Carter Family Biographies- 1927
Country music historian Charles Wolfe calls the August, 1927 Bristol Sessions the “big bang” of country music; the week two of the most influential early country stars were born. The Carter Family first recorded with Ralph Peer for Victor on August 1, 1927, several days before Jimmie Rodgers cut his first sides in a makeshift studio in Bristol, Tennessee. Sure there were other important artists and popular recordings done since 1922 but The Original Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers are, without a doubt, two of the most important performers in Country Music history.
During the next 14 years “The First Family Of Country Music” recorded 292 old-time ballads, traditional tunes, Country songs, and gospel hymns, all representative of America's heritage. The Original Family consisted of Mother Maybelle Addington Carter (1909-1979), who played guitar and sang harmony; Sara Dougherty Carter (1898-1979), who played autoharp, and sang alto lead; and Sara’s husband, Alvin Pleasant (A.P. or Doc) Carter (1893-1960), who occasionally played fiddle and sang bass.
They operated out of their homes in the Clinch Mountain area of Virginia until 1938, when they moved to Texas for three years, and then to Charlotte, North Carolina where the original Carter Family did their last radio show together in 1942. Then Maybelle Carter, who has been called the "Queen Mother of Country Music," continued the family tradition with her three daughters, Anita, Helen, and June.
The number of Country musicians that the Carter’s lives touched and influenced is immense. From Chet Atkins playing guitar for Maybelle’s band in the late 40s to Johnny Cash marrying June Carter at the height of his fame, the occurrences are too numerous to mention in this short biography. Maybelle’s “Carter lick” (sometimes called “Carter Scratch”) guitar style has influenced generations of guitarists worldwide and her 1972 tribute album “Circle Be Unbroken” officially by the The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, was a collaboration with many famous bluegrass and Country performers, including Roy Acuff, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, and Merle Travis.
The songs the Carters introduced, arranged or composed continue to be popular today including, “Can The Circle Be Unbroken,” “John Hardy,” “Wildwood Flower,” “Worried Man Blues,” and their theme song, “Keep on The Sunnyside.” A.P. Carter will go down in Country history as one of America’s greatest song catchers. See the complete list of their recorded songs at the end of this biography.
According to Bill Malone: “The Carter Family represented the impulse toward home and stability, a theme as perennially attractive as that of the rambler. When the Carters sang, they evoked images of the old country church, Mama and Daddy, the family fireside, and “the green fields of Virginia far away.”
Their stories include the antics of Elvis Presley with Anita Carter and Maybelle sewing buttons on Elvis’ shirt; how Hank Williams in a drunken rage pulls his revolver, points the barrel in June Carter’s face and pulls the trigger; how Cowboy Slim Rinehart lost Maybelle’s guitar in a poker game and the most important story of all, the one that would shatter the family forever: the story of love and betrayal.
It’s ironic that “The First Family of Country Music,” a group that eschewed family values and whose concerts A.P. Carter dubbed “morally good,” would suffer the heartbreak and loss that many American families would endure in later generations.
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.”
Sara Dougherty was born July 21, 1898 to Sevier and Elizabeth Kilgore Dougherty of Wise County, Virginia. Sara's mother died when she was three years old, and the young girl spent the better part of her childhood traveling around Virginia with her father from one relative's house to another. Eventually Sara settled in Rich Valley with her uncle and aunt, Milburn (Uncle Mil) and Melinda (Aunt Nick) Nickels, in Copper Creek.
Uncle Mil was a fiddler and there were often music gatherings at their home. Sara learned to play the autoharp from EB Easterland. “I was about ten when I got my first autoharp,” Sara said. “I sold greeting cards to raise money and ordered it from the Sears Robuck catalogue for eight dollars.” Uncle Mil played fiddle and before long Sara learned to pick the banjo and keep up with him. Among his favorite songs were “Fatal Wedding” and “Johnny Put The Kettle On.” She began playing with cousin Madge Addington (Maybelle’s older sister). They both played guitar, banjo and autoharp and would switch off on different songs.
