When they got home, there was a Bonanza rerun on TV, and Hoyt Axton was guest-starring. Maybelle insisted they watch; she’d known Axton forever. Hoyt’s mother, Mae, had written “Heartbreak Hotel” for Elvis! And Maybelle loved Hoyt. She asked Peggy for a steak sandwich with plenty of ketchup but declined her bladder pill.
“I’ll take it in the morning,” she said.
After the show, Peggy took Maybelle’s glasses and walked her to bed. When she went in to wake her the next morning, she found that Maybelle had died sometime in the night, apparently in the manner she lived, with ease and grace. Peggy Knight would always remember Maybelle’s last words to her, when she’d tucked her in the night before: “Good night,” she’d said. “I love you.”
Four days later, Maybelle’s nieces, nephews, grandchildren, daughters, and sons-in-law convened at her graveside to bid her good-bye with an a capella version of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Her passing was national news, noted by Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and scores of other publications. The most eloquent remembrance appeared in the youthful and rockin’ Rolling Stone magazine, where writer Chet Flippo recalled the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 1971 Will the Circle Be Unbroken album. There were Scruggs and Watson and Travis and Acuff—but it was Mother Maybelle who topped them all. “One of the most moving performances on record,” Flippo wrote. “Hers was a voice out of a vanished past.” Flippo had been present at the recording sessions back in 1971. And as they were readying the final track—the title track—the writer had been shanghaied to join in the chorus. Everybody in the room—musicians, friends, family, even reporters—was invited. Flippo demurred. He was a writer, after all, really wasn’t much of a singer. “Don’t worry, son,” Maybelle told him. “Just sing it from the heart, and you’ll be all right.”
Maybelle Carter never said much, so when she did, people paid attention—and remembered. More than twenty years after her death, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s John McEuen recalled asking Maybelle what she did in a big auditorium or stadium with that little autoharp. “We were in Knoxville, in the Coliseum, of course, and I was concerned about her getting the sound out there. She goes, ‘Well, like I tell the girls, if you have trouble with the mike, just smile real loud.’ ”
* * *
Stella Bayes heard about Maybelle’s death on her car radio, and she drove straight to Sara’s to break the news. She didn’t want Sara to hear it from some announcer voice. At the trailer, Stella found Sara sitting on the couch, with her head in her hands, feeling lousy as always. Stella stood in front of her sister-in-law, worried about Sara’s bad heart, hoping to be gentle: “Honey, I heard something on the news,” Stella told her. “I’m not sure if it’s true, but it must be. . . . They said Maybelle died.” Sara’s reaction was immediate, without time for filter. She went pale, drew in a breath, then gasped, while swallowing a sob. “Oh, my little Maybelle,” she cried. “My Maybelle.” And then she wept. It lasted only a minute; that’s all she allowed. But she let Stella put her arms around her, and they held each other.
The news of Maybelle’s death struck Sara hard, because it was a blow she hadn’t expected. She’d seen her friend and partner earlier that year, when Maybelle stopped in California after tagging along to a Johnny Cash show at Lake Tahoe. The two women had a few days of visiting at Coy and Sara’s trailer, talking over old times, laughing like they always could, or just sitting in comfortable silence. When it was time for Maybelle to go, they’d both been emotional. As she was getting in the car to go into the airport, Maybelle said to Stella, “I’ll never see Sara again.” When Stella went back to the trailer, Sara had said, “I’ll never see Maybelle again.”
But everybody, Sara included, thought Sara would be the first to go. She’d had been in and out of the hospital for more than a year, fighting circulatory and respiratory complications. And within weeks of Maybelle’s death, in December of 1978, she was back in. Sara had no worries left for herself, but she worried constantly about what would become of Coy. One day after visiting Sara at the hospital, Gladys Greiner stopped by Coy’s mother’s house. When she got there, Mary Bayes had something to tell Gladys.
“Gladys, Sara just called me from the hospital.”
“Oh, is she better?” Gladys asked.
