Born in Detroit, Michigan, jazz violinist Regina Carter came into the spotlight in the late '80s and has since become a premiere improviser on violin.
In 2014, Carter brought her record Southern Comfort to the KNKX studios. Alongside guitarist Marvin Sewell and bassist Jesse Murphy, Carter performed several fresh arrangements of traditional tunes going back a century or more, and had a deep conversation about legacy and ancestry with KNKX's Abe Beeson.
"I have some really powerful people in my past. You know? I think we all do, but it's from my childhood. I've always wanted to know from where I came," Carter said.
Southern Comfort explores Carter's family roots in America, specifically on her father's side. Carter knew that her grandfather was born in Alabama in 1893 and that he was a coal miner in Bradford, Alabama. Later, he married her grandmother, Kate, and they had 14 children. Carter's father was the oldest.
"I started looking into music that would have been recorded during that period, and found some really amazing jewels," Carter said.
To find the jewels that made historical connections for her, Carter dug into early American field recordings from ethnomusicologists like Alan Lomax.
"The field recordings that I heard were mostly vocalists, and I tend to always gravitate towards the vocalist, and these were just solo voices that I would hear. And then I had very good friends of mine, great musicians, do arrangements on these tunes for me and the band," Carter said.
After performing her arrangement of "I'm Going Home," inspired by a field recording that she refers to as "Prayer Song," Carter said she's found strength in the study of her family tree.
"I know that on my mother's side, my grandmother graduated from Morris Brown University with a degree in pedagogy in 1915, which was rare for an African American woman. So, that gives me strength, when I know what she had to go through in order for me to have the opportunities that I have today. It helps me not to take things for granted," Carter said. "And when I feel like I want to be lazy about something, I just remember what they had to go through, and it's like, 'Get up and get to gettin'.'"
The traditional melodies Carter uncovered and ended up recording on this record had a resonance far beyond the violinist and her family. Audiences from all over the U.S. and even Europe would tell her that they'd heard these melodies somewhere before, in particular in Appalachia, where the Scots, the Irish, Native Americans, and African Americans have long coexisted.
As Carter summed: "We really are connected as a planet, more than we think we are."
Songs heard in this episode:
- "Cornbread Crumbled in Gravy"
- "Miner's Child"
- "I'm Going home"
