The Carter Family is not only not forgotten, but its influence still smolders in the popular music of the twenty-first century, both in the United States and Europe. The Carters aren’t dusty old relics trapped on 78s. Seventy-five years after they first cut their voices into wax cylinders, their music is still finding an audience. Carter Family recordings have sold millions of copies, and continue to be remastered and remarketed to this day. For the past ten years, the Rounder label has been re-releasing original Carter Family recordings. Just last year, Bear Family Records of Hambergen, Germany, put out a boxed set of nearly three hundred of the Carter Family’s original recordings. Carter Family songs like “Wildwood Flower,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man,” and “Worried Man Blues” have been making new hits through eight decades, for stars such as Woody Guthrie, Earl Scruggs, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Lucinda Williams. To this day, the Carters’ music is celebrated at festivals from Australia to the upper reaches of Canada, in Europe and in Asia, from Newport, Rhode Island, to Alaska. Above all, the Carters proved that simple songs about the lives of ordinary people can be as beautiful, as profound, and as lasting as music studied in conservatories. The nest of Doctor Brinkley and his fellow swindlers may seem an odd place to argue such a proposition, but that is where the Carters found themselves at the tail end of the Depression.
The border stations billed them as the Original Carter Family, because a dozen years’ worth of enormously popular recordings had spawned scores of imitators. The Virginia-based trio had been willed into being by Alvin Pleasant Delaney Carter, a gangly, peripatetic man nearing his fiftieth birthday. A.P., as he was best known to his listening audience, provided an inexhaustible supply of songs, many of which he collected from Appalachia’s remote mountain homesteads (as well as from its mills, factories, boardinghouses, and coal mines) and then “worked up” with his wife, Sara, and sister-in-law Maybelle. It was Sara’s rich, expressive alto that had first attracted a producer from Victor records. At forty, she was still a riveting, dark-eyed beauty. Maybelle, the twenty-nine-year-old guitar player, was the virtuoso of the group, a fact which astonished many listeners of the 1930s, who would not believe that the agile licks and infectious rhythms were conjured by a woman.
Unlikely as it sounds, the Carter Family brought dignity even to border radio’s raucous proceedings. They didn’t play hillbillies or hayseeds or cowpokes. They were just regular folks making their own music. What set the Carters’ music apart from the crowded field of country acts was the intimacy of their harmonies; the closeness of Sara and Maybelle, who sounded for all the world like a single person with four arms playing two instruments at once; and the unself-conscious ease with which A.P.’s high bass strolled in and out of each song, as if he were leaving the studio from time to time to chop some wood or hoe some corn, then returning to join the singing when the chores were done. There was nothing squared off or predictable about the way they made music, and their genius was giving a modern sustain to decades- and centuries-old songs. “They were the best loved in our valley,” remembers one Arkansan whose entire family would walk three miles to the nearest neighbor with a radio. “They were singing our songs.”
It is doubtful that A.P., Sara, and Maybelle could have been persuaded to spend six months a year playing in South Texas had times not been so hard. The trio had never spent much time on the touring circuit and didn’t care to be away too long from their ancestral home in Poor Valley, Virginia, in the foothills of Clinch Mountain. Carters, they would say, never felt quite right unless they were enfolded by the mountains. But the border-radio appearances had reignited their popularity beyond even A.P.’s wildest imaginings. “Mercy, I never saw as much mail in my life,” Maybelle once said. “When we left [Texas after the first year] and came home we had over five thousand letters that came in. We’d get mail every day, from every state in the Union.”