“Aunt Sara was a woman hard to explain” said June Carter Cash. “She was tall, buxom, blackeyed, and always beautiful. She was a thoroughbred. She sang in a very low, almost male sounding voice, and she sang a lot because she loved it so.”
Sara learned a song from neighbor Myrtle Porter that would become one of the anthems of early Country Music and the Carter’s biggest hits, “The Wildwood Flower.” The song was passed down for several the generations in these remote mountains and like many of the Carter Family songs was based on an earlier song, "I’ll Twine 'Mid The Ringlets,” written in 1860.
A.P. Meets Sara: In 1914 A.P. rode his horse over Clinch Mountain to Copper Creek to sell his Uncle Milburn Nickles some fruit trees. He was deeply moved and forever changed by what he found there; a beautiful dark-haired woman singing and playing the autoharp. "Aunt Susie had one of these tall, old-fashioned sewing machines,” Sara recalled, “and I was standing beside it and my autoharp was on top of it, and I was just kind of playing around with it. I remember I was singing “Engine 143,” an old song I learned as a little girl, and this fellow knocked on the door."
A.P. was captivated as he stood in the front room listening to 16-year-old Sara Dougherty finish her song about the death of a train engineer. Sara was sweet sixteen, with a strong face and long brown hair down over her shoulders. While it was Sara's voice that first drew him, A.P. always said it was her dark eyes that attracted him. "I remember that he stood there while I sang," recalled Sara, "and then he said something like, 'Ma'am, that was mighty pretty playing and singing, and I sure would like you to play that over again for me,' and so I did."
"He thought it was the most beautiful voice he had ever heard," his granddaughter Rita Forrester recalled, "and that she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen." A.P., who had come to sell fruit trees to his Uncle, bought a set of dishes instead from Sara Dougherty’s own subscription booklet. Sara must have known that a single lad didn’t needed six dessert dishes and a vegetable boat, but she made the sale just the same. As A.P later told the story: "I said to Sary, 'If I thought I had a chance with you, I'd take the whole book.'"
Although A.P. and Sara had known one another earlier (Sara at first said she didn’t like A.P.), the autoharp meeting flowered into the beginning of a courtship, playing music together, and later into marriage on June 18, 1915, a month before Sara’s seventeenth birthday.
Married Life: After A.P. and Sara Carter got married they set up a home and a farm in Maces Spring, now called Hiltons, Virginia. A.P. and Sara were a striking couple; tall, strong, and thoroughbred looking mountain stock. A.P. Carter was said to have had a personal magnetism, an inner glow. His presence filed the room, someone once said. He was a kind, gentle person, but full of fire when angered. Sara was a strikingly beautiful woman, a proud lady with head erect and shoulders straight, and with eyes that seemed to look right through you.
In addition to performing at church suppers and schoolhouses, A.P. and Sara enjoyed gathering with family and friends in various homes to play music. A.P. played the fiddle, as he continued to do throughout his life, although every time he apologized for his lack of ability. He became known to family and friends as “Doc.” To supplement his income as a nurseryman, A.P. farmed did blacksmith work and carpentry.
Sara joined the church choir, and A.P. traveled with her to "singing conventions," representing their church and their hometown at events throughout southwestern Virginia. By 1919, A.P. and Sara had moved to a slightly larger cabin on a bit more land in nearby Maces Springs. Their first child Gladys was born that year. Two more would follow in the coming years: Janette in 1923, and Joe in 1927.
According to her daughter Gladys, the first song that Sara sang in public was “The Wandering Boy.” A.P. and Uncle Flan Bayes were at a singing convention and she volunteered to play a song on the autoharp. Gladys saide she received several dollar tip and one man gave her a five dollar bill.
In 1925 Sara and A.P. borrowed a car to drive to Charlottesville, Virginia. On the way back, the car broke down, and they manage to raise enough money putting on a concert in a nearby schoolhouse to get the car fixed.
