Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  They could all see Johnny Cash was a mess, but Eck and Maybelle told Cash he could come to Cude Lane to sleep over as often as he wanted. “They’d seen what happened to Hank Williams,” Cash later speculated, “and I don’t think they wanted it to happen to me.” Johnny was happy to accept the offer, partly because it gave him the chance to make a friend of Pop Carter. Johnny was a smart man, and he understood the way to June was still through Eck.

  Making friends with Eck paid off in unexpected ways. The more time Johnny Cash spent around the place, the more fascinated he was with Pop Carter. One of the first things he noticed about Pop was his obsession with rocks. “He’d be out there with a nine-pound sledgehammer, bustin’ rocks in the heat of the summer,” Cash says. “I just couldn’t understand a man lovin’ that kind of torture. I mean, he did it all day long, like a convict. Then he’d come in and cook supper.”

  Pop’s obsession gave Cash an idea. Being a good deal more open-minded and eclectic than the average Nashville star, he had heard and admired the folksinging movement. “John Henry,” the ballad of a hammer-wielding railroad man, was an increasingly popular traditional song. Johnny would see Eck out there busting his back, hammer ringing off ledge, and he couldn’t get the song out of his head. Working with June, Cash arranged a nine-minute version of the song. Maybelle and the Carter sisters did the background vocals. It appeared on his 1962 album Blood, Sweat & Tears, which was most remarkable for a beautiful duet with Anita, “Another Man Done Gone.”

  While working on Blood, Sweat & Tears, Cash began to notice that Maybelle kept even stranger hours than he did, often rolling up to the house at four or five o’clock in the morning. At first, he assumed that she must be playing a lot of out-of-town gigs—until she told him she was “settin’ with the elderly.” Maybelle didn’t go into much detail about her job as a practical nurse, except to assure him she liked it fine. Still, Johnny was shocked: “I thought, my God! This woman is staying up all night to sit with the elderly, then getting a couple of hours of sleep before the breaking of the rocks starts. But she really loved those elderly people.”

  It made him anxious to get to know her better. But like everyone else, Cash found her difficult to draw out. “Maybelle was a very, very quiet southern woman,” says Cash. “Like many quiet people, she knew more than most people, because she listened more. She was not introverted; she was happy and laughing whenever someone had something to say that was worth a laugh. But she gave nothing away, unless you asked for it. Nothing.”

  He began playing guitar and singing with her around the house as often as possible, but even then, talk was more about songs—where they came from, who she learned them from, who played them a little bit different—than anything about her own life. Cash found comfort in the ease of just being with her, without the need to work through problems. He felt no obligation to discuss, or to apologize for, the life he was leading. In the spaces of those silences, Maybelle became a reassuring figure: part mother, part mentor, part friend.

  His association with the Carters also made Cash a more interesting artist. In 1963 he recorded “Ring of Fire,” a song written by June and her distant cousin Merle Kilgore, and its success began to reestablish him as a big star. The song, about consuming passions that leave other people badly hurt, could have been about the painful A.P.-Sara-Coy triangle. It would also be remembered in the Carter-Cash household as the anthem of their own tortured courtship. June was eaten up by guilt; she was still married to Nix, but she had fallen deeply in love with Johnny. “I used to go to church about every day for a year,” she said later. “I used to get out my Bible and look through it. I used to wear out my knees and pray.”

  And Johnny was crazy for June. On the road especially, she was the person who helped him wrestle with his drug addiction. She’d hide his pills, force food down his gullet, sweep up behind him when he wrecked hotel rooms or business relationships or friendships. June made Cash want to be a better man. For one thing, even if he could get free of Vivian, he knew June would never marry him until he got himself under control. By 1964, says their friend Dixie Deen Hall, “John had begun making his bid for June, but she was still keeping her distance on account of the pills. ‘When he straightens up, yes, I’ll marry him,’ she used to say, ‘but not now.’ ”

  Johnny was working all the family angles. Time spent with Maybelle improved his manners immeasurably. “I began going fishing with her a great deal,” recalls Cash. “And when I’m fishing, I’m always saying ‘Shit!’ if I lose a hook or something. But around Maybelle, I just couldn’t do it. Nobody ever said one of those words around Maybelle. Not because she ever told anyone not to. She’d just say, ‘Oh, John!’and then go back to her fishing. That was the worst she ever said to me: ‘Oh, John!’ ”