Almost any music lover living in rural America at the time heard those broadcasts, including an entire generation of future country stars. Chet Atkins, as a fourteen-year-old living in Columbus, Georgia, listened in on a battery-powered radio he’d built from mail-order parts. In little more than ten years, Atkins would be a struggling musician hired out of obscurity by Maybelle Carter. The future architect of the “Nashville Sound” always credited Maybelle with saving his nearly stillborn career. In a farmhouse in Dyess, Arkansas, Johnny Cash listened also, never suspecting that he would one day marry Maybelle’s daughter June, who was already appearing on the broadcasts, yodeling her eleven-year-old lungs out on “The Old Texas Trail.” Twenty years later, Johnny Cash would make Maybelle Carter and her three daughters part of his road show; he would also credit her with saving his life. Maybelle would finish her career with Johnny, and he would preach at her funeral. “Having her in my show was a powerful confirmation and continuation of the music I loved best,” he wrote in his autobiography. “It kept me carrying on the traditions I come from.” In Littlefield, Texas, a small boy named Waylon Jennings would watch his daddy pull the family truck around the side of the house, pop the hood, and hook up the family radio to the pickup battery. Waylon would never forget the Carters’ swirling harmonies, and after he and Willie Nelson had reoxygenated the stagnant country-music pond with their stripped-down “outlaw” style, both would pronounce Maybelle “the Queen Mother of Country Music.”
But all the pronouncements and public approbation came later, when the country-music industry began to attach historical significance to the trio. Back in 1939, the Carters’ impact was direct and immediate. “All the songs had deep-gutted meaning,” says their niece Lois Hensley, who grew up on the music. “They were always about a feeling somebody had had.”
“A thing that especially pleased country folk,” remembers Tom T. Hall, a future songwriter and recording star who grew up in Olive Hill, Kentucky, “was that the Carters were a family.”
Listeners came to regard the Carters as friends they knew, as people like themselves. There was A.P. wandering in and out of songs, Maybelle trying out new descending licks on her guitar, and Sara’s voice deepening through time. There was little June flailing her way through a solo of “Engine 143.” That little girl couldn’t carry a tune to save her soul, but, by golly, she was a gamer. She and her sisters would even yodel. As with true country relations, the Carters’ kinship with their listeners didn’t depend finally on intimacy but on simply being there . . . every day. Where the Grand Ole Opry and Barn Dances and Hayrides were weekly affairs, special as church on Sunday, the Carter program was in the warp and weave of life. In fact, through the dark, shut-in winters of that fretful time, The Good Neighbor Get-Together on station XERA was there morning and night. Twice a day, in between Cowboy Slim Rinehart and the Mainer’s Mountaineers, came the Carter Family, leading off every set with their theme song, “Keep on the Sunny Side.”
For an hour a day, the Carters’ radio show could close up the open spaces of lonesomeness that seemed to be widening all over the country. The railroads, then the Great War, then the gleaming economic engine of Henry Ford’s America, then the Depression and the withering dust storms had enticed, begged, bullied, and shoved southerners and midwesterners (black and white alike) off the farms and toward the coal camps and mill towns of the South, up the line to industrial centers such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit, and to the picking fields of California. Some folks made it to their destination; others were simply stuck somewhere along the road, having lost the memory of what precisely they’d set out for. Carter Family music was a song of what they’d left behind. The lonesomest, neediest, most cut-off listeners could lean forward toward their radio sets, hear those songs, and think, That’s just how it was. . . . They understand.
Letters that poured into the station at Del Rio, or the post office at the foot of Clinch Mountain (where they were simply addressed “The Carter Family, Maces Springs, Virginia”)
testified to the Carters’ way of making the forgotten feel a sense of belonging, and the sinner forgiveness: “Aunt Sara, this is from my heart,” wrote one young man at the time. “Oh Dear God, hear my plea and answer the one prayer I feel in my heart. . . . I am poor and don’t understand big words but you know my heart and thoughts, please keep Aunt Sara Carter singing your praises and songs like she has in the pass [sic]. Don’t let nothing happen to her health and voice, and Good Lord if we both don’t get to see each other in this world, help us to meet each other in heaven, and there I can hear her sing and play in person forever, in Jesus’ name amen.”
The odd thing was that their devoted family of fans knew little of the Carters themselves, or of their personal lives. Even among those selling the records there was a want of information about the family. Evalean Gowen, proprietress of the Gowen Grocery Company (“Dealers in Fancy Groceries and Notions, Distributors of Phonographs, Records and Accessories”) in Grab, Kentucky, inquired directly: “Well Mrs. Carter,” she wrote, “we have been ask [sic] by our customers about your family, is it man and wife and daughter; or is the girl your sister?” Sara never did answer the query. All three were preternaturally private, and as A.P. later said of their discoverer-manager, “Mr. Peer didn’t want us to talk about that.”
