For that February date, A.P. still relied heavily on neighbors. Aunt Myrtle Bays suggested her favorite songbook number, “Little Moses.” Big Tom Carter, Bob Carter’s preacher cousin, gave A.P. the sheet music for “The Grave on the Green Hillside,” a hymn that was a favorite of his parishioners. Bud Derting, who has lived near the Holston River for ninety-four years, saw A.P. and Sara rambling around on song-fetching trips in those days. If they were passing Bud’s place, there was no mystery about where they were heading. Everybody around knew there was a mother lode of songs on one particular porch on the other side of the Holston. “A.P. and Sara had to come across the north fork in boats,” says Derting. “Everybody that lived on the river had a boat then. Maybe four or five times a day somebody on the other side might holler, ‘Bring over the boat!’ and here they came. They’d do it, pole across. Then you had to walk four or five miles, instrument on your back, to get to Mandy Groves’s.”
In 1928 Amanda Groves was sixty-five years old, still more than six feet tall and still in possession of flaming red hair and an astonishing mental capacity. Her old visiting cousin, A.P.’s father, Bob, liked to tell A.P.’s sister, “Virgie, you’ve got a good memory, but not as good as mine. And the best there is, is Amanda Groves.”
“Amanda Groves was an old lady when I was a kid,” says Derting. “She was a great big old tall healthy woman like all the Carters, square-set face, dressed in black with a big black hat on. She just remembered so good. People came to her to find out stuff. . . . Amanda Groves knew a lot of songs. They bought her an old-time piano way back years ago, a huge piano. It took a good man to pick up one corner of it. They probably hauled it in there in a wagon, maybe in parts. Anyway, they’d have singings in that house.”
“When I was a little boy, she’d set out on the porch of their little log house and she’d sing to me,” says Dale Carter, a nephew of Mandy Groves. “She had the prettiest clear voice, and she’d set there and rock and sing all these old songs. One of them I particularly remember because Burl Ives came out in the fifties or sixties and said he had discovered a long-lost song, completely lost: ‘The Wayfaring Stranger.’ Well, Lord, Aunt Mandy sung that to me when I was a little kid. She’d sing that, ‘Barbara Allen,’ ‘Sourwood Mountain.’ She had all of these. She loved to sing. So A.P., that’s where he got some of his early songs, from Aunt Mandy Groves.”
It’s hard to know just what songs A.P. did get from Mandy. Derting thinks she gave him “Clinch Mountain Home,” though Virgie and Sara always said A.P. wrote that song himself, years before, on his trip to Indiana. In fact, though A.P. is the sole writer and composer of almost three hundred songs—according to the filings at the U.S. Copyright Office—it’s nearly impossible to know the paternity of many of those compositions. There are historians who have spent years tracing Carter songs and lyrics back to hymnbooks, previously copyrighted parlor songs, and traditional ballads. Charles Wolfe traced “Sweet Fern,” a song the Carters prepared for the February 1929 session, to a parlor song called “Sweet Bird,” written in 1876 by Thomas Westendorf and George Persley. Maybelle thought A.P. got it from somebody while out hunting songs in East Tennessee.
Meanwhile Gladys always insisted her father authored the song. “I can tell you where Daddy wrote a song one time,” she said in 1990. “Right over behind the house here. The blackberries was ripe. And Mommy said, ‘Doc, go a-back out in the holler and pick me some blackberries, and I’ll make a pie.’ And there’s a little old bird up in the tree a-singin’ and Daddy was a-throwin’ berries, and hitting the bucket, and he come back—’Sweet Fern.’ He got the tune to it from that bird a-singin’ to him and [the berries] a-hittin’ the bucket. And it went ding, ding, ding. And he come back and said, ‘Sary, I thought up a song,’ and he wrote it and they made that record. And I was just a little kid just eight years old when that happened, ’cause I was eight years old when we moved up to the house, and Joe was just a baby and Janette was a little girl. But I can remember that as if it’d been yesterday.”