“I don’t think she’s any better,” said Mary. “She just said to tell you this . . . and I told her you wouldn’t do it.”
“What is it, Mama?” Gladys asked.
“She said to me, ‘Coy has been dying to go to Alaska for a long time. I want Gladys to go to Alaska with Coy.’ ”
“I can’t go,” Gladys protested. “I’m not married to him or anything, I can’t go to Alaska.” Gladys understood immediately what Sara was asking. Gladys had lost her husband; Coy was about to be widowed. Sara wanted Gladys to marry Coy after she was gone.
“Well, she wants you to go,” said Mary Bayes, “because she wants him to go to Alaska, and you’re the only one that she trusts. And you’d take good care of him on the trip if he wasn’t well or something.”
That night, Mary Bayes told Sara that Gladys Greiner had refused. “Well, someday,” Sara said, “she’s going to take him to Alaska.”
When Barbara Powell visited her aunt Sara in the hospital that winter, she found the room full of floral arrangements, and she told Sara she wanted to bring flowers but a new vase would only add clutter. “Sara said, ‘Would you do something for me?’ ” Barbara recalls. “ ‘Would you get me some perfume?’ And she wanted White Shoulders. But she never got well. She never came out of the hospital. I don’t know if she used it.”
Sara Carter died January 8, 1979, six months after her eightieth birthday. Her death was the final event of a long tug-of-war between Sara’s husband and her children. “About a year or two before she died, she said she wanted to be brought back here and buried,” remembers Janette Carter. “Coy didn’t want to bring her at first. The last time I was out there, he talked to me. He said, ‘Now I want her here.’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess you do, but whatever she wants is what needs to be fulfilled. She wanted to go back to the Valley. And I’m not gonna say you can put her out here. Whatever she wants, why, that’s the way it should be.’ ”
* * *
Even by airplane, Sara’s final trip to the Valley took a day and a half. Coy flew with the body from Sacramento to San Francisco to Atlanta, and then into the Tri-Cities Airport serving Bristol, Kingsport, and Johnson City. On one stop, Coy sat in the terminal watching the casket being off-loaded onto a tarmac for removal to a connecting flight. Two days before the funeral in Maces Springs, as the ground was being readied at the Mount Vernon cemetery, Coy talked to a reporter from a local newspaper: “My home is in California now, and we have a special burial plot there with space for her beside my parents. But I loved her enough to grant her request. She belonged to the world, and the world loved her, too. This is where I found her, and this is where I’ll leave her. We’ve had a good, long, and happy life together, but she’ll be laid to rest by my brother Dewey, who passed away in 1931.”
Sara wanted her funeral services at the Carter Fold (the six-hundred-seat indoor arena Janette had had built for music programs), to hold the crowd she expected. The day of the funeral, Friday, January 12, 1979, dawned dank and cold, and it only got worse. But as the big coal stove began to warm the Fold, family, friends, and fans filed slowly through the doors, filling the building beyond its full capacity. Sara’s body rested on the stage in a gold-colored casket, surrounded by floral sprays and guitar-and harp-shaped flower arrangements. When all had settled into the bleacherlike seating, Mount Vernon’s preacher read the outlines of her life: her birth, the death of her mother, her baptism, her marriage to A.P. Carter, the singing career, the marriage to Coy and removal to California, her frequent trips back to Virginia. Johnny Cash talked about Sara’s talent, her professionalism, her lasting mark on the world of music. “She touched the lives of countless millions of people. . . . Sara’s voice continues to inspire
artists.” Flanders Bays’s children sang a hymn, “Hallelujah, We Shall Rise.”
There was no sermon proper, but there was a reading of the thirty-first chapter of Proverbs: “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies. . . . She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands. . . . She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms. . . . Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come. . . . Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.”
There was also plenty of witnessing by those willing to stand up and testify. “When someone was down, she always had something good to say to that person. To make them feel better. We loved her dearly.”
