Recommended Jessi Darlin’s 4 favorite country artists of all time

Sometimes, it’s hard to know where to start in a genre or medium. What’s the best comic book to read first? Which symphonies are essential? With Recommended, The A.V. Club asks some of our favorite pop-culture experts what some of their favorite things are in an attempt to make everyone’s lives just a little bit more well-rounded. In this edition of Recommended, Those Darlins guitarist Jessi Darlin reps her musical roots and picks out four of her all-time favorite country artists for anyone who’s interested in more than just Johnny Cash.

The Carter Family
Jessi Darlin: The Carter Family is always a good place to start. Their early recordings are all really cool. They do a lot of gospel stuff, songs that are also kind of full of feminist ideas, and they even have creepy, dark murder songs. I like that kind of stuff a lot.

They have this song “Single Girl, Married Girl,” and it compares the life of a single girl to a married girl. It goes, “Single girl goes to the store and buys / Married girl rocks the cradle and cries.”

Also, Maybelle Carter basically invented country guitar playing. I think it’s amazing that a woman laid the foundation, that she started all that. A lot of people don’t realize that.

The A.V. Club: How did you get into The Carter Family?

JD: I kept hearing their name and stuff, and then I rented their biography, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?, from the library. I read the whole thing and was completely amazed. I hadn’t even heard them at this point. I was about 14 or 15, I think.

So, I went and bought their greatest hits CD or something, and the first song I fell in love with was “Wildwood Flower,” which is a traditional country song, and it’s probably their most popular song ever. From that first note, I was in love. I love the way Maybelle plays guitar. I love the way they sing together. It’s so lonesome and eerie. Even the happy songs are weird, eerie mountain music. I grew up in similar areas to where they grew up, too, and I felt connected to them.

There’s another song of theirs I really like called “Black Jack David.” It’s a standard, but there are other versions out there too. It’s about a 16-year-old girl who is married and has a baby, but then this guy Black Jack David comes through town, and he’s this wild guy, and she falls in love with him. He takes her away, and she just leaves her baby and her family. For a group that everyone thinks of as singing gospel, they do have some weird songs.

AVC: So many artists now absolutely love The Carter Family, but I feel like so many people know nothing about them, beyond maybe that June Carter Cash existed.

JD: The history of The Carter Sisters is really cool, too.

I was reading about when Maybelle first joined the band, and they first started The Carter Family. They read this ad in the newspaper that just said “recording artist wanted,” and so they travelled all the way to Bristol to record. Maybelle was eight months pregnant, and they had two or three other kids with them. The older kids watched the younger kids while they were all in there recording. Then, they didn’t do anything with the songs.

It was unheard of at the time for a woman to be the front person of a band. I mean, A.P. Carter didn’t really do anything, compared to Maybelle. So, the record sat on the shelf, and then this label finally put it out when they ran out of other records, and it was this big sensation. Everyone loved it.

Wanda Jackson
JD: Wanda’s not totally country, but she’s got an awesome voice. I love that song “Funnel Of Love.” I like a lot of her stuff, but I like how spooky that one is. I really like “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” too.

Ernest Tubb
JD: Ernest Tubb was always one of my favorites. I really like his band, and his lead guitar player, Billy Byrd. When I first started playing, I wanted to play like him.

AVC: What is it that you like about his guitar playing?

JD: He does a lot of one-note stuff. Like, one-note-at-a-time lead solos. He gets a really cool tone, too. It’s pretty simple, and not too flashy, but they’re always kind of perfect and complement the music. It’s always lazy-sounding, too.

AVC: What’s a good song to check out as an example?

JD: The first song I ever heard of theirs was “Walking The Floor Over You,” and it was so weird-sounding to me, because I wasn’t used to listening to music of that recording quality. It sounded so old and dated, but his voice seemed like it just reached out and grabbed you. It was so lonely. It’s just about this sweet little guy who’s so in love, but it’s so sad.

I’ve tried to sing some of Tubb’s songs, but he has such a deep voice that you can’t really copy it. It’s totally different than mine. It’s really grainy.

Hank Williams
JD: One that I think is obvious, but that people never listen to, is Hank Sr. That’s a pretty huge starting point. He was probably one of the most prolific songwriters during the time that he was alive, and he has one of the best voices in any genre, not just country music.

I feel like no matter when you could listen to Hank Williams, his music will always be classic. I don’t feel like even in 100 million years, if you heard one of his songs, you couldn’t relate to it somehow. His songs are just about everyday life and people. They’re about feelings everyone has.

Those Darlins play Wednesday at the Bluebird with Black Joe Lewis And The Honeybears.