The historian and the daughter are probably both right, in a way. Like as not, A.P. did get some lyrics or sheet music for “Sweet Bird” from somebody up in the Tennessee hills just beyond the Groveses’ house. And like as not, he did get the idea for the call-and-response arrangement of “Sweet Fern” from his blackberry expedition. And like as not, Sara and Maybelle took A.P.’s notion and remade the melody and instrumentals into something barely suggested by the old sheet music. The Carters’ method of “lining out” a song was collecting, home manufacture, and invention all rolled into one, like Old Man Curtis’s rocking chair–powered butter churn. Its separate parts might be familiar, but in combination, they constituted something entirely new.
The process started with A.P., who was happy to leave behind his farm chores to go off hunting songs. “He loved meeting people, loved visiting, and he never forgot people he met,” says Janette. “My daddy’s hands always shook. I always remember that from when he took my hand, or when he touched my head. And they were so warm. And he had big hands. And when he took my hand, I would have followed him to the end of the world and jumped off. When I was little, I would scream and cry until he’d take me with him when he was hunting songs.
“He was known in the Valley and in the area, and people would tell him if they heard somebody had a song, and he’d go see them. Or sometimes he’d just be driving by and stop and go up to a little house up in the hills to see if they had a song. It’s a wonder he didn’t get dog-bit. He’d just tell ’em who he was and that he was looking for songs. Sometimes he’d stay all night at their house.”
“A.P. would put his feet under anybody’s table and stay,” says his niece Fern Carter Salyers. “He’d stay with black people. Once Janette and A.P. got stuck and stayed over at a black family’s home, and Janette couldn’t get over how the woman had turned out the corn bread right on the stove.” In fact, the Carters recorded the African-American spiritual “River of Jordan” in 1928.
Anybody who could pick up an instrument and play a tune for him A.P. called a “musicianer.” But if the person could only sing out the lyrics, that was a “songster.” And there were a lot of songsters around, and most of them carried lyrics in their head.
Oftentimes A.P. got back home with scraps of paper bulging from his pockets, each with lyrics, or pieces of lyrics, scribbled in his shaky hand. Then he’d get out and walk those tracks, hands behind his back, cogitating on ways to fill up the holes in the lyrics. When a notion for a lyric hit him, no matter when it hit him, he had to act on it. “He’d go to bed and have a tune or something up in his mind, and holler for me to get up and hold the lamp,” said Gladys, “ ’til he could write down what he thought of, a chorus or something.”
Melody was not A.P.’s strength. There was no way he could write down all those notes. The best he could do was carry back what he remembered from his collecting trips. “He had the tunes in his head,” said a friend of A.P.’s who sometimes traveled with him. “He would hum it until Maybelle and Sara would catch the tune of it.” A.P. told Maybelle that every song should have a distinctive instrumental intro, so the audience could recognize it from the first chords, but other than that, he left the melodies to the women.
Even when A.P. brought home sheet music for old parlor songs or long-forgotten pop tunes, it didn’t do Sara and Maybelle much good; neither one could read music. When A.P. brought home lyrics with no tune at all to work with, Sara and Maybelle would fashion the melody by ear, drawing heavily on the old fiddle songs they’d heard Uncle Mil Nickels or Ap Harris play over in Rich Valley—or even tinkering with a melody they’d already heard on a record. “Meet Me by the Moonlight, Alone,” Maybelle once said, was more or less the same tune as “Prisoner’s Song,” which had been a hit for carpetbagger Vernon Dalhart in 1924.
* * *
Not only did they take a melody from “Prisoner’s Song,” but A.P. also lifted pieces of its lyrics for a song he called “I’m Thinking Tonight of My B
lue Eyes,” which they cut in that February 1929 Camden session. But what set apart that song was the tune. “I’d known that one for a long time,” Maybelle once said of the melody, so it must have been from something she’d heard as a girl from Mil Nickels or Ap Harris or her own mother. Whatever the provenance, that melody became of one of the best known and most copied in country music. It was as if the melody was so deeply encoded in country music’s double helix of performer and audience that every time a singer sneaked it in under his or her own lyrics, the songs hit with the reflexive thump of recognition. Roy Acuff used it for “Great Speckled Bird,” and it became a signature song. Kitty Wells used it on “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” and charted a hit.
