Except for Uncle Fland’s shape notes, Maybelle couldn’t read music at all—and never would—but she studied her brothers and learned to play old songs by ear. She could take one of the old songs her mom played—“Weeping Willow Tree,” “Sugar Hill,” or “I Ain’t Gonna Work Tomorrow”—and make her own tune of it. “The songs we learned were taught to us by my mother, who learned them from her mother before her, who had, in turn, learned them from her parents.” What gave the old songs a modern flare was her guitar. “People hadn’t been using the guitar in the country that much,” says historian and musician Mike Seeger. “They had been singing unaccompanied, or they had banjo and fiddle for the most part. And the style of guitar that Maybelle played had a fluid, flowing, rhythmic sound, a way of playing the melody that was plain enough so that you could understand what it was, yet still brought you in because it had rhythm and life to it.”
It wasn’t long before her brothers were asking her to play with them at dances. Having Maybelle sit in was like having two musicians at once. Almost out of necessity, she was already developing a style of playing that would become known as the “Carter scratch.” It wasn’t necessarily difficult to master, but it was distinctive. And Maybelle got there first, on her own, transferring what she’d learned from her mother’s five-string-banjo style. “I started trying different ways to pick it, and came up with my own style, because there weren’t many guitar players around. I just played the way I wanted to,” she said years later, when asked to explain her invention, “and that’s it.”
“She’d hook that right thumb under that big bass string,” her daughter June Carter Cash once wrote, “and just like magic the other fingers moved fast like a threshing machine, always on the right strings, and out came the lead notes and the accompaniment at the same time. The left hand worked in perfect timing, and the frets seemed to pull those nimble fingers to the very place where they were supposed to be, and the guitar rang clear and sweet with a mellow touch that made you know it was Maybelle playing the guitar.” Even when she was just thirteen, Maybelle had strong worker’s hands—and staying power. She and her brothers would play until sunup. “You know,” she once said, “I have square-danced all night and many a night in my life.”
Another thing Maybelle did for entertainment was attend the Holiness revivals in the area. Maybelle didn’t have so much interest in this hot new strain of American Methodism; the charismatics could be frightening, speaking in tongues, channeling the Holy Ghost itself. But for church-house music, there was no better. Maybelle would walk miles to a revival just to hear those driving hymns. “There was nothing else to do, so we’d go hear them sing,” she once said, “just for the curiosity of it.” It was wholly unchained from the old modal ballads and parlor songs so common in Rich Valley, and even from the more traditional shape-note gospel harmonies in Flanders Bays’s songbooks. At bottom, the Holiness music had the rhythmic, free-form crackle of old slave spirituals, and Maybelle couldn’t get enough.
For church itself, the Addingtons stayed closer to home. On Sundays they’d dress in their finest and ride in buggies over to the Addington Frame Church. Services at Addington Frame were less emotional and pleading than at the Holiness revivals, or even at Mount Vernon. By comparison, the Frame was subdued. But this Primitive Baptist church had a forgiving progressivism that Maybelle would carry with her all her life. By the time Maybelle came into the church, Addington Frame had a long history of social progressivism. During the Civil War, the area’s Primitive Baptist central council threatened any congregation that aided the Union cause, and the Addington Frame elders fired back: “The advice given by the Association to the churches is contrary to the orthodox principles of the Baptists. It is unscriptural, uncharitable and full of bigotry.” The Frame was also doctrinally charitable, to each and every individual. The Frame rejected predestination, which said that God had already chosen the few who would be saved and the rest were damned without appeal. At Addington Frame, Maybelle learned that everybody had an equal chance to earn his way into eternal life—from the wealthiest landowner to the poorest farmhand. It was between that person and God, and depended on both faith and works.
That’s not to say the Frame didn’t practice old-time religion. Once a year they had a foot washing, where members would humble themselves before God and community by washing another’s feet. They also had furious, weeklong revivals, part spiritual and part social. “When we’d have revivals, all the young folks would go,” says Daphne Stapleton. “And the deal was ‘Can I walk you home?’ Sometimes it would be midnight before you got home.”
