Carlene Carter turns 71 today, and she’s spent every one of those years as part of country music’s founding family. Born September 26, 1955, in Tennessee, she’s the daughter of June Carter Cash and country singer Carl Smith, stepdaughter of Johnny Cash, and granddaughter of Mother Maybelle Carter, a third-generation member of the Carter Family. Her grandmother’s group, the original Carter Family, helped launch country music itself with the historic 1927 Bristol sessions.
That pedigree could have boxed her in, but Carter spent her early career doing the opposite of what Nashville expected. She launched her recording career in England in 1978, then leaned hard into rock and new wave on 1980’s Musical Shapes, produced by her then-husband, Nick Lowe, and backed by members of the pub-rock band Rockpile. The result sounded closer to punk-inflected rock and roll than anything else coming out of country music at the time, and Carter earned a reputation for a sharper edge and a sharper tongue than Nashville was used to.
She eventually circled back to more traditional country, and it paid off: her 1990 album I Fell in Love produced three top-three country hits, including the title track and “Come On Back,” and earned her a Grammy nomination the following year. Along the way, she married four times, including her stint with Lowe, and later paid tribute to her family’s musical roots on 2014’s Carter Girl, a full album of songs pulled from the Carter Family songbook.
Now in her seventh decade in music, Carter still tours and performs, carrying a Carter Family legacy that stretches back to the group’s earliest recordings in the 1920s. Her career has never quite fit the mold of a typical Nashville artist, and that’s largely the point, she’s spent decades proving country music had room for a little punk rock attitude.