A.P. Carter Early Biography
Alvin Pleasant Delaney ("A. P." or called "Doc" by his family) Carter was born December 15, 1893 in Maces Springs (Scott County), Virginia. The area called Poor Valley is known today as Hiltons, Va. He lived in small one room log cabin with his parents and seven other siblings. By all accounts A.P., the eldest child, was a strange and complicated boy. According to his daughter Janette Carter, "Daddy always had more than one idea in his head. You never knew what he was thinking."
A.P. suffered from a physical tremor, as well as constitutional restlessness (now attributed to ADD: Attention Deficit Disorder along with a host of other maladies). From the day he was born until the day he died, he was possessed of a slight tremor, most noticeable in his hands. The family called it "palsy." His mother believed it was caused from a bolt of lightning that hit a tree she was standing under when she was pregnant with Pleasant. She reckoned it “shot such a bolt of fright into her swollen belly that the baby inside would be afflicted with that very nervous energy for each and all of his days.”
A.P.’s father Robert Carter played the fiddle and he met his future wife, Mollie, at a square dance. “It was love at first sight,” she recalled. After returning from a railroad job in Richmond, Indiana the twenty-three year old Carter married Mollie Bays in 1889, two years before A.P. the eldest child was born. According to Mark Zwonitzer in his biography, Bob Carter “was a farmer with next to no land, little ambition, no inclination toward hard work, no professed faith in God, and a passing acquaintance with the bottle.”
His seventeen-year-old wife Mollie was religious and loved to sing. Her grandfather Fiddlin' Billy Bays played mountain tunes like “Hog Molly” and “The Eighth of January.” While she did her chores Mollie sang the hymns she loved best: "Land of the Unclouded Day," "Amazing Grace," or "The Old Gospel Ship." She also sang many old-time songs and ballads from his mother including “Sailor Boy,” “Sinking in the Lonesome Sea,” “The Wife of Ushers Well," "Brown Girl," and a song that would become one of The Carter’s first hits, “Single Girl, Married Girl.” She would bear eight children: Alvin Pleasant Carter was born in 1891, then came Jim (1893), the twins, Ezra (nicknamed “Eck” who later married Maybelle) and Virgie (1898), Grant (1900), Ettaleen (1901), Ermine (1906), and Sylvia (1908).
As a boy A.P. and his brother were taught to play the fiddle by his father who stopped playing the fiddle at dances at Mollie’s request. Despite his trembling hands, A.P. showed some talent. But it was his singing voice that won him the most praise. As a young man A.P. continued to play fiddle and sang bass in a quartet with two uncles and his eldest sister in the local church. Mollie’s brother Flanders Bays, who served the church as musical director, had handpicked him for that quartet. By the time A.P. was twenty, Flanders Bays was teaching singing schools all over southwestern Virginia. Sometimes, if A.P. could get free of his farm chores, he'd go to his uncle's singing schools to help out.
He had tried his hand at working at sawmills, farming, and as a blacksmith. Wanting to earn enough money to buy himself a piece of land, A.P. left his home in 1911 and set out for Richmond, Indiana (as his father had done), to work on the railroad but came down with typhoid fever and quickly returned home. Family members recall that he wrote his first song while he rode the train back to Virginia, "My Clinch Mountain Home," a nostalgic ode to the place of his birth that would become one of the Carter’s hits:
Carry me back to old Virginny,
Back to my Clinch Mountain home;
Carry me back to old Virgininy,
Back to my old mountain home.
Nursed back to health by his mother, A.P. went to work for Flanders Bays selling fruit trees and shrubs for his nursery. The job gave him the chance to exercise his restlessness, traveling around Scott County, staying with the locals and playing music on the porch after dinner.
June Carter Cash Remembered: In an 1965 interview in Country Song Roundup, June Carter Cash (Maybelle’s daughter) recalled her family history: “To Bob and Mollie Carter were born eight children. The eldest of these was Alvin Pleasant, "Uncle Doc” as he was known to us. He was a tall dominant man, walked a lot, sang when he took the notion, ran sawmills, collected songs, gave you candy, drove a car that always had flat tires, was Aunt Sara’s husband, was kind, laughed to himself a lot, walked the railroad track (defying everything my mother said), carried patchin' in his pockets (to fix flat tires) and wrote songs. Today behind Mount Vernon Church, there is a simple rose marble stone, in the center a gold record reads "A.P. Carter...Keep On The Sunny Side [A.P. died November 7, 1960 in Maces Springs, Virginia]."
It was June Carter, a friend of Audrey Williams (Hank’s wife) that stepped between Audrey and Hank during a fight. Hank, who was wielding a pistol, stepped back and fired a shot towards Carter but missed. He jumped in his car and drove off- but that’s another story. She continues: “The Carter children, Jim, Grant, Ermine, Ezra J. (my father), twin Virgie, Etta and Aunt Sylvia were indeed some of the kindest gentlest people who have ever lived in or near Maces Springs, Virginia. There were all born in a log cabin in what is known as Little Valley. This valley is now the home of my Uncle Ermine and Aunt Ora. There's always country ham there, pork tenderloin, sorghum molasses, and all the good things that raised the Carter Family.”