  Pop had spent most of his adult life watching men sniff around his daughters; he knew exactly what Johnny was after. The drug habit scared him a bit, but he liked Johnny Cash. He was country, and he came from a devout family. His mother, Carrie Cash, had baked scripture cakes, every ingredient from the Bible! More than that, he admired the younger man’s talent, his success (both artistic and financial), and, when straight, his considerable charm. The two men shared a fascination with ancient history and an independent-minded attitude toward religion: Both were fervent Christians who rarely attended church. Cash professed awe at Eck’s huge library of antique books, and Pop offered to lend Cash one.

  The first loaner was a surprise to Cash. It was called The Way of a Man with a Maid, a work that has been described as both “erotica” and “pornography” by equally appreciative readers. “I read it all,” says Cash, “and I enjoyed it.” But when Pop asked Cash for an appraisal of the book, he knew exactly what to say: “I told him it was a filthy book, and I meant it. I was pretty close to telling him that I really, really liked his daughter, so it was important for me and him to share the idea that it was filthy. And after I told him what I thought, he said, ‘Good, I thought so, too.’ ”

  The next book Pop gave Cash was a considerably different volume by Flavius Josephus, whose writings on Roman Jewry fed Cash’s interest in history and religion. When Johnny noticed that Eck’s eyesight was failing, he found a version of the text with larger print and presented it to Pop so that they could discuss it more easily. On they went through the works of Pliny and Gibbon. “We spent hours and hours talking about those books,” says Cash. “We’d talk about the interesting things that took place in ancient times, the very human things. We loved how, in Josephus, there’s a passage where a Roman officer raises his garments and moons the Hebrews. I came to see Pop as a great teacher. On Sundays, we’d sit and talk about the Bible. I never asked him why he never went to church, and he never asked me. That was our church, right there—those books, those walls, those conversations. And it was very effective in sealing some very important things in my heart and soul.”

  From time to time, Pop would sit with June and discuss her relationship with Cash. Eck admitted that he was “a little afraid of this.” But the more time he spent with Johnny, the more he realized his gifts, and the more he came to believe the man was worth saving. If Cash could straighten himself out, he could be as popular, and as rich, as anyone in show business. And Pop suspected that if anyone could straighten out Cash, it was the Carter women. Pop had prayed on it, he told June, and he was convinced that “God had his hand on Johnny Cash.” But he reminded her to be careful. “You’re a smart girl, June. Just remember to be smart.”

  Maybelle wasn’t giving much encouragement to the relationship; in fact, she and June never talked about it. “I know it sounds strange,” June says, “but I used to try to tell what Mama felt by looking in her eyes. And as far as John was concerned, she always seemed sympathetic with anything I wanted to do.” Johnny knew better than to press Maybelle on the question. “I knew she didn’t want to [talk about it]. That’s the old-fashioned country way. She did certain things—I can’t really explain it—that said, ‘We don’t have to talk
about this.’ ”

  Unable to hold it in any longer, Cash finally declared his feelings to Pop one night over a mug of beer. “You know I’m in love with June,” he blurted.

  “Of course I know. What are you gonna do?”

  “I want to marry her, obviously. But, ah, we’re both in a very tight place and neither one of us can break free from the web.”

  “I hope you can work it out” is all Pop said.

