* * *
As Pleasant Carter neared seventy and his heart started to weaken, the men who hung around his store didn’t think much about it. “I’ve not been well all my life,” he’d always told them. They never thought his health situation was dire, even when he quit minding the store and gave it over to Milan and Gladys to run. The Valley was beginning to look different. The roads were paved, the houses bricked. Every farmer had a tractor. In 1959 Neal’s finally gave up the ghost, and without its post office, Maces Springs was no longer recognized as a town by the state of Virginia, or the Rand McNally mapmakers. A.P. must have sensed something, because around that time, he began to make known his final wishes, quietly, slyly, and at odd times. One afternoon on the porch he called to his granddaughter Rita Jett, who was not yet five. “There’s something I want to tell you that I don’t want you to ever forget,” he said in earnest. Then after a long, pregnant pause, his granddaughter leaned in, waiting to get the wisdom of the ages. “Always vote Republican,” he said.
He gave Janette advice about her youngest son, Dale Jett. The boy was only three, but A.P. already saw a lot of himself in Dale. Dale couldn’t sit still, and though naturally gentle, he was also high-strung and hot-tempered. Dale was already something of a celebrity in the Valley for being able to hold his breath until he turned blue and passed out. “Watch out for him,” A.P. told Janette, “for he has a high portion in nerves, and he will have a hard time in life.”
A.P. Carter never was much for formal and legal documents, but in February of 1960 he was so weak he couldn’t get out of bed, and his attorney suggested it was time to execute a will. “Pleasant got me and Everett Parker out [to Gladys’s house], and he had the will read, the will he made,” says Clyde Gardner. “He was in bed then. But his mind still seemed to be about as good as ever.” By then A.P.’s hands trembled badly, and he didn’t have the strength to make a good signature. All he could do was make his mark, an X, on the page.
A few weeks later, Gladys called Bill Clifton, distraught: “When can you come and see Daddy?”
“Maybe on the weekend.”
“He’ll not be here this weekend.”
That day, Bill grabbed his wife, Sara Lee, and rushed over. When he got to Gladys’s house, he found A.P. in bed, half delirious. For eight straight days, A.P. had refused to eat, and he was slowly wasting away. “Gladys had a bed set up in the living room,” says Clifton, “and there was constant flow through there between the kitchen and the bathroom, so there was always somebody to stop and talk to A.P. They’d stop and talk to him. Gladys put a chair beside him, and people would sit with him all through the night. He told me, ‘People say I’m gonna die. They had a lawyer up here to get me to write a will and had me to sign it.’ He figured that was it; he was going to die.”
But it seemed A.P. didn’t want to walk that last valley alone. That night, he would waken from a deep sleep, sure he was in a radio show or a recording session, bassing in on a song. He’d announce a song and then say to Bill and Janette, who were sitting at his bedside, “You two get to singing.” He kept at them to do a song called “Two Little Girls in Blue.” Janette didn’t even know the words, but she’d join in with Bill when he got to the chorus. When somebody would call across the room for Bill’s wife, Sara, A.P. thought it was his own Sara come back to nurse him. Nearly thirty years since she’d left him, A.P. still kept Sara’s long black ponytail, from when she cut her hair short with her girlfriends in the Valley. “His heart was broken,” says Clifton. “He loved Sara to the end. He held on to the hope that she would come back.”
The next morning, Bill was trying hard to bring his friend back to the here and now. “I said, ‘A.P., you don’t understand. We’ve got too much to do. We’ve got to rebuild that stage before summer. Somebody has to do that by June.’ That was Thursday, and at lunchtime Gladys says, ‘Daddy, can I get you something?’ It’d been nine days without food now. And he says, ‘I believe I’d like some of Myrtle Hensley’s apple butter.’ ”
Gladys raced down to Myrtle’s, who gave over all the apple butter she had. “If that’s what’s gonna keep him alive,” said Myrtle, “I’ll just have to make another batch.”
