“He’d just go in [to people’s homes] and tell them, ‘Hello, I was told by someone that you got a song, kind of an old song. Would you mind letting me hear it?’ So they’d go and get it and sing it for him.”
Over the next ten years, Riddle had some real down-home country-road adventures with A.P. One day, when Riddle was visiting his mother in his native home of Burnsville, North Carolina, he looked up and saw the big red Chevy coming down the road. Next thing he knew, Esley was on his way to Charlottesville, Virginia, where A.P. had heard about some songs he wanted to get. Logistics were difficult for a black man and a white man traveling together in the Jim Crow South, and A.P. was always in a fix to find places that would have his young friend. On the trip to Charlottesville, A.P. stashed Riddle with a family of Cherokees, or melungeons, or some such. Riddle never did know, because his hosts never said much. “I stayed up there for five days,” Riddle said, “and the whole five days I was up there, every meal, we had rabbit. Rabbit. They didn’t call it rabbit, they called it ‘rob-it.’ We had rob-it for dinner, we had rob-it for breakfast, we had rob-it for supper. After I was up there for five days, Mr. Carter came over one morning, and I told Mr. Carter, ‘Mr. Carter, I can’t stay here at these people’s house.’ He said, ‘What’s the matter, Les?’ I said, ‘They’re feeding me nothing but rabbit, and I’m getting sick and tired of it.’ They got fried rabbit, dried rabbit, stewed rabbit, boiled rabbit, and rabbit hash, and every way in the world you could fix a rabbit they had. So Mr. Carter told me I’ll see if I can find you somewhere. So he taken me way down in the country to an old man named Ole Man Brown. They were real old people—he and his wife. We went down there. Mr. Carter taken the car and went into town, and he got a whole carload of groceries. I don’t know what they was feeding him over there where he was staying, but anyway he went to staying with us, went to eating with us.”
Sometimes they’d be driving down a country road, and A.P. would start yelling for Esley to pull over. Sure enough, there would be some torn-down sawmill, and A.P. would start scrambling around picking up hardware to bring home for parts. It was an operation Riddle never quite understood. He says he never witnessed A.P. saw a single piece of lumber off the sawmill in his backyard. But the older man’s salvaging instinct was one Riddle had come to appreciate. “He was just gonna get old music, old songs, what had never been sung in sixty years,” Riddle said. “He was gonna get it, put a tune to it, and record it.”
The coal-mining town of Norton, Virginia, was always ripe for song gathering—and A.P. had family there, too. His brother Jim was living in Norton then, and his mother’s cousin Henrietta Nickels O’Neill. Hattie O’Neill had married a New York Irishman who had moved south for work as a foreman in the coal mines, and then on the L&N Railroad. William O’Neill made a good wage, had a big house, and, like many striving middle-class Americans, owned a new parlor organ. There was an array of music in that house. Most of the O’Neill children preferred the old-timey music of southwestern Virginia, and daughter Kate was already playing guitar with her band, The Lonesome Pine Specials, at radio station WOPI in Bristol. Hattie O’Neill, meanwhile, was partial to hymns. But William O’Neill, the old Irishman, was fond of the lachrymose songs of his homeland and sentimental Tin Pan Alley parlor tunes. He bought lots of sheet music for his parlor organ, and some of it ended up in A.P.’s hands. “He’d come back from Hattie O’Neill’s with a fistful of songs,” says Jim Carter’s daughter Lois. “He’d stop at the O’Neills’ and eat and get some more songs.” Sometimes A.P. would take Kate O’Neill around the area to hunt more songs. He’d write down the words; she’d catch the tune.
“He’d go ninety miles if he heard someone say that someone had an old song that hadn’t ever been recorded or didn’t have a copyright,” said Riddle. “One time he and I went way to the other side of Gate City and some old lady about ninety years old, and she had some music her grandmother had left her. We got a whole stack of that music and come back. Couldn’t nobody understand it. Couldn’t nobody read [music].”