  * * *

  Despite the drugs, Cash’s road show stayed on the move, and Maybelle’s association with the show, along with continued interest from the folk movement, had resulted in more work for her. Still, she didn’t feel ready to give up the income from nursing, even when her life became a briar patch of scheduling conflicts. Opry management had little interest in promoting Mother Maybelle and scheduled her appearances to suit themselves. Dixie Deen Hall recalls Maybelle frantically trying to change an Opry date so that she could play a lucrative folk concert on the West Coast . . . to no avail. Maybelle’s nursing agency was no more accommodating. The agency was run by a Mrs. Brooks, “a very caustic old bitch,” says Dixie, “and very strict, as I’m sure she had to be. If you were on a case, you stayed on it. And that wore on Maybelle, because some of the cases went on and on.” Dixie went to great lengths to get on Mrs. Brooks’s good side so that she could substitute for Maybelle when the need arose. When she did sit in, Dixie would wonder how Maybelle could stand it, “especially for twelve dollars a night, which was what we were paid.” Some of the cases were just sad. Red Foley’s wife was one of her patients, though neither Maybelle nor Dixie could detect any sign of illness in her. “I think she just wanted somebody there,” says Dixie, “for whatever reason.” But some patients were cranky and tyrannical, and even abusive. “It made me very sad to see Maybelle in that position,” Dixie says, “but she took it as a job. Maybe she shut it out, I’m not sure. She never seemed to find anything demeaning about it.”

  Johnny finally sat her down one day to have a talk about her life. “Maybelle, you’re not going to work at the hospital anymore.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I want you to go on the road with me.”

  “I’ll go,” she said, “but you know I don’t mind working in the hospital.”

  Cash was silent for a minute and stared hard at her; he always did that when he wanted people to listen. Maybelle’s concern for her patients was unquestionable, but Cash felt she had a greater responsibility. “Mother, don’t you think your music’s more important?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Years later, Johnny would proudly recall that day. “She never worked at the hospital again. And I’ll always remember that conversation.”

  * * *

  Maybelle’s makeover as a folk performer took another tiny step forward near the end of 1964, when she recorded a single for Smash Records called “Strummin’ My Guitaro.” Written by country song-spinner Harlan Howard, the tune was commissioned by the Oscar Schmidt Company, a guitar manufacturer anxious to promote its new, larger, mellower instrument to the folk crowd. Given its gimmicky purpose, Maybelle’s vocal-instrumental rendition was a surprisingly moving track, with lyrics that suggested a traditional English ballad. But the single sold no better than the “Guitaro” itself, which quickly faded into obscurity.

  In 1965 Columbia—not coincidentally, Cash’s label—released Best of the Carter Family, featuring Maybelle and all three daughters. Though its title suggested a compilation of early Carter songs, it was actually a rather bland set of folk songs (chestnuts made popular by Peter, Paul and Mary, such as “If I Had a Hammer” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore”) and country songs (Cash’s “Big River”). Throughout the sixties, Johnny Cash rarely recorded a song without the Carters. On religious songs especially, the Carter women gave his earth-bound growl a spiritual lift. Anita’s backup vocals on “Were You There When They Crucified Our Lord” come as close to piercing through to heaven as anything on record. In those days, and later, Johnny heard whispers from performers, critics, and record executives that working with the Carter women was dragging him down. “Well, hogwash,” he wrote in his 1997 autobiography. “I got to sing with the great Anita Carter not just once or twice or now and again in my career, but every night I walked on stage. I bet if you went around to the people who really know, the small number of musicians, singers and fans who have heard enough to make a judgment based on all the evidence . . . you’d find a fair number of them willing to endorse Anita Carter as the greatest female country singer of them all.”

  It wasn’t just Johnny who fell for the Carters. Session men found Maybelle a welcome presence in the studio. She wasn’t just an accomplished musician, she was also an enthusiastic cardplayer who didn’t mind risking a buck or two. She often brought food to the sessions, too, as did Pop, who showed up periodically with a steaming pot of his Sons-a-bitchin’ Stew and homemade biscuits.

  Toward the end of 1965, Columbia—probably at Cash’s urging, though he resolutely denies it—decided to record a solo album featuring Maybelle. Don Law and his assistant Frank Jones assembled Nashville’s “A-team,” a skilled but overused set of session musicians. Grady Martin and Harold Bradley switched off on lead guitar; Ray Edenton (an old friend from Knoxville days who had occasionally substituted for Anita on bass) played rhythm guitar; Junior Huskey played bass, and Buddy Harman, drums. The songs for the album were a good mix: several down-home dance tunes featuring Maybelle’s virtuosity (including the barn burner “Black Mountain Rag,” which she played on autoharp) and a few little-remembered Carter Family songs such as “Let’s Be Lovers Again.” There were also some original tunes, such as “Letter from Home,” a maudlin cowboy ballad that Maybelle and Dixie had written together, and “I Told Them What You’re Fighting For.” “I Told Them” was what might be called a reactionary protest song—a flag-waving condemnation of people who questioned the war in Vietnam. It was written by Dixie’s future husband, an ex-marine named Tom T. Hall. The album, titled Living Legend, was overproduced, and Maybelle’s virtuosity got swallowed up by the big band around her. It didn’t sell.