“My father used to say, ‘If heaven has music like the Carter Family sings, I don’t want to miss it.’ ”
“She was a wonderful wife and a wonderful mother.”
The service was a tribute partly to the person Sara had actually been, and partly to the Sara others needed her to be or wished her to be. This last was true of the scores of people in attendance who knew her only through her singing, and it was no less true of the blood of her blood and the bone of her bone. Janette started crying at the beginning of the service, and she could not stop. For years there had been a half silence between them; there were so many things they would never talk about. Janette had never been able to feel as close to her mother as she had to her father, but that didn’t make the last good-bye any easier. “I always thought that nothing would hurt me like giving up my daddy,” she said many years later. “And I thought, well, it won’t hurt like that when my mother’s gone, but I couldn’t tell you what the difference was. One hurt just as bad as the other. It hurt just as bad as the other.”
Her mother’s death, Janette says, was like losing her twice. She was mourning not simply the loss of her mother but the relationship they’d lost so long ago, when her mother left home. Near the end of the service, the Mount Vernon preacher read a Rudyard Kipling poem the family requested, “which attempts to express the love between Sara Carter Bayes and her family.”
If I were hanged on the highest hill,
I know whose love would follow me still;
If I were drowned in the deepest sea,
I know whose tears would come down to me;
If I were damned in body and soul
I know whose prayers would make me whole;
Mother of mine! Mother of mine! Mother of mine!
That’s when Janette lost any Carter reserve she had left, and as she was taken up to the open casket for the last look at her mother, she could no longer control her sobbing. Mommy, she cried out, for something beyond that body in the casket. Mommy. Mommy.
An icy rain beat down on the funeral procession as it headed up the Valley road and toward the Mount Vernon cemetery. Behind the hearse and the family car were three trucks carrying the flowers from the Fold to the graveside. A hundred and fifty people climbed through the sleet to the hilltop cemetery, where the Red Clay Ramblers sang “Anchored in Love” over Sara’s grave. After the mourners dispersed, Sara Carter Bayes was lowered into the ground in the foothills of Clinch Mountain, into the grave dug next to Dewey’s, two rows away from A.P.’s. But even then, the Bill Begley Monument Company was readying the tombstone. It would be like only one other at Mount Vernon, hewn of red granite. Above Sara’s name and dates, carved in the smooth glassy sheen, would be the likeness of a 78 record, perfect in its roundness, and the words “Keep on the Sunny Side.”
Maybelle and Sara at the Carter Fold (Gladys Greiner)
Mark Zwonitzer is a writer-director whose work appears nationally on public television. This is his first book. He lives in Connecticut.
Charles Hirshbreg, an editor at Popular Science magazine, is the author of Elvis and The Beatles. He lives in New York City.
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Index
A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.
ABC, 340, 341, 364–65
Acme Records, 325–28
Acuff, Roy, 122, 265, 283, 286, 287, 294, 367, 392
Adams family (Buchanan County, Va.), 117, 142
Addington, Charles Cromwell, 68
Addington, Dewey, 68, 69–70
Addington, D.J. “Deejer,” 68
Addington, Duke, 184
Addington, Ezra, 37–38, 47, 68, 70
