This is perhaps the most wide-spanning diy tape-recorder vintage compilation of recordings I've ever personally come across. Feel free to let me know what I'm missing pre or post-LAFMs, but this project – 93-minutes of Carter Family covers by various luminaries from across the country (with an emphasis on west coast types) is mega ambitious. Since vocal harmonies and Carter Families do good things together, I'm partial to the work put down on the comp by Castanets and LAKE and Slippery Slopes. Second Sacred Steel Band's lonely little trip comes recommended as well. There's a certain level of intensity you can hear on each performance on the album, like the word 'tribute' actually means something when it's a Carter Family cover placed alongside 29 other Carter Family covers.
A pretty story accompanies these scattered tracks. Here's the comp's maker, Markly Morrison, telling it:
“The music on this cassette is the product of over two years of face-to-face recordings I collected from various regions of the country. About one-third of the artists here represent the Pacific Northwest, where I have been living over the past five years or so. I chose the Carter Family as the focus of the project mostly because their music is the foundation of American songwriting. The songs say so much, and in such a direct way. And while the Carters did not actually write a great deal of these songs from their repertoire, A.P. Carter traveled to great lengths to learn as many songs as he could from the people he met, and eventually he canonized them in the Carter Family catalog. I tried to keep that idea present by collecting all of these songs firsthand on my various consumer-grade cassette recorders, not accepting any remote submissions. I’ve written a brief summary of each recording session to document the adventure that this project was and all the wonderful folks I met along the way. Thank you very much for listening to this project that has been so dear to me over the past couple of years! A portion of the proceeds from this album will benefit Rita Forrester and the Carter Family Fold in Virginia.”
The whole thing will soon be available via K-Records mail order, but you can order it from the comp's Bandcamp for now.