  While Maybelle was working on Living Legend in December of 1965, she got a package from Angel’s Camp, California. Coy Bayes had bought a tape recorder, and he and Sara had used it to send Christmas greetings to their Nashville relations. Sara even sent along new music recordings she was making on Coy’s reel-to-reel. One was a gospel song called “Farther On,” which she dedicated to Cash. She hinted it would be perfect for him to record: “Johnny Cash could sing under the floor, he’s got such a low voice,” she said. “I can’t sing it myself. I’m getting on in years and just don’t have the breath anymore.”

  Johnny got other ideas and began agitating at Columbia to bring Sara out of retirement, to record an album with Maybelle. And in June of 1966, the label brought Sara and Maybelle into a Nashville studio to record a reunion album. Joe Carter stood in for A.P. “I don’t know why they asked me,” Joe says thirty-five years later. “I’d never done any records before, but I always did sing my daddy’s parts.”

  With Sara in the room, Maybelle quietly stepped back and allowed her cousin to sing lead on every song. It was like old times. Almost all the selections were either mournful or religious; the tracks were streamlined, stripped of the A-team session men, back to guitar, autoharp, and voices. But to Joe Carter, the studio itself seemed excessive. “They had us all three separated,” he grumbles. “When you’re close together, the harmony is better, ’cause you get the feeling.” Still, Historic Reunion was a stylistic success, lean and evocative. Maybelle coaxed Sara out to play a series of concerts and TV shows to promote it. She even brought her cousin to meet her new audience at the Newport Folk Festival. The album, however, did not sell.

  * * *

  Maybelle was still appearing regularly at the Opry, but with albums to promote, folk festivals to play, and the open invitation with the Cash road show, she was back to her familiar rhythms of life o
n the road. “If we had a thousand mile car ride coming up, something we really weren’t looking forward to,” Johnny wrote, “her approach was ‘Well, let’s get on the road.’ That was her way of dealing with difficult things: ‘Let’s do it.’ ”

  With Maybelle gone so much, Pop began spending more and more time at the house he’d bought in New Port Richey. What the heck, he was retired. He was also a bit lonely. Though Eck was never a naturally outgoing man, he was learning to make new friends. In fact, to this day, his Florida friends remember an Eck Carter quite different from the one his Poor Valley neighbors recall. “He never met a stranger, and isn’t that a wonderful way to be?” says Mickey Little, who got to know Eck with her husband, Des, in the sixties. If he stayed around the house, he’d be by himself, so Pop spent mornings wandering his neighborhood, in a ramble reminiscent of his father’s back in Poor Valley, getting the news and spreading it. “He’d stop at a house and talk to someone for a minute,” says neighbor Jo Korman, “and the next thing you knew he was inside having coffee.”

  Social life in New Port Richey happened at the “fishing camps,” which were little wooden shacks built on stilts in the shallows of the Gulf. Pop spent much of his time at Des Little’s camp, on the north side of the channel marker, second one in. Of course, Eck went to work improving the place. He built a wind generator that provided enough electricity to power a radio and a percolator. Pretty soon, fishing boats were stopping by for a spot of java and the latest news, all courtesy of Eck Carter.

  Living among the fishermen, Pop had to have a boat of his own, so he bought one, then another, then another. Alas, Eck was not a terribly skillful mariner; he got lost at sea so often that he was soon on a first-name basis with the Coast Guard crew who was repeatedly ordered out to find him. On the road, Maybelle might get word that her husband was lost, had been for a few days, but she never worried. “Oh, that’s Eck,” she’d say. Her children and grandchildren might have been upset by this apparent lack of concern for her husband’s well-being, if they didn’t sometimes overhear Pop and Maybelle on the phone, actually using the word love, whispering it like it was a secret.