Addington, Florida, 276
Addington, Henry, 68
Addington, Hugh Jack, 45–46, 65, 67–69, 74, 189
Addington, Hugh Jack, Jr. (“Doc”), 68, 252, 254, 255
Addington, Linnie Myrl, 68
Addington, Madge, 40–41, 42, 45, 68, 101, 189, 379
Addington, Margaret Elizabeth Kilgore, 45, 65, 67–71, 122, 128, 184, 197, 215, 226
Addington, Maybelle, see Carter, Maybelle Addington
Addington, Milburn B. “Toobe,” 68, 189–90
Addington, Norma, 68
Addington, Suzy, 257
Addington, Warren M. “Bug,” 68, 189–90, 256–57, 276
Addington, William, 68
Addington, Willie B. “Sawcat,” 68
Addington Frame Church, 45, 72–74
Ake, George, 92
Allison, Dexter, 88
American Bandstand, 312
American Medical Association (AMA), 207, 212
American Recording Company (ARC), 176–77
Among My Klediments (June Carter), 192, 248–49
“Anchored in Love,” 108, 383, 397
Ann-Margret, 336
“Another Man Done Gone,” 348
Appalachia:
culture of, 13–16
musical traditions of, 10, 41–45, 101
song transmission in, 41–42, 43–44, 70–71
Appalachian Power Company, 195
“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”, 332
Armstrong, Louis, 83, 84
Ash Grove (Hollywood), 340–42
Atkins, Chester “Chet,” 6, 235, 266–74, 277, 289, 293, 295, 298, 335, 369
audience awareness of, 271
background of, 266–68
guitar playing of, 267, 269–70
June’s comic routines and, 270, 279–80
on Maybelle’s final days, 389–90
Opry offer and, 283–84, 286
perfectionism of, 278
playing with Carters, 259, 266, 268–74, 278–80, 283–84, 286
Atkins, Leona, 278
Atkins, Merle, 278
Autry, Gene, 83, 255, 262, 263
Axton, Hoyt, 392
“Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” 275, 289
Baez, Joan, 4, 109, 340
“Bald-Headed End of a Broom, The,” 279
“Barbara Allen,” 117, 119
Barker, Ernest, 320
Barn Dances, 7
“Bashful Rascal,” 289
Baxter, Dode, 230
Baxter, Don, 230, 233, 236
Bays, Alma (later Bayes), 55, 145, 149, 151, 152, 160, 218–19
Bays, Bobby, 165
Bays, Charlie (later Bayes), 12, 24, 30, 55–56, 149–55, 158, 242, 246, 247
business ventures of, 149–50
children of, stricken with tuberculosis, 101, 151–55, 160, 180, 220–21
family taken west by, 160, 218–21
inadvertent name change and, 219
Bays, Charmie (later Bayes), 55, 149–55, 160, 161, 180, 218–21
Bays, Coy (later Bayes), 55, 145, 149, 151, 152–53, 155, 201, 217–23, 232, 247, 325, 354–55, 376–78, 380, 384–87, 393
drinking of, 385–86
flying as pastime of, 158
move west of, 160–61, 179–80, 218–21
personality and demeanor of, 158–59
Sara reunited with, 217–18, 222
Sara’s affair with, 158–61, 163, 164, 179–80, 186, 217–18, 221–22
Sara’s death and, 394, 395
Sara’s marriage to, 222, 225–26
Sara’s relationship with, 221–23, 237–38, 246, 385–86
Bays, Dewey, 12, 55, 144, 149–55, 160, 227, 395, 397
Bays, Eliza Morgan, 21–22
Bays, Elva, 55, 149, 152, 154, 218–19
Bays, Fiddlin’ Billy, 150
Bays, Flanders, 30, 34, 47, 52, 56, 72, 101, 104, 123, 154, 250, 333, 396
as A.P.’s mentor, 31–33
Carter Family’s song gathering and, 107, 108
choir of, 31, 62, 380
as farmer, 31–32, 195
singing school of, 32–33, 37, 70
Bays, F.M., Jr., 118, 158, 195
Bays, Gordon, 66
Bays, Mary Smith (later Bayes), 12, 55, 144, 149–55, 242, 246, 394
children of, stricken with tuberculosis, 151–55, 160, 180, 220–21
family taken west by, 160–61, 218–21
Sara and Coy’s affair and, 160–61, 221, 222
Bays, Mollie, see Carter, Mollie Bays
Bays, Myrtle, 118, 123, 124
Bays, Stanley (later Bayes), 55, 145, 149, 151–53, 155, 158, 160, 180, 218–21
Bays, Stella (later Bayes), 55, 67, 145, 149, 153, 157, 250, 385
ailing siblings and, 151, 152, 154, 220–21
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? Page 44