Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  “No,” said A.P. “I just bass in every once’t in a while.”

  When Peer invited the Carters back the next morning, A.P. didn’t even show up. Sara and Maybelle recorded two more numbers, with Sara singing “Wandering Boy” and “Single Girl, Married Girl” as solos. They were done before noon. That same afternoon, A.P. loaded the family in the Essex for the trip home. He had no idea what was going to come of this venture. But he did know they were leaving Bristol with three hundred dollars more than they arrived with (minus the money he spent that morning buying Eck a new tire). On the way back home, Maybelle couldn’t wait to tell Eck about the session. He would have loved the machines: the heavy spinning turntable covered with an inch and a half of wax, powered by a system of pulleys and weights housed in a tall wooden tower. The microphone ran off electricity. Maybelle couldn’t have told her husband how the thing actually worked. And she didn’t have words to describe the static jolt it gave her when they initially played back the sound; it was like she’d found her own image in the mirror for the first time. “When we made the record and played it back, I thought it couldn’t be,” Maybelle once said. “I just couldn’t believe it, this being so unreal, you standing there and singing and they’d turn around and play it back to you.”

  When historians and writers came knocking at Peer’s Los Angeles mansion in later years, the story he liked to tell about the Carter Family’s Bristol session was the kind of hackneyed set piece that you could sell only in Hollywood: “They wander in. He’s dressed in overalls [and sometimes in Peer’s account they were splotched with mud] and the women are country women from way back there—calico clothes on—the children were poorly dressed. They were backwoods people and they were not accustomed to being in town, you see. They didn’t know what to do. . . . But as soon as I heard Sara’s voice, that was it. You see, I had done this so many times that I was trained to watch for the one point. . . . As soon as I heard her voice, why, I began to build around it and all the first recordings were on that basis.” New York talent scout discovers diamond among the rubes. History is made.

  But in private, Ralph Peer would quietly express a true sense of wonder about the family he met on that close August evening, dressed, in fact, in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. “My father always said that what amazed him,” says Ralph Peer II, “was that they were good, but they didn’t seem to know how good they were.”

  * * *

  In 1927 the Carters’ public appeal was a hard thing for a city boy like Peer to appreciate—and he didn’t. The family’s music sprang mainly from the narrow traditions of white southern gospel and the balladry that had floated for generations in the thin mountain air of Appalachia. Over the years, the trio would seek out new forms, including coal-camp blues and black gospel, but they never added Dixieland, jazz, or pop instruments to fill out their pared-down autoharp-and-guitar arrangements. Adding frets or substituting a second guitar for Sara’s autoharp was as radical as they got. They also showed little talent for the hit-chasing event song. A.P.’s one attempt, “The Cyclone of Rye Cove,” sounded like it belonged to somebody else. The Carters were never much good at channeling public tragedy.

  A.P., Sara, and Maybelle were at their best when they were plying the sharper edges of private and personal pain. From the first, that’s what they cut down into the grooves of their most affecting records. Even from the wheeziest Victrola, their voices ricocheted off the bone, because they leaned so hard on their own notions of tragedy. How many times in their own valley had they seen righteous, innocent people simply wiped away—and without cause? Right around the time the Carters went to Bristol, their friend Price Owens had accidentally driven his new Ford off the dirt road and fifty feet down an embankment into the Holston River. He was long drowned by the time farmhands pulled him out. Uncle Lish Carter had a boy drowned in that same river. One of Uncle Fland Bays’s sons fell into a well and couldn’t be pulled out in time to save him. Neither boy made his tenth birthday. In 1927 Uncle Charlie Bays had just got news that three of his children had contracted tuberculosis; it was only a matter of time before they’d be in their graves.

  Sara herself had been orphaned at three. Maybelle’s sister Madge would die at twenty-eight, orphaning her three children. And A.P. had lost a thirteen-year-old sister; by 1927 A.P.’s sister had been gone as long as she had lived. Ettaleen Carter had been a perfectly happy schoolgirl picking berries one afternoon, fevered in bed that night, and dead by morning. Maybe her appendix had burst, the doctor said. Nobody knew for sure what killed her. When they showed her daughter one last time at the grave site, Mollie Carter must have wailed. But there was little time to mourn. Mollie still had five children at home to raise. She had to go back to the planting, weeding, cooking, canning, and sewing. After Etta was buried, Mollie took on even more. She wouldn’t let her youngest girl, Sylvia, lift a finger. She doted on her, and saw that her hands were kept soft and filled with amusements.

