that I feel real confident about and I've got a list of 17 songs, but I'm bein' really ruthless. Howie and I aren't gonna work together on thsi next album and I don't know who's gonna produce me, so that's another thing."

And there's talk of a tour. "Call up BMG and tell 'em you want me," she says frantically. "Just tell 'em I'm really anxious to come back, because I'm really homesick for all my friends. I spent eight years there and it's hard to just not go back. I gotta get over there."

Here's hopin'....