So when A.P. was suddenly—and without explanation—off the radio for a stretch in February of 1939, the Carters’ vast and varied audience couldn’t have guessed why. Nobody outside the family knew anything of the crisis that shook A.P., or of worried sponsors who pulled him off the show when they thought his agitation was actually coming through on the air. The Carters’ following knew nothing of the fault line that ran right down the middle of “Country Music’s First Family.” So how could those same fans be prepared for what came next? How could they be prepared for the music to stop?
By the time the country had clawed its way out of the Depression and into war, the original Carter Family was no longer on the radio, no longer making records, no longer even together. Their parting was so sudden—and the silence that followed so eerie—that there was a rumor that the entire group had been wiped out in a car crash. Less-excitable theorists maintained that the Carters had simply outlived their popularity; tastes changed, and the audience was no longer interested. For more than half a century, the reason for the Carter Family’s breakup has been a matter of uninformed reckoning. And no one in the family would talk about it. Not Maybelle, not Sara, and certainly not A.P.
The split was most wounding to A.P., who lost nearly everything that truly mattered to him. He would spend the next two decades pining for what was lost, and never gave up the hope of recapturing it. And while A.P. didn’t go in much for irony, even he couldn’t have missed this maddening fact: The true story of the breakup had all the makings of a mighty fine Carter Family song—new love in bloom and withering heartache, promise and betrayal, earthly sin and its painful consequences. But that’s a story A.P. never would share with his public. That’s a story he endured alone.
* * *
For six decades since the Carter Family broke apart, academics and music writers have been making hay with the proposition that the group embodied a distant voice from America’s guileless, rural past. In the waning months of the last century, no less an authority than the New York Times was still writing that Carter Family music is set in “a mythic rural American Eden” and preserves “the idealized memory of the simple life.” If this makes the Carter Family more enjoyable to the Old Gray Lady, by all means, let her have it. The Carters’ songs might have been simple. Their lives were not.
The Carters were possessed of a thorny ambition that grew even in the most unlikely American soil. From two remote and still valleys, they made themselves known to half a world. That was no mean feat in the 1930s, and it didn’t just happen. To varying, sometimes conflicting, degrees, A.P., Sara, and Maybelle chased fame and fortune. They were, to quote a song lyric that may be the finest distillation of the American character ever written, “searching for the water from a deeper well.” They didn’t choose the easy path.
The Carters won fame—if not fortune—because they could recast the traditional music of rural America for a modern audience. And like their music, the Carters themselves had to negotiate the gap between the insular culture of preindustrial Appalachia and the newly modern America. Their lives were marked by the sheer want of rural existence, lack of a decent paved road or a decent school or cash money; by drought, flood, disease, meager harvest, and plain old loneliness. But their lives were also marked by the frantic demands of an American industry inventing itself. Work in the music business required regular travel for shows all through the remote backwaters of the South, and recording dates in Louisville; Atlanta; Chicago; Camden, New Jersey; and New York City. Moreover, it demanded of them product. A.P. had to go out into those Appalachian hills and scare up twenty or thirty new songs a year to feed the hungry maws of their record company and their fans. In the ’20s and ’30s there was nothing simple about bridging these two different worlds. The cost of trying was dear. And all of this is reflected in the Carters’ songs, which are mostly about life’s buffeting—about love and longing, hurt, loss, and suffering. In fact, it was precisely that clear-eyed and unwavering focus on the hard art of living that gave them such wide appeal.
Even on Brinkley’s radio station, their music carved itself in relief to Doctor’s insidious monument to quackery. The Carters weren’t simply an act; they were the real deal. When they sang of the Virginia wildwood, the cattle lowing in the lane, faith in the glory of the world to come, or the swiftest locomotive on the line, they were singing about their own story. And when they sang of orphaned children, worried men, tangled love, and bruised hearts, that was their story, too.