Those nights went so late because when a sinner was called to the altar, no schedule mattered. “Sometimes they’d start praying with somebody, and they didn’t stop until they got them right, got them saved,” says one woman who remains a force in a nearby church. “They might start in the afternoon and then come back at night after supper.”
At every revival and every regular service there was music, though the singing at the Frame was more democratic than at Mount Vernon: They didn’t go in for special quartets or solos. Everybody joined in. But despite their differences, Addington Frame and Mount Vernon were more alike than not. In a way you could say that Addington Frame religion came from across the mountain, and it came in the person of Big Tom Carter. Big Tom was a six-foot-six, three-hundred-pound servant of God and man. But he was no friend to his horses. For forty years he rode back and forth across Clinch Mountain from his home in Poor Valley to Rich Valley, where he pastored at the Frame.
Big Tom was cousin to Bob Carter (his father had helped raise Bob) and brother to Mandy Groves. He’d been a bit of a heller when he was young, even took a drink now and then. But when Big Tom got religion, he got it whole hog. After he was saved, he wouldn’t touch a drop. When Big Tom wasn’t preaching, he was serving his congregations in other ways: He delivered two hundred babies, performed more than five hundred weddings and twice as many baptisms. He also set broken bones and cured skin cancer. Anybody who thought they had a skin cancer would visit Big Tom, and he’d treat them . . . which is to say he’d burn off the growth. “You’re gonna suffer,” Big Tom would always tell people right up front. But he was not licensed to prescribe painkillers, so all he could do was suggest the best substitute for morphine he knew: whiskey.
That’s another thing Maybelle took from her church: an understanding of providential grace. Tom Carter always figured God had a highly evolved view of sin, that He took a good hard look at a person’s circumstances before He judged them. In fact, when Big Tom was late in life and suffering from arthritis and other maladies, his doctor told him to take a sip of whiskey every night for health purposes. And he did. But according to his son Dale, he’d first lace it with goldenseal (an herb), so it tasted bitter as bile. “He figured if it didn’t taste good and he didn’t get any enjoyment out of it,” says Dale, “it was okay.”
Because Big Tom also led a congregation on the Poor Valley side of Clinch Mountain, he made it to the Frame only once or twice a month. So when he was there, he’d preach Saturdays and Sundays, and that meant whoever was preparing the Sunday dinners could go to services Saturday morning. After services, Big Tom would do the dunking. “It was quite a ways from the church to the creek where they’d baptize,” says Daphne Stapleton. “Baptism was on Copper Creek, down where Hugh M. Addington lived. There’d be all the people up on the hill watching, and buggies and horses. Wasn’t hardly any cars back then.
“Maybelle and I were baptized at the same time, in 1924. There was a whole bunch of us baptized. There must have been about twelve or fifteen people. I was about thirteen, so Maybelle must have been about fifteen. Tom Carter baptized us.”
What a holy day that must have been for Big Tom, more than a dozen souls washed clean in one fell swoop. Big Tom’s call was strong, and he didn’t act on it just within the walls of his churches. Back and forth across Clinch Mountain, Tom Carter was always prospecting for souls. He’d see some young farmhan
d on a plow and walk right up to him, voice booming: “Boy! Have you been saved?!” Probably that’s why Eck Carter went the other way when he saw his preacher cousin coming. At the time he married Maybelle, Eck didn’t care much for religion. He was busy chasing other things—like worldly goods. But Maybelle never pushed Eck, and she never judged him. The way she saw it, that was his choice. She loved him anyway.