The first opportunity to record came in 1926 when A.P and Sara arranged an audition for a Brunswick record scout in Kingsport, Tennessee. They sang "Anchored in Love” and A.P. played a fiddle solo. [According to Gladys Carter they sang “Little Log Cabin by The Sea” and “Poor Orphan Boy” before A.P. (Doc) sawed away on a few fiddle tunes.] When the record company scout (looking for another Fiddlin’ John Carson) suggested to him that he should perform solo (they told the Carters that a musical group with a female lead singer would never sell) as Fiddlin' Doc and only record square dance fiddle songs, he flatly refused [Gladys said it was because A.P. promised his mother he wouldn’t play jigs].
Maybelle Joins the Group In late 1925 the third member of the original group, cousin Maybelle Addington, born on May 10, 1909 in Midway, near Copper Creek joined. Like A.P. and Sara, Maybelle was surrounded from birth by music.
June Carter Cash (Maybelle’s daughter): “The Addington family is English originating in London. Mother is a direct descendent of William Addington, born in London, 1750 locating first to Culpepper County in 1774 was appointed commissary to General Washington during the war between Great Britain and the colonies. He was present at the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown and settled on Clinch River with 12 other families around 1782.”
“The land was good with deer, bear and wild turkey in abundance. My mother's great great grandfather and family came to south western Virginia, along with the Kilgores, from which my grandmother descended. I mention all of this, because with the Doughertys, Kilgores, and Addingtons, came many an English and Irish ballad which was later sung by the Carter Family. The line of Addingtons remaining in England, produced one Henry Addington who in 1800 became Premier of England.”
Maybelle’s brother Dewey played the banjo at local dances, and her older sister Madge had played guitar, banjo and autoharp with Sara. Maybelle soon learned to play the same instruments but it was with the guitar and autoharp that she excelled. She was a little child when Sara and A.P. married, but with her natural ability on the autoharp and guitar, she was noticed by the Carters.
Maybelle’s style of guitar playing was unique, and evidently she came up with it on her own. Charles Wolfe has suggested that Byrd Moore, who traveled the area and played with Earl Johnson and many early Country performers, was an influence. The style Maybelle developed is called the "Carter scratch" or “Carter lick.” She played the melody on the bass strings with her thumb while brushing the treble strings with the backs of her right hand fingernails (fingerpicks). At the same time she would finger a partial chord with her left hand. Later she developed some intricate melody runs and hammer-ons on the bass strings. Of course, such runs were not new, but they were used differently by Maybelle, they were being used not only as a part of the lead, but as fills and also for the "bottom" of the song. This style would be imitated by generations of guitarists all over the world.
Contrary to what some have stated, Maybelle did not learn her guitar style from Lesley Riddle in 1928 when he began working with The Carter Family. She did learn to refine her slide guitar playing and to fingerpick (Travis pick with alternating bass) songs like “Cannonball Blues” from Riddle.
Maybelle also played the autoharp in a unique way, holding it against her chest and left shoulder so she could perform standing up. Rather than strumming across the harp while barring a chord, Maybelle actually picked out the melody with her thumb and finger picks. I have her autoharp book in my collection.
A.P., Sara, and Maybelle would often play together, and in December 13, 1925, Maybelle went to Maces Springs to do a schoolhouse show with A.P. and Sara. There she met A.P.'s dashing brother Ezra, known as Eck, and the two fell in love. On March 23, 1926, Maybelle and Eck were married, and Maybelle went to live with Eck and his parents and siblings in Poor Valley. The music would continue as a largely local affair for another year, until the Carter Family finally got their big chance in 1927.
First Recording at Bristol Sessions: Contrary to many accounts, A.P. Carter contacted Victor recording scout Ralph Peer through Cecil McLister, Bristol’s local Victor outlet representative, in March 1927 about making a record. Peer was already in the planning stages to do recordings in July-August in Bristol with Ernest Stoneman and invited the Carters to come. [Charles Wolfe wrote: “Then, in March 1927, the local Victor Talking Machine Company's dealer in nearby Bristol, Tennessee, had put A.P. in touch with a curious visitor. His name was Ralph Peer, and he was planning to bring a portable recording studio into Bristol that summer; after talking to A.P., and later writing to him, it was agreed that A.P. and his "Carter string band" would come to the session and try some records.”]
