Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  Sometimes when they were playing near Maces Springs, the girls would catch a glimpse of A.P. standing at the back of the audience, a tall, lean specter who’d slip in and out without a word. “I really felt so sorry for him,” Helen said. “He loved the business. He loved music. But his family at that time was so busted up that he didn’t have anyone really to sing with. Janette wasn’t singing at that time. She was married and her husband wouldn’t let her sing. It was really hard on him, and looking back, I can see where he might have come and worked with us, had we even thought about it at that time. But you know, when you’re young, you don’t see all these things at the time.”

  By the time the GIs straggled back from Europe and the Pacific to begin the work of remaking their nation, the various Carters were settling into new lives, too. A.P. Carter was back home in Maces Springs for good, living with the knowledge that his best times had passed. Sara Carter remained in California, in self-enforced exile, cut off from her music, from her home, and from the day-to-day pleasures and pains of her children and grandchildren. Maybelle Carter and her daughters, meanwhile, were full-time professional entertainers—which cut them off from home and extended family just as surely as did Sara’s exile. For the next thirty years, Maybelle Carter would make her life on the road. She would remain a gentle, modest woman and a dedicated accompaniest—shy of the limelight, quick to push others out front. But she was also, underneath the quiet facade, a woman of remarkable force. Like those Poor Valley women of Mollie Carter’s generation, Maybelle could work day and night, without expectation and without complaint. And it was Maybelle Carter’s drive, her pride, and her prodigious talents that ensured the long, sweet sustain of Carter Family music.

  The Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle at work (Lorrie Davis Bennett)

  The Carters with Chet Atkins, circa 1950 (“The Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle Song Folio No. 1”) (Lorrie Davis Bennett)

  . . . To Nashville

  The Carter sisters’ early career as professional entertainers was not without growing pains. Even June, who was the most committed to performing, had occasional second thoughts. Her successes among the sophisticated, urban daughters of Richmond’s John Marshall High School had erased any doubts a tomboy country girl might have had about her femininity or her polish. When her graduation day came and those other girls were talking about the universities and colleges they would attend that fall, June cried because she would not be going off to college also. But that was a momentary hiccup. When a local newspaper reporter interviewed her, June insisted on her commitment to her craft. “Movies or stage?” she’d say. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll just follow whatever it drifts to.”

  It sounded so nonchalant . . . so unplanned . . . so natural. But the truth was, June was hardly drifting. By the time the nation turned away from war, June Carter was a vector, headed in a very specific direction, toward a very specific place, no matter the odds. In the late ’40s, the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle were one of thousands of country acts on literally hundreds of radio stations around the country. Even feeble five-thousand-watt radio stations in two-bit towns supported live shows. And if you shot those thousands of radio performers full of truth serum, nearly all would say the same thing: They dreamed of their ascension to “Hillbilly Heaven,” in Nashville, Tennessee, on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.

  By the middle forties, the Grand Ole Opry was the dominant force in country music in the nation. WLS’s National Barn Dance, the Renfro Valley Barn Dance, Shreveport’s Louisiana Hayride—they all had big audiences and up-and-coming stars, but none drew numbers or talent like the Opry did. The Opry show aired live from seven-thirty to midnight every Saturday night, and it wasn’t just for listeners within range of WSM’s big fifty-thousand-watt signal. NBC had syndicated the show, so all over the country, every Saturday night at 7:30, folks from Boston to Los Angeles could get a half hour of the Opry, sponsored by Prince Albert Tobacco. The biggest stars were on that Opry stage, or on their way there. When the industry started toting up record sales on the new weekly Billboard charts in 1948, Opry acts dominated the country list. The Carters were no different from the other acts on minor-league radio. They dreamed of the Opry, too, even if they never dared speak of it. But even after they’d had a half dozen years on radio, the Carter sisters knew they weren’t yet ready for the big time. As Maybelle would say, “The girls was just taking their feed on music.”

