Of course, none of these future events was contemplated by A.P., Sara, or Maybelle as they left Camden that May. What mattered to the Carters was that they were carrying back to Maces Springs a cash bonanza equal to a good year’s take from the farm: six hundred dollars. Mr. Peer had proven good as his word. He paid out fifty dollars per side and covered travel expenses on top. Better than that, Mr. Peer had signed the Carters to an artist-manager contract. They would continue to get fifty dollars per song. When it was one they could copyright, A.P. would own the copyright and assign it to Peer. That meant that the three would continue to get royalties. Mechanical royalties (record sales) amounted to a half cent for every record Victor sold. Publishing royalties (sheet-music sales) would bring them two cents per sheet. So Peer and the Carters were yoked now. If A.P. could continue to come up with new songs (or songs that could be “put over” as new), Peer would make sure Victor sold them. The more songs the Carters could come up with, the better for them all.
The minute they got back to Maces Springs that May, Pleasant started looking for a new house. With the Camden take split three ways, A.P. and Sara had four hundred dollars in the bank, and A.P. had faith the royalty money would keep rolling in. Less than a month after they returned, he put down $233.33 and moved Sara and his three children off the mountain and into a four-room house on a flat one-and-a-half-acre lot. When they moved in that spring, A.P. must have been in his glory. By the standards of Poor Valley, it was a splendid house. Out front there was a big cedar tree with a congregation of robins, bluebirds, and wrens. From the back, the family could hear the susurrous rush of the Blue Springs branch. If the wind was right, according to Janette, the smell of purple lilacs and red-flowered Japanese bushes wafted down from behind Neal’s Store and right into the Carters’ new homeplace. One day not long after A.P. had moved the family into the new house, Mr. Peer sent a photographer over to take pictures for the new Victor catalog, which would feature a nearly a dozen Carter Family songs. They spent the day posing like a mountain family hard at work. Maybelle and Sara thought it was ridiculous that they had to put on their nicest dresses and then go out and draw water from the well, and that they were posed in front of the most dilapidated and weathered outbuildings they could find. Sara and Maybelle hated the lies of those pictures, but they went along.
For A.P., the next few years were all possibility and payoff. He bought himself his first car—a brand-new red Chevrolet—which he immediately put to practical use. One day not long after A.P. and Sara moved, Bud Derting was out working on a road crew in front of the new Carter house when he and his partner saw A.P. circling around his new Chevy with a big sow.
“What in the hell is that man fixin’ to do?” Derting’s partner asked.
“He’s gonna put that hog in there,” Derting said. “Must be in heat.”
“Ah, naw. He wouldn’t do that. Not in that new car.”
“Just you watch him.”
And the two men did watch, as Pleasant took out the backseat, muscled the sow in, and drove her off for her date with a stud hog.
As handy as that car proved in the gnarly logistics of breeding hogs, it was even better for doing business as a professional “musicianer.” A.P. could make much wider circuits for song hunting and promotion. And he wasn’t one to return home empty-handed; his long, lean years of denial and poverty were over. On one trip to find songs in North Carolina, he found a deal he couldn’t pass up. “About dark one night, we heard the most unusual noise coming up the road, and it looked like a Texas dust storm blowing in,” wrote Gladys Carter Millard. “Mama said, ‘It can’t be. Surely Doc wouldn’t pull that thing with our new car.’ But it was Daddy all smiles with his new purchase. The Chevrolet was a little hot. Guess it is the only car in history to pull a saw mill boiler 200 miles up mountains and over dirt roads.”
