| 'Hillbilly Queen: Carlene Carter' by Jeremy Isaac for Country Music People, 1/1994 |
| "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. |
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