What Makes The Old Songs Old?

A few years ago, singer-songwriter Wes Weddell, as part of a Bushwick Book Club event, wrote a beautiful song inspired by our book "The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song". It was called "What Makes The Old Songs Old?" and this year it was officially released on Wes's album "Somewhere in the Middle."

Give it a listen on Wes's web page.  And if you like it, please order Wes's album.

You can also find Wes on Bandcamp.

The Comics Reporter Interview, Oct 2012

For any readers who may have missed this in 2012, I'm happy to re-present our interview with Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter:
http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/resources/interviews/41379/

Listen to Amanda Sue Winterhalter

In November of last year, The Bushwick Book Club of Seattle performed songs inspired by "The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song." It was a wonderful one time event. The highlight, for me, was Amanda Sue Winterhalter's "Sugar Water." The song describes the travails of Sara Carter, with references to the tree that A.P. planted, and was sung in an acapella  mountain style reminsicent of Sara Carter's. The performance and the song gave me chills!

Now you can hear the song too. It's the final track on Amanda Sue's debut album, OLEA, and you can hear it (and order it if you like it) on the bandcamp website. See if "Sugar Water" doesn't give you chills as well!

PASTE!

It's so nice to see "Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song" in such good company on Paste Magazine's list of Five Great Musical Biographies as Graphic Novels. 

Little Anita Carter's Acrobatics

It's been written that when Life Magazine photographer Eric Schaal visited the Carters in Maces Spring in 1941, the girls did cartwheels and handstands to show off for him. Frank and I depicted it briefly in our graphic novel, "The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song." But until now, I didn't think Schaal had taken any photos of the girls. I thought I'd seen all of his shots, via Life Magazine's online photo archive.

Well, imagine my surprise today when web searching for photos from the shoot, and there is Anita Carter (credited as June, but I think it's Anita) doing a handstand! There were two others featuring her acrobatics. All featured in a gallery with a TIME article on the Carter Family from last year. What a fun surprise!

And here is how we depicted the moment in our graphic novel...

About "The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song"

“The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song” is a graphic novel that tells the true story of one of the earliest and most influential recorded country music groups. At the heart of the story is Alvin Pleasant Carter (known as A.P.), a farmer born in a lonely valley in Appalachia who has dreams of making a living with music, his great passion in life. And amazingly, his dreams do come true – but at the price of his marriage and the stability of his family.

A.P.'s wife Sara, orphaned at a young age, lives with a permanent sadness that colors her haunting singing voice. Sara has little desire to be a celebrity, but follows the whims of her husband.

Sara's teenage cousin Maybelle is a guitar virtuoso who would become as innovative and influential with her acoustic Gibson as Jimi Hendrix would later be on the electric guitar. 

Together, the three Carters changed American music in ways that would touch, among others, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash (who would become Maybelle's son-in-law through his marriage to June Carter). 

The “Carter Family” graphic novel was co-plotted by Frank Young and David Lasky. David drew the art, assisted by a small team of background inkers. Frank wrote all the dialogue, and also colored the entire book in a palette that beautifully evokes the great newspaper comic strips of the 1930's. They've attempted to capture the in words and pictures the heartfelt honesty heard in the music of the Carter Family.

This book will make an excellent gift for anyone in your life who loves a good story. Please ask for it by name at your local general store. Or, if you must, order it from a reputable online merchant.

The Carter Family is Part of "The Best American Comics of 2014!"

We're delighted and excited to be a part of the newest installment in this venerable series of books. Critics are already raving about this 2014 edition.

Paul Constant of The Stranger has said: "...I find myself declaring to you that The Best American Comics 2014 is the best edition of The Best American Comics to ever be published." He adds:

The end result is a book you can hand anyone as an overview of where comics are as an art form in the year 2014. In fact, I may even take my earlier hypocritical claim one step further and call this the best book I've ever read in the whole Best American series. It's informative, funny, surprising, and a satisfying reading experience on its own. This should be the book that every Best American guest editor aspires to emulate in years to come.

Click HERE to read a witty and informative interview of Scott McCloud by the Washington Post's Scott Cavna.

Bill Kartalopoulos, the series editor for this project, discusses his work on the anthologies in THIS INTERVIEW. These books are invaluable for making the more adventurous byroads of comics art accessible to the average reader--the person or persons who would blanch at the thought of entering a typical comic book shop, but who might peruse this book in the more dignified setting of a bookstore or library.

An unusual chapter from the Carter Family graphic novel was chosen for this book. "The Program is Morally Good" (pp. 79-83 in the GN) attempts to capture the atmosphere of the original Carter Family in live performance. It was one of many challenging moments in which David Lasky and I had the task of bringing the feeling of music to the silent printed (and drawn) page.

I enjoyed coloring this sequence, as it gave me several different lighting sources to influence my palette--from the pale pre-dawn that opens the chapter to the claustrophobic, humid lamplit scenes of the Carters in concert. David's atmosphere of the performance panels really brings this interlude to life.