* * *
How could Eck not love this girl? There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her. Anything Maybelle asked for, he’d give her. But Maybelle didn’t ask for much, so he’d give her things he thought she might like. When he got himself a motorcycle, he bought her one, too, a one-cylinder Indian. But even with the motorcycle, Maybelle couldn’t keep up with Eck. Who could? And who wanted to? “Eck had him a big Harley-Davidson motorcycle, specially built,” says his nephew Joe Carter. “And every time he’d go out, he’d come in clawed up. He’d run it through a fence or something. I believe he bored it out to eight [cylinders]. It’d outrun a scalded dog. And Eck thought he was a motorcycle man. He’d lay that thing down on a curve, and that little pedal down there where your foot rests, it’d leave a fire going all the way around the curve. If he’d a-hooked into something with that thing, he’d still be on the road. Ermine rode with him out of Bristol one time. Came near to scaring Ermine to death. Ermine said he fell in on one of them stiff curves and kept laying it down there and they was a-leaving a streak of fire behind them. He said, ‘Eck, you better slow her down.’ ”
But Eck wouldn’t slow down for anybody. He was on the move—on his way up. He’d had plenty enough lean years growing up, and his own house was going to be different. Eck measured his progress in the world by the bounty he brought home to his bride. Too much was never enough. Eck didn’t return from the road empty-handed; he’d burst through the cabin door with bagfuls of bananas, grapes, and walnuts . . . and jewelry and perfumes from town. He bought Maybelle a radio so that they could listen to Riley “the Ball Mountain Caruso” Puckett and “Fiddlin’ John” Carson—with his daughter, “Moonshine Kate”—on WSB out of Atlanta or the Grand Ole Opry (known then as the WSM Barndance) out of Nashville. Eck bought records for their battery-powered Victor Talking Machine Company phonograph. Cecil McLister didn’t stock just Caruso and Broadway show tunes. Records were starting to sound like home: Vernon Dalhart’s renditions of “The Wreck of Old 97,” “The Ballad of Floyd Collins,” and “Prisoner’s Song”; Puckett’s covers of “Little Old Log Cabin” and “You’ll Never Miss Your Mother Till She’s Gone”; and Henry Whitter’s versions of “Lonesome Road Blues” and “The Old-Time Fox Chase.” When they’d listen to them together, Eck would tell Maybelle there wasn’t a musician on radio or record could hold a candle to her.
Around their first anniversary, Eck started to build Maybelle a house of her own. He bought some land way up in the foothills, just a few hundred yards from Mount Vernon Methodist Church, and built a big four-room cabin with a sleeping loft above. In fact, Eck might have built it a little too big. It was so nice that Bob and Mollie decided to move in, too. So Eck built a second, smaller cabin a bit farther up the mountain, where he and his bride finally set up housekeeping on their own. It was time, anyway: Not long after they celebrated their first wedding anniversary, Maybelle announced she was going to have a baby. But when Eck was away, Maybelle could still go down the mountain to stay with Bob and Mollie, or up the road less than a mile to stay with her cousin Sara.
Though Maybelle and Sara had grown up within a quarter mile of each other, they hadn’t been close. Maybelle was only six years old when Sara married and went across the mountain. But once Maybelle got to the Carter side, the two women were like instant sisters. People could see it in the way they made music together: One would start in on a song, and the other could always follow along. And people could see it in the way the quiet would sit so easy between them for hours. They didn’t have to talk. For Maybelle, who was just a teenager when she married, Sara’s presence eased her way on the other side of the mountain. For Sara, Maybelle was like a lifeline she hadn’t realized she needed. For the first time, Sara found almost absolute security in another person. In fact, she even felt confident enough in their sisterhood to risk it on a practical joke, the only practical joke anyone remembers Sara perpetrating. Just after Maybelle’s first daughter was born, Sara made a stealth visit to Eck’s house. While Maybelle was cleaning in the next room, Sara quietly removed the sleeping baby from her crib, hid her in the other bedroom, and left the house unseen. When Maybelle entered the nursery and found the crib empty, she fainted. They’d laugh about that one for the rest of their days. Nobody was more forgiving than Maybelle—and nobody was more fun. When she’d stay over at Sara’s, Maybelle would help Sara cook for the children: Gladys, Janette, and baby Joe. Then they’d pull out their instruments and make music in the cabin. When A.P. was gone, they’d kick off their shoes and teach Gladys and Janette how to dance the buck and wing.
* * *
A.P. was gone about as much as Eck in those days, mostly on the circuit selling fruit trees. One time in 1926, he returned from a trip to Kingsport and somehow convinced Sara to ride back to town to sing for a man who was scouting “hillbilly” musicians for Brunswick, a “recording” company. But with Sara singing the lead, the scout didn’t see a chance for the Carters. Women just didn’t take the lead in combos, except maybe on race records. He thought A.P. should get out front. They could bill him as “Fiddlin’ Doc.” Partly for his mother (as he’d always claim later) and partly because he knew his own limitations, Pleasant demurred. But he left the audition with some cause for hope. The Brunswick man had said there was no need for them to be poor folks with voices like theirs.