That February in Camden, the Carters also recorded “My Clinch Mountain Home” and “Sweet Fern,” some ballads of unhappy love, a number of gospel songs (including Big Tom’s “Grave on the Green Hillside” and Aunt Myrtle’s “Little Moses”), and even an old “scaffold song” called “Don’t Forget This Song.” “Don’t Forget” was the sort of ballad that had, for centuries, celebrated Irish rebels who liked to make subtly mutinous speeches from the gallows before their (surely unjust) hanging at the hand of the British crown. That sort of song, if not the song itself, had traveled back and forth across the Atlantic for more than two hundred years. A.P. found his scaffold song on a farmstead in Russell County, Virginia, no more than thirty miles from his own front porch.
A.P. also convinced Sara to do “Engine 143,” the song that had drawn him to her. Peer copyrighted every song they recorded in A.P.’s name. In all, they cut a dozen more songs—and walked away with another six hundred dollars. Royalty checks from the last session were coming in every three months now, for hundreds more dollars.
* * *
For once, A.P.’s fortunes seemed to be running with the tide. At the beginning of 1929, America—and Americans—had never been so rich. Even the impoverished rural South was making its way into the modern industrial world. Southern farmers and laborers might have less time on their hands, but they had more cash. A.P. could see it all around him. The Jetts were no longer the only family around Maces who could afford a motorized tractor. Eck and A.P. weren’t the only ones around with cars. Doc Meade had given up his horse, whip, and buggy, and he was making emergency calls in a new automobile. Uncle Fland had got a Ford pickup truck and was hauling coal back from Hiltons nearly every week. Over on the outskirts of Kingsport, builders had made an entire development of whitewashed two-story clapboard houses, with big basements to hold coal-burning furnaces, indoor plumbing, electricity, polished wooden floors, and flowered wallpaper. White City, they called it, and regular working people were buying those homes for thousands of dollars. But the thing A.P. saw that he liked most was this: When Cecil McLister put new Carter records on sale at his music store in Bristol, they’d be gone in a day’s time. And that was just around home. With the Victor machine pushing Carter Family records all over the country, A.P. knew the Carters were going to keep making money. So did Eck. And Maybelle. And Sara.
For the first time in their lives, they had spending money. Sara bought new dresses and slacks, fancy hats, and a fur stole. She’d buy bottles of her favorite perfume, Blue Waltz, and bright red nail polish. Maybelle got clothes, too, and more china. Eck bought a seventy-acre homestead on Clinch Mountain and spent $275 on a new Gibson guitar Maybelle saw at the music store in Kingsport. But A.P. had the biggest eyes. Three weeks after they returned from the Camden recording date, A.P. bought seventy-five acres of the best farmland in Little Valley from Uncle Will and Aunt Myrtle Bays. He gave the then stunning sum of $3,500 for the land, taking over payments on Uncle Will’s $1,124.15 mortgage from the Federal Land Bank in Baltimore, Maryland. Uncle Will agreed to hold notes for the remaining $2,375.85 for two years, payable at 6 percent interest.
Suddenly, A.P. had one of the biggest farms in the Valley. But he remained one of the least interested, and most intriguing, agriculturalists in the entire state of Virginia. One day he decided he was going to use his new sawmill boiler to power his plow. “Pleasant wanted to plow with a steam engine,” says Bud Derting. “He got it on wheels and rigged it up to the plow, plowed one row, and he was done. Guess he done what he wanted to do, and he was happy. He’d get something in his head about a steam engine, and he was gonna do it.”
“He wanted me to plow some up there in the Little Valley where he owned his land,” says Clyde Gardner. “I went up there one morning and said, ‘Where do you want me to plow, Pleasant?’ He said, ‘Ah, just anywhere you want to.’ I told Janette that and she laughed. Said, ‘That’s just like him.’
“I heared one fellow talking about going up to the Little Valley where Pleasant had his farm, and Pleasant had a horse and a mule there, and he was going to rake hay. He hooked his horse, put it in the reins, and he couldn’t catch the mule for a while. And this fellow said, ‘Pleasant got up on that rake and set there a while and never did catch the mule. He just got the horns off of that horse and went on home.’ ”
“Sometimes he’d walk through the Gap to his farm in the Little Valley,” says his niece Lois Hensley. “There was no road, so he’d take Kit [his mule] up to the Valley to work. Maybe he’d plow one row, and then he’d quit. He just didn’t have any staying power.”