We're just one facet of this book, which features sequences from Chris Ware's blockbuster Building Stories, Ben Katchor, Charles Burns, R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky, Adrian Tomine, Tom Hart, Ron Rege Jr., The Hernandez Brothers and many other notables. It's a great honor to be in such esteemed comics company. David and I encourage you to check out this new volume, which will give you a strong taster of what's going on in the diverse, challenging and enriching world of today's comics and graphic novels.

La Famille Carter: A French Translation of Our Graphic Novel!

THIS LINK will take you to La Pasteque's page announcing the imminent publication of their French-language version of Don't Forget This Song, our Eisner-winning graphic novel on the Carter Family!

David and I are curious how the book's rural dialects will parse into the French language. We hope this book will reach a wider audience, as people are more hep to good comics in France than they are in the U.S.

We're delighted with the news of this French version. Unfortunately, their webpage only has one very small interior page. It appears to have its dialogue in French.

I assume we'll get some copies of this edition. When that happens, we'll reproduce some pages here! More news soon...

Graphic Novel Resources

A nice intro to the graphic novel "Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song" has been posted here.

Thank you, Prof Botzakis at University of Tennessee Knoxville.

TCAF paper

I just discovered an exciting first for the Carter Family graphic novel... An academic paper -- to be delivered at TCAF (in Toronto). Wow...

http://torontocomics.com/news/tcaf-partners-with-csscscebd-to-present-2014-academic-conference/

Saturday May 10th
Candida Rifkind, “Graphic Nostalgia and Musical Modernity in Frank M. Young and David Lasky’s The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song”

Eisner Award!

As Frank mentioned in an earlier post, it was a wonderful surprise to win an Eisner Award in the category of "Best Reality-Based Work" (in a tie with Joseph Lambert's "Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller").   

Here's a photo of Frank and I with our trophies:

(The globes actually spin!)

We were so thrilled to receive this honor!  There was an amazing group of graphic novels in the reality-based category, and all deserve mention here:
"A Chinese Life,"
by Li Kunwu and P. Ôtié (Self Made Hero),
"The Infinite Wait and Other Stories,"
by Julia Wertz (Koyama Press),
"Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me,"
by Ellen Forney (Gotham Books),
"You’ll Never Know, Book 3: A Soldier’s Heart,"
by C. Tyler (Fantagraphics).

Toonie Award!

 

It was such a busy summer, I've been extremely slow to post the news that Frank and I won the Golden Toonie Award for "Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song", awarded by Cartoonists Northwest. 

Here's Frank and I with Cartoonists Northwest President, Georgia Ball.  We were honored and touched to have our book celebrated by our colleagues out here in the Pacific Northwest!

We Love You, Third Place Books!

Third Place Books has always proven a great way to obliterate two or three hours in happy browsing. I was delighted when my friend Paul Tumey shared these photos of their prominent placement (with kind employee review) of the Carter Family book.

Thanks, Owen, for your kind words! And sorry if that photograph shows up sideways...

The Surprise of my Life: Meeting Robert Crumb for the first time...

So I was waiting around at Time Tested Books in Sacramento, where I was scheduled to do a signing in support of the “Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song” graphic novel. It was April 18, 2013, and I was a half hour early. I had asked the legendary cartoonist/musician Robert Armstrong to come and play a few Carter Family songs at the event. I was waiting for him to show up, in the mostly empty store, to see if he needed help setting up. A few minutes before starting time, he walked into the store, and right behind him came a bearded man in spectacles, looking very much like Robert Crumb. I quickly looked away and thought: “That can’t be Robert Crumb!” He lives in France after all. But then again, he and Armstrong used to play together in The Cheap Suit Serenaders. I looked back and found that the bearded man was indeed Robert Crumb, a man many consider to be the world's greatest living cartoonist. He shook my hand and asked if Frank (Young) was going to be there. I told him that Frank would have been there, had he known that his pen-pal R. Crumb was going to attend.

I had requested that Armstrong play few Carter Family songs, then a few old time songs of his choosing. The two of them played a lot more than I’d expected, and treated the audience of 25-30 people to what felt like an hour’s worth of music. The Carter Family songs sometimes had gaps in the lyrics; Mr. Armstrong (on a Gibson L5 guitar, Mr. Crumb on Banjo) apologized, explaining that he’d had to “cram” to learn some of these songs, to meet my request. In the second half, with some instrument changes, they played material they were more familiar with, and the musical sparks started to fly.

 

My father was in attendance, and whispered to me: “Is that really R. Crumb?” “Yes,” I answered. “What’s he doing here?” – “I don’t know.” - “Well, you didn’t give him much of an introduction.” I had nervously introduced “The Two Bobs” and after reading a few prepared remarks about Bob Armstrong (creator of Mickey Rat), simply said: “And this is Bob Crumb, who I’m sure you all know.” So, during an instrument change, I cited my father’s admonishment and tried to give a more proper introduction… “He normally lives in France, but is making a rare appearance here tonight. He’s a comics legend, and he’s my hero; this is a big night for me.”
Crumb interrupted: “Your hero?! Harold Gray is your hero.”
I agreed and added Frank King to my short list of cartooning heroes.  