In the notes from the Country Music Hall of Fame Carter Family compilation [MCA MCAD 10088]: “Bristol was the first of three stops Peer and his unit would make on this swing through the South, the others being Charlotte, NC, and Savannah, Georgia. As organizer of the expedition, Peer had lined up some of the talent before embarking on the trip. He invited the Carter Family for an August 1 audition on the recommendation of the manager of a downtown Bristol store that sold phonograph records. This local merchant (Cecil McLister) knew the Carters from their visits to his store and it was he who told Peer how to contact them.”
Ralph Peer (see his biography in this book’s Introduction) had recorded Fiddlin’ John Carson in Atlanta for Okeh in 1923. He was the most experienced talent scout in the fledgling Country Music (then called hillbilly music) business. After the Victor Talking Machine Company’s success with Vernon Dalhart's million selling "Wreck of the Old 97/Prisoner’s Song" they were very interested in recording Country songs. Peer, who left Okeh in 1925, offered his services to Victor. "I had what they wanted." Peer recalled later. "They couldn't get into the hillbilly business and I knew how to do it."
Victor executive Nat Shilkret bought Peer the latest portable electrical recording system, produced by Western Electric, for his recording trips. In early 1927 Peer did sessions in Atlanta, Memphis and New Orleans. Peer then wrote Ernest Stoneman and told him that he was coming to Galax to visit and he should find some acts worth recording. He would hold auditions and the Stonemans and the other approved acts would meet him in Bristol for the recording session.
Bristol, part of an early urban area known as Tri-Cities, was located on the border of Virginia and Tennessee. It was the largest urban area convenient for the Stoneman’s to enlist other area musicians to attend. There was also Victor distributor in Bristol named Cecil McLister and a railway. Peer told a local newspaper when he arrived there on July 21 with his recording crew: "In no section of the South have the pre-war melodies and old mountaineer songs been better preserved than in the mountains of all Tennessee and Southwest Virginia, experts declare, and it was primarily for this reason that the Victor Company chose Bristol as its operating base."
Peer rented a studio space at an empty furniture store at 408 State Street [other accounts give 410 State street] formerly occupied by the Taylor-Christian Hat Company and then placed advertisements in local newspapers saying, "The Victor Company will have a recording machine in Bristol for ten days beginning Monday to record records," and inviting all comers to present themselves. These notices were also inserted in the advertisements for the local dealer of the Victrola company, the Clark-Jones-Sheeley Co. at 621 State Street. According to Charles Wolfe, “Accompanied by his wife, Anita, and two engineers named Echbars and Lynch, Peer returned to Bristol July 21 with a carload of portable recording equipment. They began preparing the second and third floors for recording; they hung blankets on the wall, built a tower for the pulley that would drive the recording turntable and a platform for singers to stand on.”
As the Bristol Sessions started on July 26, 1927 the first week was pretty much already booked up with established local stars such as the Stonemans, the Johnson Brothers, and the singer Blind Alfred Reed. A small ad appeared in the Sunday paper announcing that the Victor Company would have a recording machine in Bristol for ten days, but this hadn't generated much response. Peer needed more talent to fill out the rest of the sessions so he astutely invited the newspaper editor of the Bristol News Bulletin to come and watch a session. The editor was more than happy to oblige and he photographed Ernest Stoneman and fiddler Eck Dunford recording "Skip to Ma Lou."
The result was a major front-page story in that evening's Bristol News Bulletin. "The synchronizing is perfect," wrote the editor. "Ernest Stoneman playing the guitar, the young matron (Mrs. Stoneman) the violin, and a young mountaineer the banjo and mouth harp. Bodies swaying, feet beating a perfect rhythm, it is calculated to go over big when offered to the public." The article also revealed that Stoneman got $100 a day for his services and that Stoneman, a carpenter form nearby Galax, had received $3600 in royalties the previous year [Today that would approximate $50,000 in royalties]. The average income per year in that area in 1927 was around $1,000.
"This worked like dynamite,” said Peer. "The very next day I was deluged with long-distance calls from surrounding mountain region. Groups of singers who had not visited Bristol during their entire lifetime arrived by bus, horse and buggy, trains or on foot." In a matter of hours, Peer was swamped with potential recording stars, and soon he found himself having to add night sessions to accommodate the new talent. During his stay in Bristol, Peer would eventually record 76 performances by 19 different groups.