  But what could Mollie do for her dead daughter, whose short life was hard work from one end of the day to the next? For the next thirty years, she regularly climbed up to Mount Vernon’s hilltop cemetery to plant flowers on Ettaleen’s grave. “She would go up there and dig around and make it nice,” Mollie’s daughter–in-law Theda Carter says. “Just spend time up there.” Mollie Carter remembered, for thirty years, when it would have been easier to forget. Mollie’s shame would have been in forgetting, in giving in to the desolate, empty feeling that her daughter’s short life, and the lives of all those who’d died in her valley, didn’t finally matter.

  In 1927 Thomas Wolfe—the first great modern writer to come down off a southern mountain—described the bone tragedy of his twelve-year-old brother’s death in his autobiographical novel Look Homeward Angel. In the event, two undertakers take the boy’s remains off the cooling board to be prepared for burial, leaving the grieving parents to themselves: “For some time Elizabeth and Gant continued to sit alone in the room,” Wolfe wrote. “Gant leaned his face in his powerful hands. ‘The best boy I ever had,’ Gant said. ‘By God, he was the best of the lot.’

  “And in the ticking silence they recalled him, and in the heart of each was fear and remorse, because he had been a quiet boy, and there were many, and he had gone unnoticed.”

  The Carters had a way of giving voice to that unspoken dread. What they cut down into those early recordings (in songs such as “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?”) was the sound of a single person facing down the desolate emptiness of uncaring time, a distant, ghostly cry from the darkest hollows: Don’t forget me. I mattered.

  But how could Ralph Peer and the boys in New York have the ear to recognize the amplitude of that keening pitch? In October of 1927, Victor released recordings by eleven different groups Peer had found on his southern expedition. The Carters’ recordings were not among them.

  * * *

  Of course A.P. couldn’t let it go. Didn’t matter to him that nobody from Victor had contacted the Carters since Bristol. For A.P. it was still an article of faith; something was bound to happen. “A.P. had the strongest convictions of anyone I ever saw,” his niece Lois Hensley says. “You couldn’t change his mind! He was that stubborn.” All through that fall, Pleasant was wound tighter than ever, and his temper could flare like a rocket. Anybody around could literally see the anger rise in him, as his tremor gained speed. So Sara just kept her head down and kept the house running. People never even saw her strain under the weight of it. She didn’t lose her calm. She never raised her voice. And even when A.P. was away on a trip or just out walking the tracks in fitful contemplation, she never faltered. She arose every morning before dawn, added wood and chips to the fire—and a pine knot if it really needed a kick. The hogs had to be fed, and she’d feed them. The cow had to be milked, and she’d milk her. Gladys was old enough to get herself off to school, but Janette and baby Joe were underfoot all day—and they had to be tended. “My mother ran her home like clockwork,” Janette wrote in Living with Memor
ies. “I knew as sure as my feet hit the floor, I would be washed all over and scrubbed clean from my hair to my toes with old lye soap. Everything smelled of lye—my hair, clothes, skin.”

  Actually, Janette was little trouble. Nearing five, she could already be counted on for small chores: gathering kindling, bunching tobacco, or walking the railroad tracks to pick up spilled coal. Joe was a different story. The minute he could walk, he was a terror, always on the go. Even that young, he was on the circuit. “I think Joe nursed all the mothers in Poor Valley,” Janette says. Sara could spend the day chasing Joe, but the corn still had to be weeded, the tobacco wormed, the corn milled, and the wood chopped. A few times a week she’d pull out the washboard and get a heavy, sloshing tubful of well water, add her lye, and scrub clean what few clothes they had. And every day, no matter what, meals had to be cooked. Sara always made sure to have corn bread put up. After the hardest days she could warm over beans, but most nights she’d try to make a real meal: tomato gravy, chicken and dumplings, green beans. If there were berries, she’d make a pie.

