Sony
2006
A Distant Land To Roam: Songs Of The Carter Family
About This Album
When Victor Records field engineer Ralph Peer arrived in Bristol, TN, in the summer of 1927, he had a mission to record every rural Southern musician he could find. By the time he left Bristol, Peer had recorded 76 songs by 19 different acts and had set the cornerstones for the future of country music, a genre that had yet to be recognized or defined. Among the acts he recorded in that little Virginia/Tennessee border town were a trio consisting of two young girls and a sawmill worker from Virginia -- A.P. Carter, his wife Sara Carter, and Sara's cousin Maybelle Carter -- or the Carter Family, as they came to be known. A.P. was a song collector, and whether he had a particular fascination with songs about loss, loneliness, and mortality or those were simply the sorts of songs he heard in his Appalachian travels is a matter for the scholars and historians to decide, but the Carter Family's extensive catalog of traditional southern songs was full to the brim with tragic train wrecks, murders, and all manner of misfortune, and featured a profound yearning for deliverance and redemption. These were the songs that fellow Virginian Ralph Stanley and his brother Carter Stanley grew up with, and when they began their professional career as the Stanley Brothers, the Carter Family tunes were a staple of their act from the start.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9)

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