When he was in Maces Springs, A.P. began improvements on his new homeplace. The house, he decided, needed a new fence all around it. Of course, deep down, Pleasant was still Pleasant, so after he put up the swinging gate, he lost interest, and in the Carters’ front yard stood a lonely hinged gate, and no fence. It was still like that the day word arrived that Mr. and Mrs. Peer were going to make a visit to Maces Springs—in two days—to talk business. The Peers were going to drive to Poor Valley, have supper, and spend the night. “My wonderful Daddy had to get a garage up quick,” wrote Gladys. “It would never do to let a big Cadillac set out overnight.” With a little help from his friend Worley Vicars, Pleasant built a four-square wooden garage, with sturdy side braces and a tin roof. With his sawmill, Pleasant planed out a door. Then he bought a big Yale lock for security and put a gallon of blue paint on the outside. (There were only two painted houses in town, and A.P.’s wasn’t one of them.)
Maybelle and Sara began sprucing up for the visit, too, plumping the feather beds and throwing extra lime at the outhouse, frying chickens, making red-eye gravy and hams, baking desserts (including Maybelle’s trademark divinity). They planned supper at Eck and Maybelle’s, where there was a separate dining room that didn’t take all the heat from the stove, and Maybelle pulled out her best dishes (untouched by a child’s hand) and her brand-new china tea set (a recent present from Eck). The Peers’ visit was a boon to Leonard Neal’s grocery. Gladys watched the procession of neighbors who had saved up their eggs and chickens to have an excuse to pass by the house and get a glimpse of these New Yorkers and their Cadillac. Actually, the locals got a lot better look at the Peers’ car than A.P. would have liked. The doorway to A.P.’s new garage was too narrow to allow the Cadillac entry into its beautiful new berth, and the garage itself was two feet shorter than the car.
Other than that, the trip was a grand success. The Peers drove off with a country ham and jars of dewberry jelly. They left behind the newest stand-up Victrola for A.P. and Sara, with a complete set of their records and a promise of another recording date. And why not? Peer was making a pile off the Carters and other artists he’d signed to contracts. His other great find at Bristol, the yodeling brakeman Jimmie Rodgers, was making Peer rich all by himself. Rodgers’s record sales were five times that of the Carters. Every time Victor released a Rodgers 78, it sold nearly a quarter million copies. And a few would go on to sell twice that. Rodgers was making a half cent on each record sold. As the holder of the copyright, Peer was making a lot more. The royalty arrangement had worked like a dream for Peer, making him a hero to many of the rural acts he signed. “Most of them expected to record for nothing,” Peer once said. “When on top of this fifty dollars I gave them royalties on their selections, they thought it was manna from heaven.”
But the truth was, Peer could have done a lot worse by the Carters. In the twenties, it was common for publishers to simply buy copyrights outright, for one hundred dollars or less, and take all the royalties. “I was too young to have the really vicious approach,” Peer said of his early days in the business. Ralph Peer was also too canny. As long as he kept his artists happy, he figured, they’d keep coming back with more songs. And with a financial stake in sales, his recording artists were more likely to go out and hustle their records and sheet music. (Though the copyists in New York were having a devil of a time translating Sara and Maybelle’s melodies into sheet-music notes.)
Peer’s formula had been a happy elixir for A.P. Carter, and he was a spirited promoter for his own records, even if it took some doing. When record-store owners and fans started writing to ask if the Carters would make music in their towns, A.P. pushed and prodded until Sara and Maybelle agreed to go out and give “entertainments.” First he broke off the end of an ironing board so that Sara could have a stand for her balkier new twelve-bar autoharp. Then he built her a real stand. He even had flyers printed up for the shows, and two weeks before a scheduled date, he’d show up in town and start posting them in schools, in country stores, even down the dusty, rarely passed side roads. A.P. especially liked a town with a lot of telephones. There were more poles to work with:
; A.P. was never strict about admission. He’d often let youngsters in for a nickel or a dime. The halt, the lame, and the blind he let in free of charge. The Carters performed at any place in town big enough to hold a crowd, which was generally the school or the church. “When we first started going out to schools and places like that, we didn’t have microphones,” said Maybelle. “We put on many a show without a mike in these schools. In fact, in a lot of schools we didn’t have electricity, just had kerosene lamps.”