How could A.P. forget that? Sometimes when he was home, he would pull out his fiddle and play along with Sara and Maybelle. And sometimes he’d just stop and listen. He knew how good the two were together. He’d heard all Eck’s records, too, and the men were agreed: There was no duo or group better than their Sara and Maybelle. Not only that, the music they played—the songs themselves—were precious gems, A.P. believed. Pleasant Carter had a preacher’s faith in the eminence of those songs. As Pleasant saw it, those old songs were more valuable than all the coal in Wise County—and a lot more lasting. That’s what he was banking on in July of 1927, when he saw an ad in the Bristol paper for the local Victrola dealer, the Clark-Jones-Sheeley Company. DON’T DENY YOURSELF THE SHEER JOY OF ORTHOPHONIC MUSIC was the headline, but in a box beneath it, the small type read, “The Victor Co. will have a recording machine in Bristol for 10 days beginning Monday to record records—Inquire at our Store.”
A.P. went immediately to 621 State Street to see if Cecil McLister knew anything. And Cecil sure did. There was a Mr. Ralph Peer in just the other day, he told A.P., a representative of the Victor Talking Machine Company who had asked Cecil to put the word out and line up some music acts Peer could audition in Bristol. Cecil didn’t see why the Carters couldn’t have a tryout.
“[A.P.] came back home and he told us, said there’s a man from Victor in Bristol looking for talent, you know, to make records,” Maybelle told folklorist Ed Kahn twenty-five years later. “And of course we didn’t think anything about it. I didn’t.”
A.P. couldn’t think of anything else . . . and he couldn’t stop talking about it. He told his wife that Mr. Ralph Peer was going to be paying fifty dollars for every song he liked well enough to record. Sara’s reaction was characteristically blunt: “Aw, pshaw. Ain’t nobody gonna pay that much money to hear us sing.” Even when A.P. could point to the story that appeared in the Bristol paper a few days later, about a fellow named Stoneman, from Galax, who was making $3,600 a year in royalties alone, the reaction in Maces Springs generally followed Sara’s. The toughest criticism came from Uncle Lish, who was himself a suspect character—he’d once set out to burn the lice out of his hen’s roosts, forgot that it was attached to his barn, and burned the entire structure to a charred heap—but always read
y to think the worst of his wifty nephew. “Well, Doc’s going crazy,” he’d say.
“Uncle Lish Carter was always on A.P.’s case,” Janette Carter wrote in Living with Memories. “Doc had done some strange things, usually right backwards to other people. . . . So when Daddy calmly announced, ‘I am going to make records if Ralph Peer in Bristol likes our act,’ Uncle Lish said, ‘Send him out to Marion [the Marion, Virginia, mental hospital]. He’s completely gone this time. His family will starve, no doubt.’ ”
Eck was not altogether behind his brother’s scheme, either. Maybelle was just eighteen years old, and eight months pregnant. Besides, A.P. didn’t just want to borrow Eck’s wife; he wanted to borrow his car. Eck did relent, but not before he made A.P. promise to weed his corn patch. Some good was going to come of this, Eck figured. On July 31, 1927, A.P., Sara, and Maybelle loaded up Eck’s Essex for the trip. “I remember standing at the fence up there at Grandma Carter’s, screaming and crying for them to take me, and they left me a-standing there,” Janette says. “They took Joe. He was nursing.”
Eight-year-old Gladys climbed aboard the Essex; she was going along to baby-sit Joe, in case their mother had to spend long hours auditioning. By the time A.P. got everybody loaded in, there wasn’t much room for luggage. “When we got ready to leave, I said, ‘Should I take my guitar?’ ” Maybelle told Kahn. “A.P. said, ‘Why, sure.’ Said, ‘You can’t make a record without your guitar.” Had they rehearsed? Kahn asked. “We didn’t do anything. Of course the songs we did then we already knew. We had been doing them together quite a bit around the house.”
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? Page 9