Much of the sheet music A.P. collected was crumbling yellow pages from the post–Civil War boom in commercial song-making. In the forty years between the Civil War and the advent of the phonograph, a song’s success was judged by its sheet-music sales. A hit song might sell hundreds of thousands of copies of sheet music, which landed in parlors all over the nation. By the late twenties, the writers of those songs were more or less forgotten men: an Indiana reform-school teacher named Thomas P. Westendorf, a black railroad porter, Gussie Davis (who is credited for, among other songs, “Goodnight Irene”), and the Jewish New Yorker Charles K. Harris. In 1892 Harris had produced one of America’s first megahits, “After the Ball,” which sold 5 million song sheets and is still rendered nightly in the Broadway musical Show Boat. Davis and Harris were northerners working on Tin Pan Alley in New York, but these men understood, or came to understand, what appealed to a post–Civil War southern audience; they specialized in sentimental story songs about home, mother, wandering boys, and orphaned children. But when Harris wrote “Mid the Green Fields of Virginia,” what the composer knew about the Old Dominion would not fill a page. As Harris once explained to Booker T. Washington, “I had to inquire if there was corn raised in Virginia and if there were hills in Carolina. This information was given me by my office superintendent, Mr. Blaise, a native Southerner, and my imagination did the rest.”
But A.P. could take these turgid old parlor-piano songs and, with a good cleaning (there was usually an underbrush of moldering Victorian poetics to clear away) and a little melodic rendering by Maybelle and Sara, work up a song that seemed kin to latter-day, down-home mountain balladry. A.P. found the parlor songs of William Shakespeare Hays especially useful. Will Hays was a Louisville, Kentucky, newspaperman/poet and probably the most prolific southern songwriter of the late nineteenth century. Hays was fond of pale moons, withered flowers, aging mothers, and dying children. His songs could be egregiously maudlin, but A.P. shaved off some of Hays’s dewy theatrics and made nice little songs of “Jimmy Brown, the Paper Boy” and “You’ve Been a Friend to Me.” Others, like “Little Log Hut in the Lane,” required drastic minstrelectomies. In the Hays version, the lyrics went as follows: “I’ll never hear dem singin’ in the cane, / And I’se de only one dat’s left / Wid dis ole dog ob mine, / In de little old log cabin in de lane.” A.P. remade it entirely: “I’m going from the cotton field, / I’m going from the cane, / I’m going from that little log hut, / That stands down in the lane.” Even when he sang from the perspective of a black slave, A.P. meant to give voice to a certain human dignity.
Song-hunting trips got a lot easier with Riddle as his traveling companion. Much of the time A.P. could leave Esley to drive the big new Chevy, so he could daydream in peace and not worry about running off the road. Best of all, Riddle could remember lyrics and a tune, something A.P. could never do. “I was quick to catch on to anything,” Riddle said. “If I hear you sing, I could sing it, too. I was his, what you call, his Poll’ Parrot. I was his tape recorder. He’d take me with him and he’d get someone to sing him the whole song. Then I would get it, then I’d learn it to Sara and Maybelle.”
Besides his work as the human recorder, Esley Riddle also brought his own repertoire to the Carters. The mixing of races was an unusual thing in Poor Valley, but then, A.P. had never hied to convention. He and Sara would have Riddle at the homeplace for a week or more at a time. “They were just like home to me,” said Riddle. “I was with them off and on for four or five years. They all lived in the neighborhood, almost in hollering distance. His father, mother, sisters and brothers, Maybelle.
“I’d be settin’ over there sometimes, you know, and pick up the guitar and play something. Four or five months from then, I’d be coming down the street and I’d be hearing it. The Carter Family would be singing it.
“You know, as many times as I was over at the Carter Family, I never got them together to sing for me but twice the whole ti
me I was over there. They never sang for me. I’d have to do all the picking and singing while I was over there.”
The Carter Family would record their own version of a blues song Riddle learned from a Blind Lemon Jefferson recording, and a retooling of a song Riddle’s uncle had been playing for decades, “The Cannonball.” It’s a familiar down-home tune, put to many a song. Charlie Poole and his white North Carolina string band took the melody for their McKinley assassination song, “White House Blues.” But black musicians pushed the melody into the space between ragtime and blues, as in Furry Lewis’s version of “Stackolee” and Mississippi John Hurt’s “Frankie.” Woody Guthrie would take the same melody and write a Depression-era song called “Dirty Overalls.”