* * *
Not even Myrtle’s apple butter could keep him going much longer. A.P. made it through the summer, but by the fall of 1960, his failing heart landed him in the Holston Valley Community Hospital in Kingsport. The last time Clifton saw him, A.P. was flat on his back, under an oxygen tent, barely in the world. Bill was about to a make a Carter Family tribute record for a company called Starday, but A.P. received this news without a glimmer of recognition.
On November 7, 1960, Janette went to visit her father and found him shading to blue. When she reached for him, his hand was cold and, for the first time she’d ever seen, still. “I took his hand and it wasn’t shaking anymore,” says Janette. “I ran out to the nurse, and I said, ‘He’s not shaking! You have to do something.’ And she said, ‘His nerves are dying. It’ll not be long now.’ ” That evening, Janette went home to get some rest, to prepare for the death siege. But later that night, she saw a black hearse coming up the Valley road. She knew it must be carrying the body of her father. A.P. had asked to be taken back home, because he didn’t want visitation in Kingsport.
His other wishes for his funeral were simple. He’d be buried near his parents, and his sister Ettaleen, in the cemetery behind Mount Vernon. He requested a wooden casket and said specifically, “I don’t want no special singers over me. Just the Mount Vernon Quartet.” In his funeral program, also according to his wishes, Sara Dougherty Carter was listed as his wife. All in all, the official remembrance of Alvin Pleasant Delaney Carter was a modest affair. Outside of family and near friends, his passing was barely marked. Short death notices ran in Billboard, the Kingsport News, and the Kingsport Times, but not in the nearest newspaper, the Scott County News. “For some reason,” the Scott County editor wrote to a folklorist who had requested a copy of the obituary, “we failed to carry the death of Mr. Carter.”
A.P. Carter died as cash poor as he’d lived, but Ermine Carter, the only real workhorse among the Carter siblings, stoutly defended his oldest brother. “Well, I don’t care what you say about Doc,” he’d say. “He’s the only one that left every young’un he had a house, and some land.” Gladys got the 125-acre farm in Little Poor Valley and the homeplace. Janette got the 125 acres of land in Poor Valley, the general store, and the house her father built for her. Joe got a lot next to Janette, and the land near Highway 58, west of Hiltons. That legacy to his children was a point of pride for A.P. He had managed to reverse the losses of his old great-grandfather Dulaney Carter, who had drunk away two fortunes and left his heirs nothing but debt.
As was his way, A.P. left little debt to be settled. He owed $350 dollars on a note he’d taken in 1956 from the First National Bank in Gate City, and $230 in sundry small-time obligations. Even with $1,100 worth of hospital and funeral expenses piled on (he was right about how dear dying had become), A.P. Carter’s worldly debts were cleared within ten months of his death. Sale of his livestock brought in $457.33, his household goods $45, and his last plat of tobacco $371.35. But the biggest check that winter came from Ralph Peer’s company: $617.33 in royalties. The Kingston Trio had recently recorded a version of “Worried Man Blues,” and both Columbia and RCA were re-releasing original Carter recordings as LP albums. Just three weeks after A.P.’s death, Elvis Presley recorded “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”
In fact, the growing royalties left room for the children to honor another of A.P.’s final wishes, to make a nod to heirs of a different sort, and to the boundless faith their father had in the staying power of Carter Family music. One day in the fall of 1961, having been duly instructed and paid, the Bill Begley Monument Company crew drove up the Valley road past Janette’s house, then past the old homeplace, past Neal’s boarded-up store and Eck’s old house, before turning left onto a winding dirt path. The truck climbed slowly to Mo
unt Vernon Methodist Church on the road that had been carved out of land donated long before by the old singing master, A.P.’s first musical mentor, Flanders Bays. At the cemetery, and without ceremony, the men placed a special marker on the grave of Alvin Pleasant Delaney Carter. It was like no other at Mount Vernon. Above his name and dates, carved in the smooth glassy sheen, was the likeness of a 78 record, perfect in its roundness, and the words “Keep on the Sunny Side.”