The first onstage was always A.P., whose new success had given him an air of command and a surprising magnetism. He made it a point to introduce every song. If it was a ballad, he’d tell what he knew of the real story; when he told the story of “Wandering Boy,” he’d often get himself worked up into tears. For other songs, he’d simply give credit due. “Hattie O’Neill over in West Norton learned this to me,” he’d say. Sara and Maybelle rarely spoke from the stage, but for an hour or more they bent themselves earnestly to the task at hand. A.P., meanwhile, might join in, or he might simply wander offstage. Occasionally he’d play his fiddle, unless he forgot it, and then he was apt to cry out, midsong, “Sara! Where’s my fiddle?”
Sometimes when he came in late on a part, or missed it altogether, Sara would chide, “A.P,. why don’t you sing when you’re supposed to?”
“Well, I’ll get in there,” he’d say. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be there.”
“If he felt like singing, he would sing,” Maybelle once said. “If he didn’t, he’d look out the window. So we never depended on him. We just let him sing when he got ready.” There was one show in later years when A.P. never even made it to the stage but simply left the women to do the show by themselves. (They found him later that evening sound asleep at their host’s home.) The emceeing was left to a local schoolteacher who was not altogether familiar with the trio’s repertoire, so Sara had to write out the set for her. But the light of the kerosene lamps must have been dim that night. “For their next number,” the schoolteacher said at one point, “the Carter Family will do ‘Sad and Lonesome Dog.’ ”
Sara and Maybelle wouldn’t even laugh at that. Even when things went awry, or Pleasant meandered, Sara and Maybelle stayed the course, reproducing as closely as possible the recordings their audience already knew so well. In the middle of a song, Maybelle might occasionally break into a sideways smile, but above all, the two women meant to project dignity. “Mama didn’t believe in getting broke up onstage,” says June Carter Cash.
“All of us felt about those performances just like you would feel about visiting some friends,” said Maybelle. “They could buy our records elsewhere. They came to see us in person, and we came to please them.” The best of those entertainments were pleasing in the extreme and occasionally had the spontaneity of a good Methodist revival. When things were really going good and the audience was right down with anything they did, A.P. might break out his fiddle and try his shaky hand at a dance song. Then Sara and Maybelle would call out the little girls to do a buck and wing. A.P. even bought five-year-old Janette an Indian costume for her stage time. It had a fringe of bells up the pants leg, and a headdress. “I loved to dance,” says Lois Carter Hensley, who would have been six years old in 1929. “I’d dance my shoe soles off. Janette was sort of shy. And her daddy wouldn’t let her dance at home. But Aunt Sara sort of picked on me and made me get out and dance at the shows. They wanted the whole family to kindly contribute a little bit.”
But sometimes the entertainments were too far away to take children, and so it was just the three of them—or four if Eck was in town. Sara and Maybelle could always depend on Dicey Thomas and Myrtle Hensley or Mollie Carter or their sisters-in-law Vangie and Ora to take care of their brood, but they still insisted on making the trip as fast as humanly possible. They’d ride over, do a nighttime show, pack up their instruments, and head straight home. At least now they could count on the Chevy. Before that, Maybelle once said, “We’d go out in a little Model A Ford, with no lights, and have to tie a lantern on front to get home with. I recall one night all four of us, my husband, too, were all piled into a one-seated little coupe, and it was a-storming and lightning like mad as we were coming into Gate City. We were meeting all these cars, and I said, ‘A.P., can you see?’ He said, ‘I can’t see a thing.’ About that time, bang! we hit a car on the left-hand side of the road, mind you, and my head hit the windshield. I was picking glass out of my head for months.
“Another time we were going around a mountain when a pickup truck with a barrel on it comes around the bend, and A.P. was so busy watching it he ran off the road himself, and there we were astraddle this big log.”
Fortunately, though, most of the trips were uneventful. On those quiet nights after the show, Maybelle and Sara slept in the backseat, while A.P.—his driver’s license taped to the steering wheel—piloted his new Chevy through the still, dark hours of morning, over the winding highways and rutted dirt roads that led back to Maces Springs. He was never happier.