Whether A.P and Ezra read the accounts of the ongoing Sessions in the paper, A.P. already had an appointment to audition on Aug. 1. Many members of the Carter clan didn’t understand A.P.’s desire to make records. “Send him to Marion (mental institution),” said Uncle Lish. “He’s completely gone this time. His family with starve no doubt.”
A.P. borrowed his brother Eck’s car (in exchange for weeding Eck’s corn patch) and on Sunday July 31 they left Poor Valley to make their appointment to audition the next morning. After a harrowing trip over 26 miles of dirt roads with wife Sara, 8-year-old daughter Gladys, 7-month-old son Joe, and 8-month pregnant cousin Maybelle, A.P. pulled the Essex in Bristol.
One account goes: With a hearty country breakfast under their belts, they loaded into Ezra’a old Essex and headed for Bristol. Rains had swollen the Holsten River at a place where they were to ford it, and the Essex stopped right in the middle of the river and refused to go any further. Long dresses were hiked up over the ladies knees, and guitars and autoharps carried on their shoulders to the dry bank and they pushed, and tugged until they finally got the old car moving. Up the bank they discovered another problem- there was a flat on the right rear tire. A.P. being the flat tire fixer, got out the hand patch kit and quickly repaired the flat, pumped the tire up, and, with the instruments climbed aboard again. [Wolfe reports they had three flat tires and the weather was so hot that the patches had melted off as fast as they were put on.]
The Carters spent the night at their Aunt Fergie’s who lived in Bristol. When the Carters came to the audition the next morning on Monday August 1 Peer identified them as "Mr. and Mrs. Carter from Maces Springs." Peer recalled, “He was dressed in overalls, and the women are country woman from way back there- calico clothes on- the children are very poorly dressed. They look like hillbillies.” [Peer manufactured this famous account to establish a “hillbilly image” for the Carter Family, a group he soon managed exclusively. The Carters dressed up for the occasion in their Sunday best and all existing photos show A.P. in a suit and tie.] Although they had scheduled the audition in March Peer was surprised to see them. After they started played he was relieved, saying, “But as soon as I heard Sara's voice, that was it. I knew it was going to be wonderful."
The Carters were asked to come back and record after supper, from 6:30 to 9:30. On the recordings Maybelle played guitar and sang harmony, Sara played autoharp and sang alto lead and A.P. sang bass. “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow,” “Little Log Cabin by the Sea,” “Poor Orphan Child,” “The Storms Are on the Ocean,” were recorded that evening and “Wandering Boy,” and “Single Girl, Married Girl” the next morning. A.P didn’t sing on the Aug. 2 session because Peer told him “you’re not doing much” and mentioned that he kept moving away from the microphone.
A.P. never did much except sing bass and occasionally trade a lead part. He rarely fiddled and many times would sing only when he felt the spirit move him. In many ways the Carter Family was really the first female Country group. Because it was unusual for a Country group to have a female lead singer, this gave Peer pause, but he liked their music. At $50 a song the six sides the Carter Family made totaled $300, a large sum of money in those days (roughly equivalent to $4,200 today).
First Records Released
That November 1927, Victor finally released the Carter Family’s first 78rpm record with “Poor Orphan Child” on one side and “Wandering Boy” on the other, followed a few months later by “The Storms Are on the Ocean” and “Single Girl, Married Girl.” Despite Peer's uncertainty about the Carters' music the records sold so well that Peer wrote to the Carters asking them to come to Camden, New Jersey, for a second recording session in 1928.
Ralph Peer's enthusiasm, brisk record sales, and some cash in hand were like gas on the flames for A.P.'s burning desire to take his family and their music as far as they could go. Always a song collector, A.P. now became a man obsessed. According to Charles Hirshberg: “He began carrying pieces of yellow paper with him wherever he went and he went everywhere. All through the mountains he roamed, selling fruit trees, but always with another end in mind: songs. And he seemed to have an uncanny ability to find them. Says (daughter) Gladys: "When I was a little girl, he'd take me with him sometimes. We'd walk along till he seen a house up on a hill or on some riverbank, and he'd say, 'Well, I'm going up to that house. They'll know some songs. 'There'd be some old song they knew the tune to, or the chorus. Daddy'd write down the words, take it home and work it up. Write some more verses, change it around. He usually had to have something to get him started."