“Just before he died, A.P. told Gladys how he wanted to be remembered at Mount Vernon Cemetery,” says Bill Clifton. “He had seen this pink marble in Texas that he really liked, and that was what he wanted for a marker. He wanted it to stand out. He said, ‘Someday people will come to Mount Vernon and want to see where the Carter Family is buried.’ ”
June Carter and Johnny Cash, not long after they met (Stella Bayes)
Maybelle, with Anita and June (Lorrie Davis Bennett)
On the Road Again
In Nashville, Eck must have been shaken by the lack of regard shown his brother; the performers at the Opry, the songwriters and producers and A&R men on Music Row, were more or less oblivious to A.P. Carter’s death. This town was looking forward, not back. In the studios on Sixteenth Avenue, a new Nashville sound was being pioneered by Chet Atkins, now head of RCA’s Nashville division, and Owen Bradley, who had a similar position at Decca. Atkins and Bradley wanted slick, uptown production, and big arrangements with lush string sections, drums, and smooth vocal backing—something that could compete with rock and roll for the millions of dollars at stake in the popular-music market. “Crossover” talents such as Jim Reeves, Don Gibson, and Patsy Cline were the sort of performers they were looking for—pop singers whose voices were better matched with piano than with banjo. And even at the Opry, management seemed more interested in expanding its audience than in pleasing the older, rural loyalists. Traditional country music couldn’t be dispensed with altogether, and Maybelle continued to do her weekly show at the Ryman, but little was done to promote her.
In the early sixties, it was harder than ever for Maybelle to get her daughters together on any stage. Anita was living in Mobile, Alabama, with her husband, Don Davis, and was in semiretirement. Anita had never stepped up to stardom, and it didn’t seem likely she would now. Her firstborn baby was colicky, impossible on the road, and when her son Jay was diagnosed with autism, caring for him became her overriding priority. Helen had a houseful of boys and was beginning to see herself more as a songwriter than a performer, especially after Ann-Margaret made a top-twenty hit of Helen’s thoroughly un-Carteresque pop tearjerker “What Am I Supposed to Do?” June, of course, was still onstage pitching away, just beginning to tour as a regular with the Johnny Cash road show. Maybelle still supplemented her show at the Opry with whatever road work she could get. But no label had much interest in putting out her records, so she was moonlighting as a practical nurse, sitting with the elderly and the infirm for a little extra cash.
Eck could see the writing on the wall: The Carter sisters had virtually no future together, and Maybelle’s career was sliding into obscurity. It must have been soon after A.P.’s death that he made the plan. He may have even mentioned it to Maybelle. Pop Carter had been thinking about it for a while, researching it in consumer magazines. He’d decided it was time to retire, and according to his research, New Port Richey, Florida, was the place to go; the little fishing village just north of Tampa was the best value the country offered. He found a bungalow there, on a crystal-clear freshwater river, a short boat ride away from the Gulf of Mexico. The fishing was great. Heck, he already had the deep-sea poles. So one night in 1961, Pop made his announcement. “Mom came in off the road, and he had decided that it was time for them to retire and go to Florida,” says Becky Bowman. “And he had already bought a place and made two trips with his truck moving stuff down there!”
Maybelle nearly fainted. “Daddy, surely you didn’t,” she said. “Surely you didn’t do that.”
“Yes, I did,” said Eck, and proud of it, too. He’d got a great deal on the house.
“Well, I’m not retiring.”
* * *
Nobody was going to force Maybelle out, not Opry management, not Nashville record gurus. Making music was what she did, and she wasn’t giving it up. Her resolve would pay off, partly because of a promising new movement building far away from Nashville’s Music Row. It had begun in 1958, when the Kingston Trio had a smash hit with “Tom Dooley,” a traditional ballad first recorded in 1929 by the near-blind fiddler G. B. Grayson. The champions of the “folk” music revival were mostly young Yankees, many of them intellectuals or liberals. A lot of them came out of academia, and some of its professors started writing Maybelle and asking if they could visit her in Tennessee. She never said no, and between semesters, college men would drive up to her house in suburban Nashville, pull out reel-to-reel tape recorders, and start asking her about the old days, the early recordings, Sara, and A.P. They’d quiz her on how she developed the Carter scratch, her autoharp technique, or where the family got its songs.