* * *
There were only two things Pleasant Carter wouldn’t quit: his music and his home. In 1929 he could have moved his family to one of those beautiful new houses in Kingsport or to Bristol or up north to be near the recording studio in Camden; he could have gone to Nashville or Atlanta or Chicago, where radio stations were blasting out their barn dances week after week. But the more A.P. traveled, the more he knew there was only one place he could live. He had to be surrounded by his mountains, and he had to be surrounded by his home people, who knew him best and were willing to make allowances. Folks around Maces Springs knew how to forgive and forget. Mount Vernon, for instance, didn’t turn its back on anybody.
One Sunday, a three-hundred-pound congregant worked himself into a frenzy powered by an alternating religious current of guilt and righteousness. First, he called out his secret mistress and demanded she wash his feet. Then he started jumping up and down in a craze until he went right through the floorboards, terrifying the other Methodists. “Mr. Paris got so upset, he jumped out the window,” remembers one woman who was there that day.
It was decided that the wayward sheep would have to be restrained by the flock, so the best wrestler in attendance was sent in first. “I can throw him,” said Daddy Denison, “but I can’t hold him.” It took every man in church that day to get Haven Larkey tied down to the floor, and in the confusion, poor Ernest Wolfe got knotted up with Mr. Larkey, too. “You gotta let me go!” Ernest kept yelling. “You gotta let me go!”
Once the storm had passed—and the floor was fixed—Mr. Larkey was welcomed back. But people did like to tell the story on him. A.P. Carter knew people told a few stories on him, too, but there was no harm, and he never minded. Not now that he’d achieved fame outside the flock. “When did you say you were born, Pleasant? . . . Well, I never did see nobody born in December that amounted to anything.” But Alvin Pleasant Carter had amounted to something. In a two-year period ending in 1930, the Carter Family sold seven hundred thousand records across the nation.
Carter Family Songbook (Flo Wolfe)
Jimmie Rodgers with the Carters in Louisville (Flo Wolfe)
Fire on the Mountain
Of course, Mr. Peer wanted more, and A.P. began piloting his new Chevrolet in wider and wider circles, searching for material. Remote hollows, tenant farms, mining camps, big-city factories—A.P. would go anywhere in search of a song. In Kingsport there was a group of black musicians who had come down from the mountains of Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina to work at the local mills and factories. There was Steve Tarter, a blues guitar player who had reputation enough for recording artist Blind Lemon Jefferson to seek him out when he came throug
h town. There was a guitar player named Ed Martin, a fiddler named John Evans, and his guitar-playing brother-in-law George “Duff” McGhee, who played at farm workings and city dances both. There was McGhee’s son Brownie, whose polio had bound him to a wheelchair but gave him plenty of time to practice his guitar, and his other son, Sticks, so named for the way he’d wheel his brother around downtown Kingsport. The teenage Brownie, who would go on to fame as a world-traveling blues musician, remembered the excitement when A.P. Carter pulled into town in his big new red Chevrolet bought with record royalties. In the black section of Kingsport, A.P. found a group whose music had plenty in common with his own—their home sound also came off the porch and out of the church. That neighborhood’s left-handed five-string banjo player plucked out a version of “John Henry” that was much the same as the one Maybelle’s mother used to play on her own five-string banjo, on the porch overlooking Copper Creek. But the music these black Kingsporters made was starting to get the bluesy feel they’d picked up on old Scott Joplin–like ragtime records and the recordings of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, and Barbecue Bob.
One Sunday morning, somebody in Kingsport sent A.P. to see John Henry Lyons, who had a blues song called “Motherless Children Sees a Hard Time.” Visiting the Lyonses’ house that day was a young black guitar player who had learned to play watching Ed Martin and Steve Tarter. His given name was Lesley Riddle, though he always asked friends and family to call him “Esley.” “I happened to come by the porch there, and so John Henry gave me his guitar and told me to play Mr. Carter a piece,” Riddle told Mike Seeger more than thirty years later. “So I was playing pretty regular then and I played him a couple of pieces. He wanted me to go home with him right then and there. I went over to Maces Springs with him. Stayed over there about a week. From then on, he and I got to be good friends. I continued for about three or four years, going over to his house and going where he wanted to go. I went out with A.P. about fifteen times to collect songs.
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? Page 14