| 'Ballad Of A Teenage Queen' by Andy Wickham for Wax Paper (Warner Bros.) |
| One rainy Sunday there appeared on my television--somewhere between Jimmy Swaggart and The Sam Yorty Show--the image of Mary Magdalene by the Sea of Galilee. TV Guide revealed that I was watching a film about the Holy Land by Johnny Cash. Mary Magdalene turned out to be June Carter. Today, Carlene Carter, her eldest daughter and an angel of the honky-tonk variety, sits before me looking as if she just popped out of one of stepfather's hits. Perhapes you remember how it goes. "There's a story in our town Of the prettiest girl around Hair of gold and eyes of blue How those eyes could flash at you..." |
| She is a striking girl with an aquiline beauty which makes you think of fields of bluegrass. Her eyes really are the color of cornflowers. She is wearing a neat jacket and slinky black pants and on her small, shapely feet are high-heeled slippers. A family heirloom sparkles on her right hand while a button on her lapel endorses "Nick Lowe--Pure Pop For Now People." She is 22 and her first LP comes out this month. Dulcimers Playing What is fascinating about her, apart from the mysterious blend of past and present which she embodies, is her complete self-assurance and the serenity with which she tells her story. It is a tale rooted so richly in the stuff that real pop is made of that it is almost impossible to recount without bursting into a medley of Golden Oldies. When she speaks, in the slow, musical tones of northeast Tennessee, you can almost hear dulcimers playing. "Nick Lowe calls me C.C.," she says, "and Billy Bremmer calls me Petty Cash. Really my first name is Rebecca but I like Carlene." She was named for her father, Carl Smith, whose heart songs haunted every honky-tonk in the late '50s. He is a tanned, leathery figure with keen blue eyes, once billed as "The Country Gentleman," and on his album covers he is usually seen riding a horse or leaning on a white picket fence in denims and a staw stetson. He raises quarter horses on his farm in the Tennessee Valley and is clearly a man from Marlborough County. Though he and her mother parted when she was two, Carlene regards Carl with pride and affection. She says she would have adopted his surname for her career were it not for the wish of her grandmother Maybelle that she should carry on the Carter name. Carlene was raised by June, whose life has been a spirited example, in the country tradition, of triumph over adversity fueled by religious fervor. Though Carlene remembers her past, she is not enslaved by it and if there have been distressing moments she seems, like her mother, always to have kept on the sunny side. One of her songs contains: "Who needs words with eyes like yours?" This could be applied to Carlene herself who is not inclined toward verbosity. Consequently her childhood flashes by in a series of sparkling cameos. There is her meeting Elvis at the age of two. "Mama was in New York at the same acting school as Elvis, and on Sunday afternoons he used to roll me around Central Park." There is her first public performance at the age of four. "It was Johnson City or Chattanooga. I went on stage with my cocker spaniel and sang 'Waterloo' and 'Charlie Brown'." There are Rosey, Ezra Carter, and Rip Nix. "When Mama and Carl split up, Mama rarried Rip Nix and they had Rosey. We lived together in an old house in Madison, and Maybelle would come 'round to play cards. She really misses Ezra since he passed away. He was her husband and A.P.'s brother. He was a retired mail clerk on the trains. Things didn't last with Rip Nix. I hear he's now made millions in cement." Genuine Outlaw She first met Johnny Cash at her eleventh birthday party. "He bought me a pair of roller skates, so I figured he was okay." She did not at first feel quite happy about him as a prospective parent. "Mama set me and rosey down," she recalls, "and said, 'Now girls, I'm in love with John and we want to get married' and we just looked at each other and wnet 'Uurrrgh!' But then, me and Rosey had this meeting and we wanted Mama to be happy so we decided to help her out." Cash was gaunt and sunken-eyed in those days, coming to the end of a harrowing battle with pills, a genuine outlaw as distinct from the fancy-dress variety. The story of how June Carter helped him solve his problems and how Ezra showed him the Way of the Lord has been told elsewhere and nowhere better than in the Cash autobiography, Man In Black which includes a fetching illustration of a teenage Carlene looking every bit the cheerleader she was soon to become. Johnny Cash married June in Franklin, Kentucky. rosey and Carlene were flower girls and Merle Kilgore, eagle-eyed author of "Wolverton Mountain" and "The Great Drinking Bout," was the best man. Cash had four girls of his own and the family moved to his lavish spreak on the Old Hickory Lake where their neighbors included Roy Orbison, Red Foley, and Lester Flatt. Carlene was now 14, struggling with Math and History but flashing her cheerleader thighs up and down the football field at Hendersonville High. "Sometimes I'd bring guys home to play pool," she recalls, "other times we'd go to the concerts or drive-ins. Most nights we'd just circle around the Shoney's burger stand. We liked the Beatles and the Stones. I was a good girl--the worst thing I did was wear make-up." |
 |