Here"s bedrock American music distancing itself from its European ancestry. The Carter Family showed what a couple of hundred years of Appalachian isolation could do to the Anglo-Celtic ballads on which country music was based. These songs are sometimes dark and unearthly, sometimes awash in Victorian bathos, but always unerringly affecting. Rounder is in the process of reissuing all of the Carters" RCA recordings. This volume includes the original versions of perennial folk favorites like "Wildwood Flower," "Keep on the Sunny Side," "The Wandering Boy," "Bury Me Beneath the Willow," and eight more. --Colin Escott