Carter Family

That is, of course, the one of John Hardy.

We'll hear how the tale changes from the early recordings of Lead Belly and the Carter family to a haunting interpretation some 70 years later from Bill Frizzell and Petra Hayden.

Three versions of an old story, and plenty of room for a few stretchers along the way.

John Hardy was a Negro, and he was a desperate man, and he carried two six-shooters.

And there you have it.

That's the joke.

And that short set opened with the story of John Hardy, opening with Lead Belly's narrative from 1945, and then a pair, one contemporary and one from the Big Bang of country music, from the Carter family.

Bill Frizzell and Petra Hayden's John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man comes from the 2003 album Petra Hayden and Bill Frizzell.

You know, where I heard, first heard Buck Owens and The Dillards and Johnny Cash.

But there was, in the house, my mom had gotten it, the Smithsonian box set of folk, you know, music, of, like, everything from, uh, blues to The Carter Family.

Mm.

And The Carter Family was really a band that hit a chord with me.

Sure.

I know they weren't down and out [laughs] as much as-

It sounded down and out.

It sounded emotional, and it really struck a chord with me.

On XERA, Brinkley broadcast yodelers and fiddlers and Mexican orchestras and religious sermons and psychics.

And the Carter family, they came to Del Rio in the late 1930s, contracted by a consolidated oil company to perform live on the station.

Somewhere in Arkansas, a six-year-old named Johnny Cash was listening.

On the same frequency, in different time slots, you could hear Lydia Mendoza, La Alondra de la Frontera, The Lark of the Border, performing Norteño songs for an audience stretching from Los Angeles to the interior of Mexico.

tax fraud indictments, a fortune that had evaporated.

The man who'd exploited the regulatory frontier more aggressively than anybody in the history of American broadcasting died the way all frontier operators eventually die, without a frontier left to exploit.

But the music that he'd put on the air, the Carter family and Lydia Mendoza and the yodelers and the fiddlers, all of it tangled together on 500,000 watts of unregulated signal over the Chihuahuan Desert, was already inside people, already part of them.

The six-year-old in Arkansas carried it his whole life.

The voice of Laura Cantrell, where the roses abloom again.

And yes, a song written by the Carter family way, way back, even before CDs, God forbid.

um and records almost uh not quite but uh pardon me uh yes that's from um uh laura cantrell's album of a few years back now and when did it come out doesn't have a date on it but um a great singer and uh yes but in the middle we heard uh the voice of margot price uh from the mercury revs tribute to bobby gentry's the delta suite revisited and Margot was doing sermon there which was Bobby Gentry's songs one of Bobby's yes and that's another story that we have actually covered on previous episodes of Sleep at the Wheel well touched on I should say And we opened that bracket with, goodness gracious, the one male voice of the show, I think, John Prine, but helped out from his duets album, which was entitled In Spite of Ourselves.

And there he's singing a song that was written by, written, I think, by Kieran Cain.

I wrote the background vocals for that record.

The Oak Ridge Boys, the Carter family, and there was one, maybe Jan Howard, maybe.

One other vocalist was singing with the Carters and us.

But I wrote that background, which all we'd do is go...

No Depression magazine was first launched by Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock in 1995 as a response to the burgeoning alt-country movement happening within American music.

The magazine took its name from a Carter family tune that had been covered by seminal alt-country act Uncle Tupelo on their first LP.

For the last three decades, No Depression has been at the vanguard of American roots music combining in-depth historical features that explore the fascinating history of Americana with regular reporting on the most exciting things happening in today's world of old country.

No Depression published gorgeous print editions from 1995 until 2008 when the recession and the rising print costs forced Alden, Blackstock, and publisher Kyla Fairchild to make the magazine an online-only entity.

And because they too loved everything you just said, all of that kind of music.

And, um, wanted a place where these songs and these stories could be told and understand sort of by, for, and among their peers.

So a lot of people often ask me like, where does the name come from? And again, once I admit that I did not come up with it or think about how it would appear on the internet in the 21st century, I get to explain that it was from a Carter family song from the great depression where the chorus went and there's no depression in heaven.

But again, Uncle Tupelo was that band that named their 1995 record, No Depression.

Right, right.

I want Carter Family on vinyl.

That's way too hardcore again.

Yeah.