Carlene Carter back in music and in life
By Nick Cristiano
Inquirer Staff Writer

"She's not dead?"

Carlene Carter laughs as she anticipates the reaction of some folks
to the news that she is back playing shows. After all, it's been 11
years since the former country star from the famous musical family
put out an album, and since then the only real national news she has
made involved drug busts.

It certainly was a long, hard fall.

In the early '90s, Carter, daughter of June Carter and Carl Smith,
stepdaughter of Johnny Cash, was one of Nashville's brightest young
talents. After a string of critically acclaimed but poor-selling
efforts with her then-husband, the esteemed British roots-rocker Nick
Lowe, Carter really clicked: On I Fell in Love, Little Love Letters,
and Little Acts of Treason, she hit the charts with her own brand of
vivaciously smart, rock-inflected country.

But old demons caught up with her. In June 2001, Carter was arrested
in New Mexico for heroin possession and sentenced to probation. Two
years later, her boyfriend and musical partner, Howie Epstein, former
bassist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, died of a drug overdose.

The real bottom, however, came in June 2004, when she was jailed a
second time for a probation violation on a DUI.

"I spent a month of my life locked up... . I just went, 'You know
what? I've got grandbabies, I don't want them to know me like
this,' " the 50-year-old singer said in an interview from New
York. " 'I'm not doing any of the things I love doing.'... I was just
tore up."

She went into a recovery program again, and says she has been clean
since.

Last year, she played her mother in a Nashville stage musical,
Wildwood Flowers. That part not only helped her finally heal from the
deaths of her mother, her stepfather and her sister, Rosey Nix, but
it also precipitated her full-time move back to the Nashville area,
and reignited her muse. She began writing new songs, and she is
recording them.

She's still "rocking like hell," although she's no longer doing
cartwheels or jumping into the crowd. "I've put on a lot of weight,"
the newly remarried artist said, laughing again. "But I figure it's
OK because I'm a grandmother."

The songs she's singing onstage now span her whole career. They
include "It Takes One to Know Me," a tune she wrote three decades ago
as a birthday present for the man she calls "Big John." She thought
Cash had never recorded it, but it turned up last year as the final
track on the Cash boxed set The Legend. To top it off, the producer
suggested Carlene add her own voice to those of Johnny and June, and
she did. It was another nice touch in a life that seems to be back on
track.

"I lost my faith, I lost my hope, I lost so much," Carter says. "Now
every single breath I take every day, I'm amazed."