Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  In the twenties, youngsters were streaming out of the hills with their grandfathers’ hand-me-down-down fiddles . . . and their songs, too. Twenty-two-year-old Marcus Lowe Stokes blew down from the Blue Ridge foothills and captured Atlanta’s annual fiddler’s championship with a foot-stompin’ version of “Hell’s Broke Loose in Georgia.” After that, the crowd wouldn’t let Stokes off the stage at Cable Hall, and he was happy to oblige his audience: “We play till milking time in Cartersville,” he said. Stokes’s rousing victory inspired Stephen Vincent Benet to write the poem “The Mountain Whippoorwill” (“My mother was a whippoorwill pert / My father, he was lazy / But I’m hell broke loose in a new store shirt / To fiddle all Georgia crazy”).

  In short, fiddlers always drew a crowd, and that’s why Atlanta’s Okeh dealer, Mr. Polk Brockman, wanted the John Carson records by the time the next fiddle contest convened. So on a hot July day in 1923, Brockman went to Atlanta’s Railway Express Office to take delivery of the Carson disks. Then he raced to Cable Hall, where dozens of fiddle champs and an audience of six thousand people were gathering, climbed onto the stage, pointed the glory horn of an old German phonograph out toward the audience, and let fly with Fiddlin’ John on record. In a few hours, Brockman’s inventory was gone and he was calling New York.

  “He got on the phone and said, ‘This is a riot,’ ” Peer remembered. “ ‘I’ve gotta get ten thousand records down here right now.’ ” When national sales hit half a million, Peer called Carson to New York: “I said, ‘Get this fellow on a train right away. I’ve got to remake the record. We can’t go ahead with that sort of thing. So we remade two selections and another eight or ten, you see, and we were off.”

  So Peer had another series to add to the Okeh catalog and a question about what to name it: Mountain? Mountain Country? Hill Country? It would be nearly two years before a five-piece string band from Galax, Virginia (Al Hopkins and the Hill Billies), gave Peer his inspiration. Next catalog out, the “hillbilly record” was born. Peer began trolling the mountains for more recording artists, and the mountaineers were waking up to it.

  In the summer of 1924, a thirty-one-year-old carpenter in the coal town of Bluefield, West Virginia, was downtown killing time at the Warwick Furniture Company when the store manager put one of Peer’s early mountain recordings, Henry Whitter’s version of “The Wreck of Old 97,” on the phonograph. Ernest V. “Pop” Stoneman was almost embarrassed for Henry; he’d worked with Whitter over at a cotton mill in Fries, and Pop knew the man was no singer. He sang “through his nose so bad,” Pop told an interviewer in the sixties, “I said, ‘Everybody’s going to think we all sing through the nose. I can outsing Henry Whitter.’ So I made me a harp rack and started working on a harmonica and autoharp combo. I said, ‘They ain’t got anything like that.’ ”

  Stoneman was already moonlighting as a musician for hire, at three dollars for three hours most Saturday nights. But through that summer, he spent his free nights rehearsing with a local dance band. He wrote letters to both Columbia and Okeh. Columbia invited him to New York in September; Okeh said “come any time.” But when Pop started saving up money and talking about his big trip, his friends mostly laughed at him. “You won’t find your way out of Penn Station,” somebody told him. “Others did,” Pop said, “and I’ll follow them.”

  Stoneman arrived in New York in September of 1924 with forty-seven dollars (less train fare) in his pocket, an autoharp, and a harmonica. The Columbia man offered him a hundred dollars to record eighteen sides right away. Pop didn’t like the offer, so he just never went back. Over at Okeh, the audition went better. Ralph Peer had been charmed by the autoharp—he’d never seen one before—and he offered Pop twenty-five dollars per song. A few days later, Pop recorded “The Titanic” and “The Face That Never Returned,” but when Peer sent the demos to Pop in Bluefield a few weeks later, he said Pop’s songs were just too fast. Peer figured the key to hillbilly records was in the songs’ stories. “You’ve got to make people understand it,” Peer said. So Pop paid his own way back to New York and recut those songs, plus two others (“Freckle Faced Mary Jane” and “Me and My Wife”), and Peer signed him to a five-year contract.