Maybelle’s Guitar 1928
With royalty money from the Carter Family's successful first recordings, Eck bought young Maybelle Carter bought the finest guitar he could find in a music store in Kingsport, a 1928 Gibson L-5 arch top, for $275 (approx. $4,000 today). Until her death in 1978, "Mother Maybelle" used it on hundreds of recordings, radio and television programs, and live appearances.
As the first f-hole, arch-top guitar, the L-5 was designed to be twice as loud as any flattop guitar of the period. Carter used it to revolutionize the role of the guitar, transforming the rhythm instrument into a distinctive lead voice.
Maybelle’s guitar was played by Elvis Presley one night when he broke a string. It was used in all the original Carter family recordings after the Bristol Session and played duets with Chet Atkins. It was the guitar that was featured in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s homage to Maybelle, the “Circle Be Unbroken” album in the early 70s that became Maybelle’s first certified gold album in 1973.
It was the guitar that Maybelle one time loaned to Cowboy Slim Rinehart in the late 1930s when the Carters were playing on radio XERA in Texas. Slim got drunk and lost the guitar to a local army airman in a poker game. “Maybelle had to get the base commander to help find it,” said her grandson, “but she got it back.”
The story goes that a slightly inebriated Tom Pall Glazer, and Hank Thompson were in a battle of wits in Las Vegas over the greatest guitar player in the business. Tom Pall yelling Chet Atkins, and Hank Thompson the champion for Merle Travis. After much debate, a phone call was placed to Travis to settle the argument. When asked "Who's the greatest guitar player?" Travis replied, "Mother Maybelle Carter." There were no more questions.
In 2004 the Maybelle’s guitar was up for sale by Gruhn Guitars in Nashville with a $575,000 price tag. It was on loan to the Country Hall of Fame when the owner, who wished to remain anonymous, decided to sell it. Murfreesboro businessman Bob McLean provided the donation for the Hall of Fame to acquire the guitar, and he was among the celebrities on hand as the guitar was transferred from Gruhn Guitars to the Hall of Fame on August 22, 2004.
Second Recording Session 1928
The following spring, Ralph Peer gave the Carter Family expense money to travel to the company studios in Camden, New Jersey and cut twelve more songs on May 9 and 10, 1928 including their theme song, "Keep on the Sunny Side" and perhaps their most widely known song, "Wildwood Flower."
At $50 per song, the total take amounted to $600 for the twelve songs they recorded, as much as they could make in a whole year on the farm. They split the money three ways, and with their winnings A.P. bought 70 acres of land and moved Sara and their three children into a larger farmhouse.
The songs recorded included some of their best: "Meet me by the Moonlight Alone," "Keep on the Sunny Side," "Little Darling, Pal of Mine," "Forsaken Love," "Anchored in Love," "I Ain't Goin' to Work Tomorrow," "Will You Miss Me when I'm Gone," "Wildwood Flower," "River of Jordan," "Chewing Gum,” and "John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man."
Lesley Riddle and A.P. Collect Songs- 1928
The Carters needed new songs to record and get copyrighted and A.P. became one of most successful song collectors in the history of Country Music. Most of the Carter family songs were collected and arranged by A.P. on his song collecting rambles throughout the south. He would find someone that had a song, get them to sing it. He would write down the words, arrange it and teach it to Sara and Maybelle.
One source of A.P.’s songs were African-American musicians, an unusual choice for the segregated rural south. In Kingsport, Tennessee A.P. collected “Motherless Children” from John Henry Lyons who belonged to a group including Brownie McGee and Steve Tarter. One Sunday morning in 1928 Lyons introduced Lesley (Esley) Riddle to A.P.
