Search - Flatt & Scruggs, Maybelle Carter :: Songs of the Famous Carter Family

A gem to own, Maybelle plays guitar on You are My Flower!

Tony Thomas | SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA | 06/21/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a good album. One of the things I have always enjoyed is the way Flatt and Scruggs used the old Carter Tunes. Part of this has to do with the fact that Earl is probably the best player of Carter Style Tunes on the guitar, though his son Randy seems to have picked up the mantle. Of course, since the first Flatt and Scruggs records on Mercury, you can find Earl picking up the guitar for sacred tunes, where the banjo is seen as too profane, and later for Columbia when they started recording Carter family tunes. In fact, some of the the earlier recordings Earl made of things like Jimmie Brown the Newsboy are superior to versions on this album. In fact, someone should collect them all and put out an Earl Scruggs plays guitar album. The bad spot is the that it is recorded with too much echo and reverb and other stuff. Apparently, it was not all recorded live like all good string band music should be, and the sound suffers at times.There is some great dobro playing by the great Josh Graves.
Lester Flatt must have sung fairly well, but, alas, all the fakery in the recording process diminishes his great voice and makes the group backup singing here sound a bit muddy. I would have like to have heard Maybelle sing more.Earl does all the lead guitar playing except on one tune, "You are My Flower." It may not be noted in the notes, but when they cut this album Earl tried and tried and tried and tried to record the guitar part for that song. It is a beautiful song that Maybelle composed when the Carter family was based in Del Rio, Texas, playing on a 150,000 Watt station in Mexico. She said it tried to do what the beautiful Mexican tunes she heard did.Earl tried everything. He even tried borrowing Maybelle's lengendary L-5 to cut the guitar track. He didn't have it up to his standards or probably to Maybelle's standards, and Maybelle was known for being a perfectionist when she got into a recording studio!Finally, he had Maybelle do the guitar part on that track, even though this is not on the liners for this album either on vinyl or CD.Earl was lucky. Maybelle also played the fiddle, the mandolin, and THE BANJO! She was known as the best musician in her little valley in Virginia from the time she was 12 or 13. Even when she was a teenager dads were telling their sons that they needed to work hard to be a banjo player or fiddler like that Maybelle Addington. She might have added a few of her frailing banjo licks here too."