A.P. took the scant lyrics Riddle had sung with the tune, added his own, and came up with a song that included this delicious and vivid phrasing: “My baby left me, she even took my shoes . . . She’s gone, she’s solid gone.” In the recording session that May, A.P. screwed up the courage to make “The Cannonball” his first turn as a solo vocalist.
Years later, Maybelle would tell Mike Seeger that Riddle had taught her how to play the blues licks in “The Cannonball,” but Riddle always demurred. Maybelle was just like him, Riddle would say. She was always paying attention, always watching. “You don’t have to give Maybelle any lessons,” Riddle remembered thirty years later. “You let her see you playing something, she’ll get it. You better believe it.”
The Carters even recorded one of the few songs Riddle claimed to have worked up himself. “I was sitting on my shoeshine stand—that’s what I was working at—one morning, and it was raining and I hadn’t made no money and I was lonesome,” Riddle told Mike Seeger. “I had my old guitar over there. I got that guitar and picked up the words and went and got me a piece of paper, up on the shoeshine stand, and wrote them down.” A.P. and Sara recorded the song, “Lonesome for You,” as a duet, passing the lead vocals back and forth like a hot potato.
In fact, in the two recording sessions the Carters did in 1930, they reached well outside the narrow traditions of Clinch Mountain music. A.P. was showing real artistry. That year he wrote a beautiful and thoroughly modern song, “The Birds Were Singing of You,” which captured a single suspended moment of grief. Under the stillness of a pale moon, a lonely man can’t shake the whispering memory of his departed lover. Did the lover die? Run off? Marry another? We never know. In that void of knowledge, all that exists is his gnawing pain. In that moment, the birds were singing of her. Heaven was thinking of her. And all the world was sighing, sighing for her.
A.P. wrote two of the songs they recorded that year, and Sara herself wrote two. But of the nineteen songs the Carter Family cut, nine were either church-house blues or sacred songs from the black Baptist or Pentecostal churches. Both those musical movements were fed by absolute, existential loneliness, far beyond the comparatively feeble homesickness of Anglo-Irish and white southern traditional music. In the African-American song, there might not even be a home or mother to get back to.
The body-altering flights of Pentecostal music, especially, rose out of that emptiness. When there was nothing holding people to this cold world, why wouldn’t they sail right out of it on the righteous note? Though the Holiness revivals Maybelle had attended were gatherings of southern whites, the movement got its musical release from the children of slaves. Pentecostalism was Wesleyan Methodism hot-wired by the notion that the Holy Ghost was at large in the land, and it was the first American religious movement to scramble the boundary line of race. In fact, the white-led Pentecostal movement would have flamed out in less than five years had it not been for one particular African-American man, a son of former slaves, William Joseph Seymour.
As a young Methodist working the cane fields in Louisiana, Seymour began to hear the call to preach, and the call drew him toward Houston, Texas. He walked there and found himself on the doorstep of a whites-only Bible college, where the minister Charles Fox Parham was converting laymen to his new Pentecostal church. When Seymour arrived at Parham’s Bible college, he was refused admission. But day after day, Seymour came back to sit on the steps and listen to Parham describe the underpinning of his new mission: The minister told of the Pentecost, fifty days after Passover, when the apostles of the crucified Jesus gathered and, with flames over their heads, began “speaking in tongues,” channeling His word in a way that broke down all barriers of manmade language. At his own church, Parham said, on the first day of the new century, one of his followers had risen out of her chair and, in ecstatic release, had begun speaking in tongues. This was a sure sign, Parham said, that the Holy Spirit was again present in the world, and that He might soon cleanse it in a flame of fire, leaving the holy and faithful to a better life on earth.
Seymour never did make it through the door of that Bible college, but he’d been led there by the Holy Spirit, so he took what he heard there on those steps as the gospel. He began making his way west toward California, preaching about a new Pentecost, which was there for the asking. By the time he arrived in Los Angeles in 1906, Seymour had worked up his own twist on Parham’s teachings: If God meant to break down the barriers of language, didn’t He also mean to break down the barriers of race?
