June Carter Cash: Wildwood Flower : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The daughter of mother Maybelle Carter and wife to Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash was an extraordinary entertainer in her own right; fittingly, she says goodbye with a lovely bouquet of songs, recorded a few months before her death at seventy-three in May. Cash spent her life in music, traveling as a child with her mother's pioneering trio, the Carter Family, then alongside her sisters and mom and, finally, for the last forty years with the Man in Black, with whom she cut several hit duets in the 1960s. The homespun Wildwood Flower features rich vignettes of her career: audio clips of little June and her siblings on the radio in the 1940s alongside a new version of their morality tale "Kneeling Drunkard's Plea"; Cash's kooky storytelling a la "Big Yellow Peaches," a song inspired by Lee Marvin; and several Carter Family numbers ("Keep on the Sunny Side" among them), upon which she's joined on vocals by her husband, children, grandchildren and other kinfolk. The album's pristine, spare sound em-phasizes Norman Blake's masterful picking, daughter-in-law Laura Cash's haunting fiddle and June's signature autoharp strum. "Will you miss me?" Cash presciently sings on one of the most moving tracks. The answer: yes.

HOLLY GEORGE-WARREN
(RS 931, September 18, 2003)