  Still, in 1946, they were heading in the right direction. Richmond’s biggest station, WRVA, wanted the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle, so the group bolted the five-thousand-watt piker WRNL and moved to the jewel of Richmond’s hillbilly music scene. In the summer of 1946, WRVA had spent loads of cash renovating an old theater called the Lyric. The newly christened WRVA Theater was at Ninth and Broad Streets, smack in the middle of downtown. The stage-door entrance faced the state capitol. For its debut season, the WRVA Theater booked a variety of shows: the Ballet for America, featuring exotic ballet stars Nana Gollner, Yurek Shabalevski, Kurek Lozowski, Tatiana Grantazeve, and Bettina Rosay; traveling productions of Dear Ruth and Voice of the Turtle, two of New York’s most up-to-date comedies; the Richmond Musicians’ Club, the Richmond Opera Group, and the Aladdin Players. But Saturday nights were given over entirely to hillbilly entertainment. The Old Dominion Barn Dance played twice a night, every Saturday, without fail.

  The Old Dominion Barn Dance is where the Carters first learned that there was more at stake in the music business than ever before, and that the fight for the spoils would not always be friendly. That lesson came courtesy of the impresario of those Saturday events, an Iowa farm girl named Mary Arlene Workman. Mary Workman had started making music with her high-school sweetheart and husband-to-be, John “Sugarfoot” Workman, back in Keosauqua, Iowa. They’d made their way up from little Iowa stations to The National Barn Dance on WLS in Chicago, where Mary Workman inherited her stage name, sort of. One morning at the WLS studio, an emcee blanked on Workman’s name. “When it was my time to go on,” remembered Workman years later, “he looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know what your name is, little girl, but it ought to be Sunshine Sally.’ The name stuck but had to be changed to Sue when another Sally proved to have a claim on the original name.” As the emcee in Richmond, “Sunshine Sue” was a big draw for the rural folk who tramped downtown for the Saturday-night show. They tramped in such numbers, in fact, that the station had to open the box office at noon every Saturday so people didn’t have to stand in line for hours waiting to buy tickets. And that was even when the comedy acts were so bad—Grandpa Jones complaining about the city slicker who sold him a tub, with a hole in it!—that some folks made it a point to get outside and have a smoke during breaks from the music.

  Sunshine Sue proved a practiced hand at the accordion and a passable vocalist. She and Sugarfoot even made a charming rendition of “What Are Little Girls and Boys Made Of?”—sugar and spice and everything nice; snails and nails and puppy dog tails. She was a genial and enthusiastic mistress of ceremonies. “Take off your shoes, throw them in the aisles, and be ready for a party,” she’d say as she stepped to the mike for her welcome song, “You Are My Sunshine.” Her biggest fan was Virginia governor William Tuck. While in office, Tuck had a private box reserved every Saturday night, where he delighted in entertaining visiting dignitaries and plenipotentiaries. By writ of official proclamation, Tuck christened Sunshine Sue “the Queen of the Hillbillies.”

  The Queen was also a skilled image maker who understood what her audience expected of a woman in the 1940s. Newspaper accounts of the day always noted Sunshine Sue’s steadfastness in domestic chores. Despite her busy schedule on the radio and on the road, she found time to cook, to keep house, to get up at 5:30 on Monday mornings to do the wash. When reporters wanted to talk business, she’d demur. “John has the brains,” she’d say of her husband, “and I have the big mouth.” Beneath the act, Mary Workman was one heck of a businesswoman. She rarely saw a marketing opportunity
that gave her pause. After her first son was born, she allowed a southern soft-drink company to put out mini-diapers that read, “Sunshine Sue says it’s time for a change—to Dr Pepper.”

  When the Workmans incorporated Southland Shows, Mrs. was made president. Southland—that is, Sunshine Sue—brought to Richmond shows such as Oklahoma, Annie, Get Your Gun, and Hollywood on Ice, and stars such as Tex Ritter and Gene Autry. She also scouted and chose hillbilly performers, signed them to exclusive contracts, polished their acts, directed them, and sold them as a package to the WRVA barn-dance show. The Old Dominion Barn Dance, in effect, belonged to Sunshine Sue—which made problems for Maybelle Carter and her daughters. The Carters had a sort of side deal with WRVA. They had a nonexclusive contract with the station itself, and that contract allowed them to book their own show dates on days they weren’t working the radio shows or the Old Dominion Barn Dance.

