The Carter Family: In The Shadow Of Clinch Mountain (Bear Family Records)

WITH ENOUGH PATIENCE and old catalogs, you could probably confirm that at least some Carter Family recordings have been available for almost the entire span of recorded country music. The Carter Family first crackled out from wind-up Victrolas, only then beginning to reach rural areas, in 1927. Sales had shrunk by the LP era, but the folk song revival found the Carters an entirely new crowd, one far removed socially, economically, and geographically from their original public. And now Germany's Bear Family Records has gathered almost three hundred Carter Family recordings, in other words everything that the original Carter Family recorded, into an elegant boxed set. Most of the sets will probably be ordered from giant e-commerce outlets, curiously similar to the catalog houses that shipped Carter Family 78s to isolated homesteads back in the Twenties. Isolation is a lifestyle choice now, though.