This is the most comprehensive collection you will find on the Carters. This is a boxset for a serious collector and I would recommend it to one who can appreciate the magnificence and beauty of their work throughout the years.

Fantastic, Fabulous ,Great, I can't really find the words to describe this box set from Bear Family. I know it's an expensive set but worth every dollar you get your moneys worth not just great music but an historical journey of country music by one of the most respected groups in any genre of music. This is truthfully a treasure trove of American music an you should be proud of your musical heritage. I'm an Englishman living in Australia.

A classic presentation of the group that is considered to be of the founders of Country Music.

Since my youth I have had an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. The original of that interest first centered on the blues, then early rock and roll and later, with the folk revival of the early 1960's, folk music. I have often wondered about the source of this interest. I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. The subject of the following review is an example.

With the recent Johnny Cash movie biography Walk the Line the Carter Family has again come into greater public prominence. And rightly so. The trio performing simple country (or better rural) music mainly composed by A.P. Carter evokes, if not a simpler time, then in any case, a simpler type of music. While I cannot listen endlessly to such music at one sitting about one-half a cd at a time works. Why not the whole cd? There is a very similar melody and guitar line to their work in most songs. The value of each song sometimes gets lost in the basic repetition.

A note on subject matter- The bulk of the songs concern home, hearth lovesickness and religion as might be expected from mountain people. And that is okay. This reviewer, although not a religious man, can appreciate the simple, fundamentalist but very personal religion evoked here. Not to romanticize the simple rural folk of the past but I do not believe that the religious sentiments expressed here are the same as those of religious fundamentalists today who want to ram a theocracy down our throats in the United States today.

The Carter Family has often been called the first family of country music, and no better argument for this claim can be made than this massive 12 CD set. Recorded for a variety of record companies between 1927 and 1941, this set includes all of the studio recordings made by the trio before they went their separate ways. The box set includes a 220 page, hardcover book that includes all known photographs of the Carters, as well as program notes, song lyrics, an essay from noted country music scholar Charles Wolfe, and a discography. For the uninitiated, the Carter Family were from the Clinch Mountain area of Virginia. The group consisted of leader A.P. Carter on backing vocals, wife Sara Dougherty Carter on lead vocals, guitar and autoharp, and Sara's cousin Maybelle Addington Carter on lead guitar and harmony vocals. When the Victor recording company placed adds in Virginia and Tennessee newspapers in the summer of 1927 for musical talent, dozens of local acts appeared and many were recorded. The Carter Family was chosen, as was the soon-to-be legendary Singing Brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers. These recording sessions, often called the Bristol (TN) Sessions, are cited by many as the birth of country music as we know it, incorporating old time string band and folk music with such later developments as blues, ragtime and jazz.
Both the Carters and Rodgers went on to sell hundreds of thousands of 78 RPM records in the late twenties. The Carter Family traveled and performed widely, and their careers even survived the Great Depression. After recording dozens of sides for Victor, the Carters moved on to ARC, Decca and Bluebird. All of the music was memorable, and all of it is preserved here. The sound is rough in spots but better than any previous reissues. Only the Victor sides (about half of this compilation) have been reissued in their entirety, so this is the first CD reissue for many of these recordings. The Carter's mid-Thirties work is some of their finest, and its a pleasure to finally have all of these sides reissued.
The Carter Family's music influenced many other musicians in the Thirties and Forties, and they continued to be a force in later decades as well. The folk revival of the Sixties so a particular renewal of interest, and as late as the 1970s Johnny Cash featured Maybelle Carter and her daughters (including Cash's wife, June Carter) in his recordings and stage shows.
The German company, Bear Family Records, has done their usual excellent work in compiling this release. Sure, its expensive, and its a lot of music from a single act, but serious scholars of American music will consider this set essential. The Carter Family's legacy has never seemed greater than it does on this fine set.