  Sunshine Sue wasn’t worried only about loss of control; she jealously guarded her standing in the Richmond radio world, so from the beginning, she was wary of the Carters and their big audience. When the Carters were on the radio show, or at the barn dance, Sunshine Sue let them know who was boss. Anita was getting to the age where she wanted to go to parties with her school friends or to high-school football games or dances, so she was always bumping heads with Sunshine Sue. Workman would tell Anita if she did a yodeling number she could get some time off. “I hated to yodel,” said Anita, “but I’d do ‘Freight Train Blues,’ and maybe she’d give me a night off.”

  It didn’t help matters any when Gene Autry, during a radio interview with Sunshine Sue, said his biggest thrill in Richmond was meeting Maybelle Carter. And it didn’t help matters that June was acting as emcee of the morning show and drawing big numbers compared to Workman’s own afternoon show. After just eighteen months at WRVA, things came to a head. Sunshine Sue wanted the Carters under the Southland Shows tent, full-time, earning for the company and letting her take a cut. The Carters wanted to maintain some independence. “[WRVA] wanted to speak to us,” says June, “and I said, ‘I know what they’re going to ask us today. They’re going to ask us to give up our park dates and would we just work for what everybody else works for, because they might be a little jealous of what was going on and they didn’t want to say Sunshine Sue was jealous.’ So I said [to the rest of the family], ‘I would like us to just draw up a letter and have it typed and official, and we will all sign it and it’s our resignation. We don’t have to be at WRVA anymore. We want to do something else.’ Mother said, ‘You speak for us and we will do what you say. If you say stay, we’ll stay. If you say go, we’ll go.’

  “So we typed up that letter and we got in that room and they said, ‘Now, we think what you should do is just sign a contract with us, and us only.’ And I said, ‘Before you get any further in this—I’ll just save you some time. We’ve all talked about this, and we would like to go home to southwestern Virginia. And then we feel we should be doing some other things.’ And I gave them the letter. We’d already signed it. It was official, that was it. Then we went home to the Valley and had a chance to see all of our friends and to just stay in that part of the world.”

  That summer, in 1948, the Carters had no definite plan for the future, just a general sense that it would be grander than Sunshine Sue’s Old Dominion Barn Dance. Their sudden reappearance in Maces Springs was a little awkward at first, because they had no place to live. Once the Old Dominion Barn Dance paychecks had started coming in, Eck had sold the homeplace to his brother Grant and Grant’s wife, Theda, and bought a farm outside Richmond.

  Fortunately, one of Maybelle’s brothers had built a little cottage along the banks of the Holston. He’d practically grown up at Eck and Maybelle’s house, so now, returning an old favor, he invited the Eck Carters to live with him, his wife, and their two daughters. Maybelle’s brother had just enough room for a family of five, as long as the five were used to sleeping in cramped quarters—which, of course, they were. The metamorphosis from performers to farmers was a little more self-conscious than it had been in the past, but soon enough, they got the hang of it. Each morning at sunrise, Maybelle prepared biscuits and gravy with fried pork, hot cereal, juice, and coffee. At dinnertime (around noon) she set the table with truck-patch vegetables and, it seemed to June, “all the beef, pork, fish, or fowl that roamed the world.” Finally, in the evening, with the tobacco wormed and the corn hoed, there was a small meal of milk and corn bread, with a few leftovers and a dessert of peach cobbler, or something like it—except for Eck, who always helped himself to a slice of cheddar cheese, topped with brown sugar.

  Still, even among friends and family, living at a slow, safe, familiar routine, Eck and Maybelle, Helen and June knew they didn’t belong to the Valley anymore. It simply couldn’t hold them. It was as if they were getting up every morning and putting on clothes that didn’t fit. Even while June helped her uncle with the farm chores, she was thinking mainly of the future, of the kind of entertainer she wanted to be—and of the kind she did not want to be. One day in the middle of that summer, she says, “I plumb killed Aunt Polly. I actually took her clothes and buried them in the yard.”