Elisha “Lish” Carter and Mary Bays Carter (with their children), Will Bays, Charlie Bays (holding Dewey) and Mary Bays, Mandy Groves, Mollie Carter (obscured, holding Ettaleen); bottom row: Nancy Carter Bays Hensley (Bob Carter’s mother), Nathaniel “T’int” Bays and Levisy Bays (Mollie Carter’s parents), Bob Carter (holding Eck and Virgie), A.P. Carter, Jim Carter (Stella Bayes)
Mollie Carter with grandchildren (Carter Family Museum)
Pleasant
Five separate mountain ridges cut on a southwest diagonal through Scott County, Virginia: Powell’s and Stone westernmost, out by the Kentucky border; Clinch Mountain farthest south and east, not far from the Tennessee border; and in between, the Copper Creek and Moccasin ridges. Every big valley rolls and folds into itself, forming valleys within valleys, haunts and hollows that can’t be seen from even the highest perch in the county, on top of Clinch Mountain, 3,200 feet up. So you’d have to have a pretty fair knowledge of the richly filigreed landscape, of the right roadless gap to take, to make your way into the deepest hollows. That inaccessibility, with its promise of well-hid treasures, has always been the heart of the romance of the Appalachian Mountains. “A mysterious realm,” the writer Horace Kephart called the southern Appalachians, “terra incognita.” Kephart was a St. Louis librarian who had traveled widely in Europe and spent years cataloging a gargantuan collection of works by and about a fourteenth-century Italian poet. In 1904, with his penchant for the obscure surprisingly undiminished, Kephart moved to the America’s southern mountains and began cataloging the culture of its natives.
Ten years later he brought out his book Our Southern Highlanders and introduced a people as exotic to his fellow academics as South Sea islanders or Eskimos. For a decade Kephart had plumbed the region’s language, superstitions, work patterns, diet, and dentistry: “It was here I first heard of ‘tooth-jumping,’ ” wrote Kephart. “Let one of my old neighbors tell it in his own words: ‘You take a cut nail (not one o’ those round wire nails) and place its squar p’int agin the ridge of the tooth, jest under the edge of the gum. Then jump the tooth out with a hammer. A man who knows how can jump a tooth without it hurtin’ half as bad as pullin’. But old Uncle Neddy Cyarter went to jump one of his own
teeth out, one time, and missed the nail and mashed his nose with the hammer. . . . Some men git to be as experienced at it as tooth-dentists are at pullin’. They cut around the gum, and then put the nail at jest sich an angle, slantin’ downward for an upper tooth or upwards for a lower one, and hit one lick.’
“ ‘Will the tooth come at the first lick?’
“ ‘Ginerally. If it didn’t you might as well stick your head in a swarm o’ bees and ferget who you are.’ ”
It’s no wonder Horace got caught up in the flat-out oddness of the remotest hollows (the “back of beyond,” he called it), but his seminal work in the mountains had the effect of obscuring the regal and practical breadth of Appalachian culture. By 1913, it was way too late for rural to still be thought of as synonymous with backward or isolated. At the time Kephart was doing his fieldwork, a young native of Scott County, Leonidas Reuben Dingus, educated at the free schools near Wood, Virginia, was presenting his own postdoctoral papers, to wit: “Study of Literary Tendencies in the Novellen of Theodore Storm,” “A Brief on Schiller’s Esthetic Philosophy,” and “Beowulf Translated into Alliterative Verse—Selections.” It was with evident pride that Dingus was celebrated as “one of the ripest scholars the county has produced.”
A full generation before Kephart arrived, Scott County had ninety-six public schools and two local newspapers, not counting the Toledo Blade, which arrived over the mountains by horseback in Copper Creek every two weeks. There was nobody who wasn’t but a few hours’ ride from a railroad station, and from there you could get to Kingsport, Nashville, Indianapolis, Washington, D.C., or New York. And the railroads could deliver any of the largest or most exotic items to be found in the Montgomery Ward or Sears, Roebuck catalogs. Usually that wasn’t necessary, however, for most of what was needed could be got right in Scott County. There were forty corn and flour mills, fourteen sawmills, and two woolen mills, all powered by the creeks and rivers that ran through the valleys. Every wide place in the road, such as Fido, Osborn’s Ford, and Nickelsville, had a general merchandise store that stocked everything from fine china to Cracker Jacks. Even the outlying areas were dotted with home manufacturers who could take a body from cradle to grave. You could buy a pram, a wagon, or a coffin, handmade locally.
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? Page 2