  What Peer loved about Stoneman was that he didn’t do just the old traditional songs that everybody knew. He’d made something new of the Titanic poem—and could find newer songs with modern-sounding lyrics, such as “Sinful to Flirt” and “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down.” And Pop could always pick up a new song in a hurry. That helped a lot in Okeh’s hillbilly catalog. The best-selling songs were usually what Peer called “event” songs. “Any disaster that came along we’d have somebody write a song about it,” Peer said. “This was the trick. This fellow Andrew [’Blind Andy’] Jenkins was just waiting there to get an idea. He had a wonderful retentive mind. He’d get people to read the paper to him. And he could write a song about any little incident.”

  The first big event song was Jenkins’s “Floyd Collins Trapped in a Cave,” about a Kentucky spelunker who got himself wedged into a dark, tight spot sixty feet underground. For three weeks in February of 1925, while a make-do crew from the local railroad raced to dig out poor Floyd, the nation had been riveted to the live-or-die drama. It was one of the country’s first big media circuses, early reality programming. The story ran in newspapers across the country, and on radio broadcasts; newfangled newsreel cameras filmed as the heavy machinery tunneled toward Floyd, and a tiny Louisville Courier-Journal reporter managed to crawl far enough into the hole to interview Floyd. “Oh God, be merciful!” was how the special edition of the Courier-Journal quoted Floyd. “I keep praying: Lord, dear Lord, gracious Lord, Jesus, please get me out of this.” Just as his rescuers got close, the roof of the tunnel fell around Floyd’s head. Photographers snapped away at his doe-eyed fiancée, who looked on as the workers dug a second tunnel. When they finally got to Floyd, he was cold and lifeless. But what a story—and one the entire nation knew. Such a nice religious boy, and brave to the end . . . and the poor girl he left behind. It was an American tragedy.

  Within six weeks, Fiddlin’ John’s version of the Jenkins song was on the market. And Jenkins recorded it, too, and so did George Ake and John Fergus and Vernon Dalhart. With the powerful Victor label behind him, Dalhart made “Floyd” a million-seller. And Polk Brockman owned the song. He’d asked Blind Andy Jenkins to write it, and bought the copyright. So Brockman was getting a royalty on every song sheet and every record. No matter who recorded it, or for what label.

  After that, when there was a cotton-mill fire in South Carolina or a flood in Mississippi, Brockman and Peer would call Jenkins, or Kelly Harrell, and tell one of them to work up a song, fast. Peer could hand Stoneman the words to Harrell’s new “Story of the Mighty Mississippi” on one day, and Pop could record it the next: “Ralph Peer put me in a room with a colored piano player who played me the tune,” Stoneman said, “and I pinned [the words] up in my hotel room and learned them that night.” That’s why Peer had signed Stoneman to a personal contract, which made Peer his manager. And that’s why Peer took Stoneman with him when he left Okeh for the Victor Talking Machine Company.

  Since the turn of the century, Victor had been the label of Enrico Caruso and class. The Victor Red Seal series was the top of the line of the recording industry: operas, symphonies, silky urban dance tunes—only the best. But when company sales had dropped off a cliff—by 1925 revenues were just half the 1921 figure—Victor was suddenly anxious to get into the growing hillbilly music field. So they hired Ralph Peer to make it happen. Peer said he’d come on for no salary, as long as he could control the copyrights to all the songs he found. The way Peer saw it, this was duck soup: He’d get a royalty on every record sold, and Victor knew how to sell a record. No company sold more. When Peer first got to Victor in 1926, he recorded a new Stoneman record and it sold sixty thousand without an ounce of promotion.

  That year, Victor began a new electric recording process and issued a new phonogra
ph, the Victor Orthophonic, which was flying off the shelves. Victor still had money to burn, Peer found out, when he told the company’s recording director what he was going to pay the hillbilly acts for each song. Nat Shilkret, a onetime clarinet prodigy who had played with the Russian Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, had paid out piles of cash to artists such as Nellie Melba and Caruso, and to the finest dance orchestras in New York. He almost fell over when Peer named the figure, the same one he’d paid at Okeh. “You cannot make any recordings for Victor at twenty-five dollars apiece,” Shilkret said. “This is just entirely too cheap. It might get out and we couldn’t stand that kind of publicity.”