  When the work was done, most everybody liked to take a swim in the Holston River, get the chiggers off after a long day in the field. But Sara never liked the water. Maybe she’d help the girls catch lightning bugs so that they could put them in a jar and watch them spark in the night. Sara could always make music, but there was so little time—and she had so little strength left at the end of the day. Besides, Maybelle had her hands full with her new baby, Helen, who was born that September. Most nights Sara’s autoharp sat untouched on her cedar chest. Bristol was a fading memory.

  Then one day in early November, Eck and Maybelle came back from the city with news. They’d stopped by Cecil McLister’s store, and he had the phonograph piping music out onto State Street. The crowd was huge, and they were listening to the Carter Family’s first record. Inside, the record was on display under the NEW ORTHOPHONIC VICTOR SOUTHERN SERIES sign. It was a double-sided 78 with “Poor Orphan Child” on one side and “Wandering Boy” on the other. Eck and Maybelle had come home and played it for A.P. and Sara on Eck’s phonograph. And of course that wasn’t the only copy in the Valley. Uncle Flanders Bays bought the record—and he didn’t even own a phonograph. But that gave him a chance to take it to the Collinses’ for a listen, and then on to the Denisons’, where everybody waited in anticipation while Daddy Denison hand-cranked their boxy little Starr phonograph. “Flanders was so proud of that record that night,” one of the Denison daughters remembers.

  Sara suddenly had celebrity. Funny thing was, the sun didn’t rise any later. The cow didn’t milk herself, the weeds didn’t stop growing, the tub of wash water didn’t get any lighter, and corn bread didn’t miraculously appear on plates every night. Day to day, Sara’s life didn’t change one whit. At least not right away.

  Then, in early 1928, Peer released “The Storms Are on the Ocean” and its flip side, “Single Girl, Married Girl.” That record took off. “Single Girl,” a married woman’s lament for the loss of her carefree girlhood, moved the disks. There must have been a lot of women out there who felt kin to something they heard in Sara’s lone voice. (“Sara sang that one by herself,” Maybelle remembered. “It’s no harmony song.”) It sold, and kept selling, all over the South. One day that spring, Cecil McLister himself drove over to Maces Springs and presented the Carters with a royalty check. It wasn’t a lot, but suddenly the Carters were making money—for doing nothing. McLister had some other news. Mr. Peer had called. He wanted the Carters in Camden, New Jersey, right away, at the Victor Recording Studio. And that’s when Sara’s life changed. That’s when it started to get hard.

  “Entertainment” poster (Gladys Greiner)

  Original Carter Family, circa 1930 (Carter Family Museum)

  Home Manufacture

  Pleasant Carter was in a frenzy that spring. Mr. Peer wanted the threesome in New Jersey in early May, and that was just weeks away. They had to have songs to sing, the more the better. Peer was still offering fifty dollars for every song they recorded, plus royalties for each and every one they could copyright. Sara and Maybelle knew plenty of old songs from Rich Valley. And according to Maybelle, A.P. even wrote a song he called “Little Darlin’ Pal of Mine,” about a jilted lover. The writing foretold A.P.’s best to come: sighing wind, a casket, a shroud and a grave, betrayed and lifeless lips still hoping for a last kiss, and the charming, to-the-point couplet “Thought I had your heart forever, / but I find it’s only lent.”

  To round out the selections, A.P. leaned on family and neighbors. And who didn’t want to help? Uncle Fland knew plenty of church songs and had stacks of the old shape-note hymnbooks from the publishers in Tennessee. Even A.P.’s flintiest critic had a song for them: “Now, ‘Keep on the Sunny Side,’ ” says Joe Carter, “Daddy learned from Lish Carter.”

