Yet Wildwood Flower shows us how much country music -- as a culture, a musical tradition, a lifestyle, even -- lost with Carter Cash's passing. Recorded over a six-month period, from late 2002 to March of this year, the album is an uncanny musical memorial to a life shaped equally by music and by family -- two forces that, for Carter Cash, were inextricably linked from birth to death. Wildwood Flower abounds in world-wizened visions of songs she performed thousands of times over the past six decades. Most of the tunes were penned by uncle A.P. Carter, including "Keep on the Sunny Side," "Storms Are on the Ocean" and "Sinking in the Ocean." But Carter Cash's individual spirit colors them all. The intro to "Big Yellow Peaches," the sole Carter Cash composition included here, is a humorous riff on Lee Marvin that suggests the wit and fearlessness of the woman who cowrote "Ring of Fire" and once asked prisoners at Folsom Prison to look at her face, not her chest, while she performed.
Wildwood Flower is as roughly rendered and scratchy as a historic photograph. Produced by son John Carter Cash, the album eschews smooth production in favor of familial intimacy. Some of the songs, including the spare, spooky "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone," were taped in June in Johnny's bedroom in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Cameos by members of the ever-sprawling Carter/Cash lineage -- including daughters Rosanne and Carlene Carter, granddaughter Tiffany Anastasia Lowe and, of course, Johnny, who sings backup on almost every track -- lend the album the casual feel of a living-room concert hedged in between Bible readings and bedtime. Backed throughout by Norman and Nancy Blake, who share duties on acoustic guitar, mandolin and cello, Carter Cash carries her years in her voice: It's craggy and often flat but utterly sincere from the first note to the last. Carter Cash is gone, but Wildwood Flower helps ensure that the circle, indeed, remains intact.