  “So make it fifty dollars each,” Peer said.

  When he told Shilkret he wanted a portable recorder to take on a southern expedition for Victor, Peer, as he later said, had to “put over the thought that the hillbilly recordings didn’t have to have the same quality as Caruso. And, uh, they appropriated sixty thousand dollars for the trip . . . and they thought that was peanuts. I could have done it for half. But at that early age, I had the sense to conform to whatever the company wanted.”

  With the money in place—and a new and better recording system—Peer wrote Stoneman. He was coming to visit Pop at his new home in Galax, Virginia, and Pop should go up in the mountains and find some acts worth recording. After the auditions, Peer said, he’d have Pop and the other approved acts meet him in Bristol, Virginia, for Victor’s first field-recording session. Recording in Bristol had two advantages: There was a strong Victor distributorship there, run by Cecil McLister, and it was a railhead. With two major roads and a half-dozen short lines running into Bristol, acts from all over Appalachia could get there fairly easily. If all else failed, Peer figured, at least he’d get some Stoneman recordings on wax. By the time Peer got to Bristol, that’s about all he could count on. Pop hadn’t turned up much talent besides his own family and one friend.

  By the time Peer and Stoneman started recording on July 26, 1927, the whole expedition looked like a bust. So Peer got the idea of inviting the local newspaper editor to visit the rented makeshift studio on the Tennessee side of Bristol (downtown’s State Street runs along the Virginia-Tennessee state line). The editor came over the next day. “Intensely interesting is a visit to the Victor Talking Machine recording station located on the second floor of the building formerly occupied by the Taylor-Christian Hat company in Bristol,” said that afternoon’s News Bulletin. “This morning Earnest [sic] Stoneman and company were the performers and they played and sang into the microphone a favorite in Grayson County, Va., namely ‘I Love My Lulu Bell.’ . . . Eck Dunford was the principal singer, while a matron 26 years of age [Pop’s wife, Hattie Stoneman] and the mother of five children joined in for a couple of stanzas. . . . The synchronizing is perfect: Earnest Stoneman playing the guitar, the young matron the violin and a young mountaineer a banjo and the mouth harp. Bodies swaying, feet beating a perfect rhythm, it is calculated to go over big when offered to the public.”

  All this made nice publicity for Victor and Peer, but the real coup was when the New York executive took the Bulletin editor aside and told him about the money the group was making: two hundred dollars a day for recording, plus royalties. Stoneman had made $3,600 in royalties last year alone. (Peer neglected to mention that he himself had made $250,000 in royalties from the sheaf of copyrights he now controlled—in a quarter of a year.) Well, naturally the editor tucked Stoneman’s financial windfall right into the story. “This worked like dynamite,” Peer said, “and the very next day I was deluged with long-distance calls from the surrounding mountain region. Groups of singers who had not visited Bristol during their entire lifetime arrived by bus, horse and buggy, train, or on foot.”

  Most of the acts racing toward Bristol would go back home to obscurity, with nothing. Many of the mountain acts Peer saw repeated the same songs: hymns, centuries-old ballads, or popular standards that had been recorded already. Peer needed material he could copyright and cash in on, so he needed musicians who could write their own songs, or at least restitch the traditional songs enough that he could “put them over as new.” Down in Bristol in those last few days of July 1927, Peer was holding musicians to a tougher standard than he had while at Okeh. As always, he’d let the groups do the song of their choice first—and it was usually a well-known song. Then he’d ask if they had any songs of their own. “If they did another popular song,” Peer remembered, “I never bothered with them.”

  Few who climbed the two stories to his State Street studio could spin out something new, or new-sounding, but Peer was not discouraged. The dapper thirty-five-year-old had a certainty about himself and his ability to make a find. He never doubted his fundamental method: constant activity. On the first day of August, he spent the entire day in the overheated studio on State Street, recording two different bands. Both had decent fiddlers, but neither had much to offer in the way of new songs. He broke for supper but planned to come back that evening for another session—to meet with a Mr. and Mrs. Carter, from Maces Springs, Virginia.