These strangers in his home drove Eck crazy. He’d say hello, maybe, and then get out of the house. Maybelle never seemed to be bothered. She was matter-of-fact and patient. They’d run through long lists of songs, and she’d tell them where they got each one. “A.P. found that one. . . . A.P. wrote that one. The eighth song we ever recorded was a song A.P. wrote . . . known all my life . . . known all my life . . . known that one a long time.”
There was one guy who came all the way out from UCLA, who was going to be writing his dissertation on the Carter Family. He was getting a Ph.D. . . . in the Carters! “Did you have any notion you were setting a style that was going to be very important?” the doctoral candidate, Ed Kahn, wanted to know.
“I never thought it was important,” she answered.
“But when were you first aware that the Carter Family had a distinctive style?”
“In fact, I hadn’t thought too much about it in that way until the last few years, you know, when everybody started coming to me and telling me they would have never played the guitar if it hadn’t been for our records. Lot of them tell me that. When they were kids, they listened to these records.”
“You never had any idea your guitar was distinctive?”
At this, Maybelle let out a laugh. “No, I never did. I didn’t even think about it. I just played the way I wanted to and that’s it.”
The new interest in Maybelle’s old kind of music was not completely unheeded in Nashville. One of the first to understand the possibilities was Louise Scruggs. Louise was a famously shrewd and frosty woman, wife of Earl Scruggs and manager of the bluegrass band Flatt & Scruggs, named for her husband, and singer Lester Flatt. In January of 1961, she says, “Someone, I don’t remember who, sent me 150 of the old Carter Family songs on reel-to-reel tapes. Earl was on tour with Johnny Cash. We’d had a big snow and I couldn’t get out of the house. I was sitting there with nothing to do, so I put those tapes on and started listening to them.” She sensed immediately the power of those songs, how they could be reinterpreted by a new generation without disturbing the emotional tug at the center. “By the time Earl came back in from the road,” she says, “I was ready to tell him: ‘You really should do a Carter Family album.’ ”
Her husband was delighted. Earl Scruggs had grown up on a farm in Shelby, North Carolina, and listened to the Carter Family’s 1943 performances on WBT, Charlotte. “Maybelle just knocked me out,” Scruggs said. “She and Merle Travis were my favorite guitar players.” And Earl had been hearing around town “that Maybelle was settin’ and nursin’ with people instead of pickin’ and singin’.” So he asked her to sit in on the record, and she agreed, suggesting she’d like to play the autoharp. She’d been refining her technique over the past few years, she told him, and the instrument would give the sessions a Carter Family flavor distinct from other Flatt & Scruggs albums. Earl Scruggs figured he’d play the guitar when necessary, affecting Maybel
le’s style as best he could.
But once in the studio, Earl started to get frustrated. He had trouble reproducing Maybelle’s unique tones and nuances, no matter how perfectly he copied her notes. He didn’t lack for talent or confidence; he was, and is, widely regarded as the greatest banjo player in history. He figured he was having trouble matching up to Maybelle because the Gibson guitar she’d played for more than thirty years was so rare and well broken in. So Maybelle brought her Gibson into the studio . . . and Scruggs still couldn’t get it right. “I never could find that pretty tone she got offa that guitar,” he says. “I mean I picked all over it, but I just never could find it.” The song that really drove Earl nuts was “You Are My Flower,” with the Mexican-style licks Maybelle had first worked out back in Poor Valley, listening to border radio. The band had already recorded the song, and all that remained to complete the track was for Scruggs to overdub the guitar solo. After a few false starts, he asked Maybelle to play it, so he could study her more closely.
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? Page 37