 

As things wound down, they asked the audience for a request. Someone said: “How about a train song?” Someone else: “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad!” Crumb jumped into "Workin' on the Railroad" and played the whole song beautifully. Armstrong commented something to the effect of: “That’s the last word in Cornball Americana.” They closed with a smokin’ instrumental.
When the fun was over, I managed to sign a few books and chat with some old friends who came to the event, two from my high school, one from college, and two Pulse Magazine alums (Jackson Griffith and cartoonist Michael King). Patrons talked with Crumb and Armstrong, and I got to meet cartoonist/musician Christine Shields as well. My father talked politics with Crumb (who showed us his French medical card – “I can get treated and when I leave [the doctor’s office] there is no charge.”). My dad concluded that now it was up to us younger folks to fix all the problems. And so ended one of the best evenings of my life.

 One final note: The owner of Time Tested Books, Peter Keat, had told Crumb and Armstrong that the Cheap Suit Serenaders had played at his wedding about 30 years ago. Crumb and Armstrong asked the same question that was on my mind: “Has the marriage lasted?” “Yes,” said Mr. Keat, “the marriage has lasted all these years.” Crumb breathed a sigh of relief… “You managed to avoid the curse of the Cheap Suit Serenaders.”

More photos from the event are posted here.

 

Mission Comics Recap

I am getting caught up on things I should have blogged a few weeks ago.  I was in Northern California in mid-April for my father's 75th birthday, and also did two signings, in SF and Sacramento.  Here's my recap of the SF signing, at Mission Comics and Art...

http://dlasky.livejournal.com/210128.html

David Lasky will sign "Carter Family" graphic novel in Sacramento on Thursday, with music by Robert Armstrong

If you're in the Sacramento area, please come get your Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song graphic novel signed by David, and listen to Robert Armstrong (of the Cheap Suit Serenaders) play and sing Carter Family and related songs.   April 18th at 7pm.  This event is free.

[Armstrong is a legendary cartoonist as well, and one of my favorites.]

http://timetestedbooks.blogspot.com/

 

 

 
[I wish I was going to be there on the 21st when Time Tested remembers Sacramento-based PULSE! Magazine, which was one of the first publications to hire me as a cartoonist and illustrator! -David]

Time Tested Books
1114 21st Street (between L and K streets)
Sacramento, CA 95811
Phone: 916-447-5696

 

David in San Francisco at Mission Comics on Wednesday

David is travelling to Northern California in the week ahead.  You can find him at San Francisco's Mission: Comics and Art on Wednesday evening, April 17, where he will present a slide talk about the Carter Family book & then will sign copies...
https://www.facebook.com/MissionComics/posts/257291421075172

Trivia: In the summer of 1991, David lived in the Mission District, on the same street as Mission: Comics and Art, just 12 blocks east. (I'm excited to see how the neighborhood has changed.)

"We're talking hardcore, powerful, overlooked American history here..."

Colleen Mondor reviews "Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song" on bookslut.com...
http://www.bookslut.com/bookslut_in_training/2013_03_019987.php

More mentions...

The Peschel Report (which is a great site for links to articles on books and litereature - and graphic novels and comics) honored us by linking to our Seattle Times review...
http://planetpeschel.com/peschel_report/review-carter-family-graphic-novel-rocks/


The wonderful folklife website Boiled Down Juice wrote a nice review:
http://boileddownjuice.com/dont-forget-this-song-a-history-of-the-carter-family-in-the-form-of-a-graphic-novel/
And this week they are highlighting Leslie Riddle as well!

Readers continue to write good reviews in GoodReads.  So glad you're all enjoying it!!

Cartoonists Northwest wrote up a nice review of the talk Frank and I presented at their meeting in January...
http://www.cartoonistsnorthwest.com/meetings/lasky-and-young-draw-history/

We were honored to have a page of original art featured in an exhibition at Rice University.  Curator Robert Boyd provided a description of the project along with a photo of the page on display...
And if you're a fan of comics art, take a look at the rest of the exhibition:
http://emergencyroomcomics.blogspot.com/
(Or visit in person if you live near Houston).

Visit Seattle blogger David Newman kindly mentioned our mention on the NPR site.

The Copacetic Comics Company gave our book a very nice writeup...
http://www.copaceticcomics.com/comics/the-carter-family-don-t-forget-this-song
Please shop there whenever you're in Pittsburg (or every day, if you live in Pittsburgh).

"...Young and Lasky’s writing and art nearly makes up for the fact that no one’s figured out time travel yet"

Thank you, Lucy Boyes, for writing such a nice review on your blog about comics that are sad...
http://www.consequential.net/2012/sad-comics-reviewed-the-carter-family-dont-forget-this-song/

I think this might be our first review from the UK, but I'm not sure.