The official Pentecostal story marks April 9, 1906, as the day “the power fell.” At one of Seymour’s services, in a private home on Bonnie Brae Street in L.A., a small group of black laborers began speaking in tongues, wildly, ecstatically, noisily. One neighbor lady walked over to see what was the commotion, began channeling the Holy Ghost, and fell on the piano, making music though she’d never played an instrument in her life. For five days, Seymour’s quiet preaching drew a slowly growing audience, but it was mostly a local curiosity. The crowd watched as people among them twisted with the contortions of out-of-body conversions, and strained to hear Seymour’s description of the imminent flame-licked apocalypse. On the fifth day, when an earthquake hit San Francisco and great stretches of the “Queen City of California” were consumed by fire, Bonnie Brae Street really started rocking. Seymour had to move his growing revival out of private homes and into a drafty abandoned stable on Azusa Street in downtown Los Angeles.
William Joseph Seymour was not by nature a charismatic; he was a smallish, soft-spoken man with a wispy beard and a glass eye. But his message had force, and it appealed first and foremost to the illiterate. Pentecostalism promised them “primal spirituality,” an experience of the Holy Spirit that didn’t depend on an ability to read or understand the Bible. Illiteracy was no disadvantage when the Holy Spirit could put the Word straight in you.
For nearly three years, the Azusa Street “Apostolic Faith Mission” revival pressed on, growing every day. As the movement grew, converts were no longer just African Americans from the Azusa Street neighborhood. Blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos—they all came to hear Seymour. People made pilgrimages from Europe and Africa. “One token of the Lord’s coming is that He is melting all races and nations together,” Seymour wrote, “and they are filled with the power and glory of God.” A Los Angeles Daily Times headline screamed, WHITES AND BLACKS MIX IN A RELIGIOUS FRENZY. One white convert stated firmly, “The color line was washed away by blood.” Services were carried on from morning until midnight, seven days a week. People came by the thousands. The neighbor lady’s ringing piano was accompanied by the tchokking rhythms of everything from cow’s ribs to thimbles. There was shouting, crying, screaming, wild flights of channeling, and near orgasmic release. “The power of the Lord was so great,” said one in attendance, “it seemed to tingle your spine, and your hair stood on end.” Through it all, Seymour sat up front with his white preacher-partner, often with his head inside a shoe box or a wooden crate, trying to blot out the earthly noise so that he might hear the Spirit speak to him. Most of Seymour’s talks were quiet teaching sermons, but sometimes he’d suddenly jump out of his chair, screaming, “Repent!” or he’d begin speaking in tongues.
Some local newsmen were terrifie
d by what they saw: “Disgraceful intermingling of the races, they cry and make howling noises all day and into the night,” wrote one. “They run, jump, shake all over, shout to the top of their voice, spin around in circles, fall out on the sawdust-blanketed floor jerking, kicking and rolling all over it. Some of them pass out and do not move for hours as though they were dead. These people appear to be mad, mentally deranged or under a spell.”
The first furious revival was over by 1909, and also gone was the hopeful brotherhood of the races. White Holiness preachers had co-opted many of Seymour’s white converts and split them off into their own “Assemblies of God” church. When Seymour converts carried the Pentecostal message back to the South and the Midwest, they usually split down racial lines. There was the Church of God in Christ (for African Americans) and the Fire Baptized Holiness Church (whites only). By 1930 the Ku Klux Klan had burned down a number of black Pentecostal churches in the South. Seymour’s Azusa Street church had vanished.
But what lived on was Pentecost-fired music, with its wild abandon, its rhythmic, driving flight, and its stark, lyrical imagery. In those songs, people weren’t just orphaned—they were orphaned, crippled, and blind—but they still had their train ticket punched for heaven. Jesus was likely to be nailed to a tree, and the world was always about to be consumed by fire.
At the time he met A.P., Esley Riddle was singing a lot of sacred songs he’d learned in church. When A.P. heard Riddle’s friend Pauline Gary sing in Kingsport, he brought them both into the Valley to give entertainments for all his white friends. “She sang sacred songs,” said Riddle. “He wanted her to come to Maces with us, so we taken her up there and she stayed up there about three days. We had a big old audience up there. Had a houseful. All the rooms full, three rooms, then they were standing all out in the yard and everything. Of course she was a really good singer. We had two programs up there, two nights.”
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