  A.P., Sara, and Maybelle would gather nightly, after the day’s work was done, and work to squeeze every song down to three minutes or less, all a 78 could hold. Religious songs such as “Anchored in Love” were the easiest. They could take them right out of one of Fland’s hymnals, and they rarely ran over. But the ballads were tougher. “You had to tell your story in three minutes,” says Janette. That time, she says, generally allowed a simple pattern: verse-chorus-instrumental-verse-chorus-instrumental-verse. If a song ran over, they couldn’t cut the words and short-circuit the story, so Sara and Maybelle would cut down the instrumental bridges. Then, most important, they’d work out the harmony. “They sang on one mike to record then,” says Joe Carter. “Ain’t like today. They couldn’t adjust the levels after the fact. That’s where better singing, closer harmonies, has to be on. The rehearsals were about getting the harmony real tight.”

  By the time A.P., Sara, and Maybelle boarded a train for Camden on May 7, 1928, they had rehearsed and re-rehearsed twelve different songs, squeezed each into the three-minute format, and tightened the harmonies down to a whipstitch. On May 9, after a night at the Camden Hotel (where they were treated to the marvels of indoor plumbing, hot and cold running water, and room service), they were driven to the Victor recording studio in downtown Camden. That first day the Carters laid down four songs, including “Meet Me by the Moonlight, Alone” and “Little Darlin’ Pal of Mine.” Maybelle must have been making her own separate study leading up to that session, because on both those numbers she played guitar in the fretted Hawaiian style, just like Frank Ferera’s backing on Vernon Dalhart’s big-selling record “The Wreck of the Old 97.” She was likely inspired by listening to the Dalhart record Eck had bought for her.

  The next day, the Carters raced almost flawlessly through eight separate numbers. That session was part old-time ballad (“Forsaken Love”), part hymn (“Anchored in Love”), and part pop song (“I Ain’t Goin’ to Work Tomorrow”); part Maces Springs fatalism (“Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?”) and part Rich Valley spirit (“Wildwood Flower”), with dollops of slave spirituals (“River of Jordan”), country humor (“Chewing Gum”), and mining-camp lawlessness and regret (“John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man”).

  If the Carters had never again returned to a recording studio, their work in that two-day session would have been enough to mark them for good. Those twelve songs sold from the start, and they had legs, too. The tracks they set down that May have been retraced and remade for nearly three-quarters of a century. “John Hardy” alone has been covered by Flatt & Scruggs, Doc Watson, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Manfred Mann. “Wildwood Flower,” named by National Public Radio as one of the one hundred most important songs of the century, is the closest thing country music has to a true anthem. Those first Camden recordings proved for good that a lone mountain woman’s voice could speak to a vast audience (men and women, rural and not), flat-grading the road for singers such as Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Emmylou Harris, and Lucinda Williams. In Camden, Sara’s contralto alone carried the song of a jilted maiden (“Wildwood Flower”) and the ballad of the murdering John Hardy. The Carter
s’ small-group church harmonizing—which they also used on traditional ballads and love songs—set the standard for early country music, putting the voice ahead of instrumentation. “Guitar and autoharp was all they had,” said one musician friend of the Carters’. “Their singing is how they got to where they wanted to be.”

  A.P. still only “bassed in every once’t in a while,” but he showed remarkable range, and a genius for finding his moment and his way in. On “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?” his distant harmonizing creeps in and out at unforeseen intervals, giving the song a haunting echo. A.P.’s voice sounds as if it’s floating in the dusk-darkened treetops, the mournful wail of a man who no longer casts a shadow in this world.

  By the end of the twenties, Maybelle’s Carter scratch—graceful and thumpingly rhythmic at once—was the most widely imitated guitar style in music. Nobody did as much to popularize the guitar, because from the beginning her playing was as distinctive as any voice. “She could make that guitar talk to you,” says Ruby Parker, who was schooled on the instrument by Maybelle. Maybelle’s innovations crossed through musical genres. On the gospel songs they cut in Camden, Maybelle’s scratch provided a rhythmic drive like the Holiness songs she’d heard at revivals, and even in the first recording sessions, she was already playing Hawaiian, and a sort of slide guitar favored by the black blues musicians around the South. Her style had a way of bridging geographic, ethnic, and social divides. Maybelle’s version of “When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland” was the first song that guitar virtuoso Doc Watson learned to play; her “Wildwood Flower” was the first song the Italian-American city kid named Perry Como learned to play.