  Anita, meanwhile, was hoping to stay right where she was for a while. Now fifteen years old, she was ready to settle down a bit. She’d attended classes in Maces Springs, San Antonio, Hiltons, and Richmond, sometimes beginning the year in one school and ending in another. Besides, she was tired of the cornpone demands of radio and road-show work. There was newer music, western swing and jazz, for instance, that drew her. She didn’t want to take some new job just to be another hillbilly act.

  Often, when the family would convene for one of Maybelle’s banquetlike luncheons, the radio would be tuned to WNOX out of Knoxville, Tennessee. The signal was weak, but the noontime show, Midday Merry-Go-Round, was one of the most spirited country-music programs they had ever heard. Its impresario was Lowell Blanchard, who was busy making WNOX “the stepping-stone to the Grand Ole Opry.” Roy Acuff, the Opry’s biggest star, had been at WNOX. “We educate ’em,” Blanchard would say with a trace of bitterness, “and Nashville gets ’em.” But in Knoxville, Blanchard ruled; it was his bumptious, cornball sense of humor that set the tone for the midday show that included wacky skits and flashy hillbilly music.

  So when Blanchard called and said he wanted the Carters on his show in Knoxville, Anita blanched. But Maybelle, who was not going to sit in the Valley much longer, convinced her youngest daughter that this would be a good move. Maybelle said she’d heard musicians at the Knoxville station who had no equal. They were young, fast, modern, and on the edge. Anita was not much cheered but had to knuckle under and go with her parents. By the end of the summer, the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle were in Knoxville, Tennessee, a town that was, notably, a hundred miles closer to Nashville than was Poor Valley.

  The Carters moved into North Knoxville’s Whittle Springs Hotel, a giant Tudor pile standing proudly on the brow of a hill, where the father of famed playwright Tennessee Williams was spending that summer in quiet splendor. “It looked like a country club,” says June Carter, “with a swimming pool in front, and a golf course. Rich old ladies lived there, like Ma Sterchi [of the enormous Sterchi’s Furniture fortune], and some rich older men, too.” That summer, Knoxville was a town riding the wave of a postwar economic boom. Factories were rising along the banks of the Tennessee River. Roads were clogged with new cars and trucks and the John Deere tractors that were replacing the country mule on the smallest farms. The Tennessee Valley Authority was pushing electricity farther and farther outside the city limits; not even Senator Kenneth McKellar’s warning that the TVA was “a hotbed of communism” could slow the juggernaut. After the lean years of depression and wartime rationing, people simply wanted more. A few had already climbed atop their roofs to place their own Brobdingnagian antennae, pulling the long wires through windows and into the backs of gleaming store-bought television sets. But even as those few invited friends and n
eighbors over to watch Milton Berle in lipstick and a dress, or the World Series, live, in their own living room, eggheads around the nation were debating whether television was the wave of the future or just a flash-in-the-pan gimmick. Radio, all agreed, still ruled the airwaves. News, both local and national, commodities prices, baseball games, weather, and entertainment—radio had them all. Folks couldn’t afford not to have a radio. In Knoxville, the station to dial in was WNOX.

  The WNOX studios were downtown on Gay Street, between Breezy Wynn’s clothing factory and the Sterchi’s Furniture outlet (the Sterchis had once owned WNOX). The station had only ten thousand watts, a local, minor-league affair, but its signature show, the Midday Merry-Go-Round, had attracted a stable of great musicians. One of the most talented was a skinny, shy, sad-faced guitar player up from Luttrell, Tennessee. And his was the first face the Carters saw upon entering the Gay Street studio. There he was, Chester “Chet” Atkins, sitting sullenly in a corner. He may have nodded a hello when the Carters entered, but he wouldn’t have had much to say. Anita’s high hopes must have wilted when she saw him that day, along with his band mates, a guitar-mandolin duo known as Homer and Jethro. These two were the perfect image of hillbilly, all floppy hats and overalls.