* * *
Mr. Peer had set a second Camden recording date for February of 1929, just eight months after the first. Victor had sold nearly one hundred thousand copies of “Wildwood Flower” and “Keep on the Sunny Side,” and the rest were selling steadily. The Carter audience was proving loyal, and Peer only had to check the sales of Victrola phonographs around the South to know that the record-buying audience was growing. In the late twenties, the way rural mountain people got their music was taking a radical—and modern—turn. Take for instance the Adamses of Buchanan County, Virginia. Minnie Adams was just eleven years old when the Carter Family records first came out, and her dad worked for a state crew digging out a road between the Premier Coal Company and the town of Grundy, Virginia. Up to then, the Adamses had never had a radio or a phonograph, so their music had been familial, and catch-as-catch-can. “My mother’s people were wonderful singers,” says Minnie. “My granddaddy played songs, had a beautiful voice. My mom had heard songs from Grandpa Blankenbeckler. He sang a lot of English songs and Irish songs. The songs all had stories. That’s what I liked about them. ‘Barbara Allen’ was one of my favorites.
“There was an old fella used to come by our house, must have been going someplace to perform, maybe. He would pass our house, and he always wore a blue serge suit and carried his banjo. And he’d always stop at our spring and get him a drink of water, and we’d ask him to sing ‘Barbara Allen.’ Oh, that voice rang all over the hills. And he’d pick it on his banjo.
“Sometimes we went to performances at schoolhouses or courthouses, but there were not a lot of dances. There wasn’t room for dancing. Anyway, Buchanan County was a mining spot, but it was beautiful up on these mountains. And we’d walk so far then, about five miles, to hear the Carter Family records because they were tops. We didn’t have a Victrola, so we’d walk over to friends’ through a flat place. They told ghost stories and ate apples around the fire, popped popcorn, and played Carter records. People come from miles around. The Carters were the main attraction.
“And then my daddy finally got a Victrola, and we thought it was the grandest thing on earth. Everybody was getting one by then. It wasn’t a very expensive one. Just a little music cabinet.”
Anybody who was lucky enough to be living near Maces Springs could still be treated to a little live music most any night around harvesttime in 1928. Once the day’s farmwork was done, Maybelle would haul her guitar over to A.P. and Sara’s new homeplace to rehearse for their February recording date. “I used to go out there on the railroad and sit there and listen to their practices,” says Fland Bays’s son F.M. “They’d rehearse on the front porch. I’d hear them rehearse, so I’d walk over there and sit right by the tracks and listen. You could pitch a horseshoe from their front porch where the railroad tracks ran. It was maybe fifty or seventy-five feet away.”
“We walked everywhere we went,” says Chester Hensley, who was a teenager working on a road crew in 1928. “I worked on these bridges up here a
t the county line, me and two more boys that lived here about my same age. We walked up there—eight miles—do a day’s work, and walked home. And sometimes we’d come home and eat supper and go about three miles over here to the New Hurland Church to a revival meeting.” But if there was no revival meeting for entertainment, or if it was Baptists—they weren’t like the Methodists; they’d come into the audience and grab you right out of your seat to get you saved—Chester and his buddies would cross the Knob and go to the Carter homeplace. “I’d walk up this road here, and the river is just on the other side of the hill. Nanny Hawkins would take us across in his boat. When we’d get to A.P.’s house, we’d just lay down there on the grass, there on the yard, and listen. They allowed anybody who wanted to come in. They didn’t care who come in.”
“Neighbors would come in,” says Janette, “and they’d let them listen to these songs they was gonna put on the records. ‘Now, you listen to this and see what you think.’ And if the neighbors didn’t like ’em or the family didn’t like ’em, most of the time it was because they weren’t right. They were very serious songs, but they all had to have that Carter style. It all told something. It had meanin’ to it. The songs that they sang, people wouldn’t forget ’em. They’d linger in their minds, if you know what I mean.”
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? Page 13