My grandma passed in '78, and that's the year I started recording. It's also the year that my dad retired from his career. So it's funny how torches get passed on, and you feel a responsibility to be connected to the music that they did and try to carry it on in your own way.

I wood-shedded for a year to play Grandma's simple stuff. It's not that simple, and I don't use picks the way she does. But I played them as authentically as I could, with the flat-picking.

Grandma and Mama showed me that you always have to give as much as you can, no matter what.

I do feel I'm responsible to carrying on the music. That's what I was charged with as a kid. When I was a little girl, I was told, 'When we are gone' - when you're a kid, you never think they'll ever be gone - 'you have to keep the music alive, the Carter Family songs, and add your own songs.'

I challenged myself to carry on the style of guitar that my grandmother did: the Carter scratch.

I wanted to play rocking country music, and when I started out in the late Seventies, it took me a couple of albums to figure out how to do that.