June Carter Cash's first-ever retrospective is subtitled Her Life in Music, and rightly so. June began singing with the Carter Family at age 9, when the precocious child was harmonizing on the family signature song, "Keep on the Sunny Side", and taking a solo with "Oh Susannah" (which she pronounces with an extra syllable-- "oh Susie Anna"). The first disc in this two-disc set focuses on her early career, with songs performed by the Carter Family and the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle alongside solo tracks and duets. As much as it tracks the various lineups that played barn-dances around Appalachia during the 1930s and 1940s, this disc traces June's growing confidence as a singer and comedienne. That confidence is evident on tracks like "I Guess I Told You Off" and "Baby It's Cold Outside", with Homer & Jethro, and grows through later songs like "Strange Woman" and "Without a Love to Call My Own".
Admittedly, many of these songs are mere trifles-- short entertainments full of virtuoso picking from her mother and sisters and lots of cornpone humor from June. This is no criticism: These songs are apt showcases for June's gracious wit and robust vocals, and their primary purpose was to rouse all-ages audiences, which makes them part country music, part vaudeville. Heard outside their original live context, these songs lose something essential but still sound complex and amusing, so we can only imagine the impact they had on their original listeners.
June's third husband joins the Carter Family on the first disc's final track, a full version of "Keep on the Sunny Side", although Johnny's presence is hinted at on the previous track, "Ring of Fire", performed by the Carter Family. Gone are the mariachi horns and the gravity of Johnny's vocals; in this earlier version, a simple drum taps out a two-step rhythm and a chorale of voices testifies to the overwhelming risks of love like a church choir singing a hymn to God-- thankful, yet awed.
According to the second disk of Keep On the Sunny Side, June and Johnny's inevitable collaboration didn't initially pay off. "Jackson" still sounds like a barnstormer, but its complex view of a cooling marriage offsets the sentimentality of their duets on Tim Hardin's worst song, "If I Were a Carpenter", and Kris Kristofferson's "The Loving Gift"-- both of which suggest that a woman's ultimate act of love is procreation. Johnny also pops up in the jokey "Slewfoot", which, coming so soon after their duets, seems to be exploiting their very public relationship. But really, it's just another vaudeville song like "Baby, It's Cold Outside", only this time performed in the studio instead of on the stage.
That distinction is important. Despite its overbearing production, the studio material on the second disk isn't necessarily inferior to her earlier live songs, but it does afford her far fewer opportunities to showcase her outsize personality. Often she inhabits characters-- like the reformed harlot in "The Shadow of a Lady" or the woeful gunman in "East Virginia Blues"-- but never with the liveliness and commitment with which she played Aunt Polly or Little Junie. June needed an audience, her autoharp, and a few agile pickers and fiddlers. But she had her moments in the studio, such as the duet with her husband on "Far Banks of the River Jordan", which proves eerily prophetic. And the final three tracks, taken from the last few years of her life, reveal a gritty authority in her aged voice. Keep On the Sunny Side ends with yet another version of the title track, recorded in 2001. At 73 June sings those lyrics with the same determined pluck as she did at 9, revealing an artist whose hopefulness proved as solid and indefatigable as her voice.