  78 (Eugene W. Earle)

  Gladys, Janette, and Joe, near the old porch (Carter Family Museum)

  New Orthophonic Victor Southern Series

  A. P. might have been overly optimistic about the ride to Bristol. By the time they arrived at his sister Virgie’s house in town, it was near dark—and everybody must have been in a foul humor. It had taken the entire day to drive the twenty-six miles from Maces Springs to Bristol, traveling the dirt road that ran up and down but rarely flat, curving around the foothills so that the horizon was often lost. Around some turns, the road mercifully opened onto a view of gently rolling farmland; around others, the high hills closed in from both sides, dwarfing the little Essex automobile and blocking the slanting sunlight until the path was all but darkened. Maybe the road hadn’t been graded in a while, because it seemed to eight-year-old Gladys that they were bouncing off the seats all the way. Infant Joe squalled the entire time, and Sara had to keep him at her breast. And how often did Maybelle, just a month from giving birth, have to stop to answer to her poor weighted bladder? There was certainly no shortage of stops. The rain held off, but a tire popped. A.P. managed to get a rubber patch over the inner tube, but the heat kept melting it away, so he had to stop along the road twice more to repatch and pump air back into the inner tube.

  At Virgie’s at least there were beds, but Gladys heard somebody walking the floor most of the night. Was her mother up in the night comforting the baby? Could her daddy have slept at all? He was anxious every day. What must he have been like that night, with his big audition at hand? It was a good thing they had all the next day to tune their instruments and run through the songs they’d chosen. As evening neared, they put on their best Sunday clothes. A.P. wore a dark blue suit. Sara and Maybelle wore their nicest dresses, cut just below the knee, with sheer silk hose fastened tight by garters. Gladys put on her best dress and her Sunday-school slippers. Then they all headed for State Street.

  What confidence the trio had mustered took a shot when they got to the old hat warehouse downtown. On the sidewalk outside the building, and all through the lobby, there were people milling around, and it seemed like half of them were carrying instruments. The way they were dressed, they might have been from Richmond or New York or London. Years later, A.P. confessed to a friend that he’d been so shaken when they arrived that they decided to go around to the alley and climb the fire escape. They didn’t want to walk though that crowd and let everybody get a look at their country clothes.

  When they arrived upstairs in the warehouse loft, the walls were hung with blankets. The “recording machine” was partitioned off by a second set of blankets, and all they could see of it was one horn jutting through a small aperture. Mr. Ralph Peer was there, with his new wife (and former secretary), Anita Glander Peer, and with two engineers who ran the recording machine. The businesslike Mrs. Peer ushered Gladys and baby Joe
over into the corner, while Mr. Peer calmly explained to the three nervous musicians that they would have to mount the jerry-built platform, get right up next to the horn, and direct their voices into it. So they climbed up on the wooden stage, drew in close to one another. Then Maybelle led in, bare-fingered, on Eck’s little Stella guitar, and Sara’s voice chased right after it:

  My heart is sad and I’m in sorrow,

  For the only one I love.

  And suddenly, out of nowhere, A.P.’s quavering bass was registering right alongside Sara’s contralto.

  When shall I see him?

  Oh, no never ’til I meet him in heaven above.

  Bury me under the weeping willow,

  Yes, under the weeping willow tree

  So he may know where I am sleeping

  And perhaps he will weep for me.

  They told me that he did not love me.

  I could not believe it was true

  Until a man softly whispered,

  “He had been untrue to you.”

  Peer wanted more. So he had his wife usher Gladys and Joe straight out of the studio. Anita Peer was an able businesswoman and problem solver. Before she’d married Ralph Peer she’d been a girl Friday around movie studios. She’d dealt with Hollywood producers, puffed-up actors, and stoned session musicians. But a crying baby was beyond her expertise. “Mrs. Peer fed Joe ice cream until he was about to burst, as it would have to do until his Mama finished singing,” Gladys later wrote. The Carters recorded four songs that evening, and Sara’s was the lead voice in all. Peer had been taken with her voice, but it was still a tad unsettling. In all the groups Peer had seen in Bristol—and all the mountain groups he’d auditioned over the years—none had a woman carry the lead vocals. And he didn’t know if A.P. Carter had the force to hold the group together musically. Peer couldn’t help but notice the way the tall, gangly fellow kept wandering away from the microphone in the middle of a song. After that first session, Peer pulled A.P. aside. “You didn’t do very much,” he told him.