Leslie Riddle, an African-American guitarist and singer was born on June 13, 1905 in Burnsville, North Carolina. After a cement factory accident robbed him of his right leg, Riddle learned to play guitar while he was recovering from his injury. Throughout the Twenties, the decade after his accident, he played and sang in small string bands, at churches and neighborhood gatherings. He moved to Kingsport and was soon a regular in the area African-American musical scene.
“I played a couple of songs for him (A.P.) and he wanted me to go back home with him right then and there,” said Riddle in an interview with Mike Seeger. “I went over to Maces Spring with him and stayed about a week. We got to be good friends and for the next three or four years I continued going over to his house, going where he wanted to go. I went out about 15 times to collect songs.”
“He was just gong to get old music, old songs, what had never been sung in sixty years,” said Riddle. “He was going to get it, put a tune to it, and record it.” Riddle also taught the Carter Family such songs he knew like “Coal Miner Blues,” "The Cannon Ball," "I Know What It Means To Be Lonesome," and "Let the Church Roll On." Maybelle Carter learned to fingerpick and play slide guitar from Riddle. “You don’t have to give Maybelle any lessons,” said Riddle. “You let her see you playing something, she’ll get it- you better believe it.”
It was Riddle’s job to learn the melody of the song. “If I could hear you sing, I could sing it too,” said Riddle. “I was his tape recorder. He’d take me with him and he’s get someone to sing the whole song. Then I’d get it and learn it to Sara and Maybelle.”
Through Riddle and his friend gospel singer Pauline Gary from Kingsport the Carters also learned “On a Hill Lone and Gray,” “I’m Working On A Building” and “On My Way To Cannan’s Land.” Through Riddle they adapted songs like Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (See That My Grave Is Kept Green) and Blind Willie Davis’ “Rock of Ages” (When the World’s On Fire), which is the melody that Guthrie later used to write, “This Land Is Your Land.” By 1937 Riddle had married and no longer worked with the Carter family. In 1942 he and his wife moved north to Rochester, N. Y. and lost touch the Carter Family.
The Depression Years- Recording With Jimmie Rodgers
Economically and emotionally these were trying times. Unlike many groups, the popular Carter Family recorded with Victor throughout the Great Depression (1929-34) years at least twice every year from 1929 to 1932. Even though their sales dropped drastically they still outsold other Country groups. Recording and performing did not bring in as much money, and A.P.'s erratic personal habits contributed to stress at home. In 1929, A.P. sought work in Detroit for several months, while Maybelle and her husband, Ezra, followed his railroad job to West Virginia, and, in 1931, to Washington, D.C. The recording business would not recover until the mid-1930s.
Ralph Peer hatched up the idea for the first all-star team-up in country music, bringing the Carter Family and Jimmie Rogers together to record. June Carter Cash, “They recorded with Jimmy Rodgers, and I remember once that mother said Jimmy was too sick to play his guitar so she played it for him.”
The session began in Louisville, Kentucky on June 10, 1931 with “Why There’s a Tear in My Eye” and “The Wonderful City.” A.P., who did not sing or play, contributed the song, “Why There’s a Tear in My Eye” and had some lines in the skits. A.P’s song as many collected came from other sources, “An Old Man’s Story” was copyrighted by Carson Robinson in 1928. On June 11 Jimmie recorded “Let Me Be Your Side Track” and the whole group recorded their song-and-spoken-word skits “The Carter Family and Jimmie Rogers in Texas” and “Jimmie Rogers Visits The Carter Family.” On June 12 the first skit was redone to its released form.
The first release by the two top Country recording artists for Victor was “Jimmie Rodgers Visits the Carter Family” backed by Rodgers “Moonlight and Skies.” The single was a big success by post 1929 standards, selling 24, 000 copies. Curiously, the other songs from that session (except Jimmie’s solo “Let Me Be Your Side Track”) were released five years later, long after Rodgers was dead.
“The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in Texas,” though recorded in Kentucky, asks the listener to imagine the Carters paying a visit to Jimmie in the Lone Star State. The number begins with Jimmie offering a short-lived snatch of song on 'Yodelling Cowboy', switches into repartee as the three Carters knock at the door, and then segues into Jimmie and his guests performing “T for Texas.”
In 1932 Peer renewed the Carters' contract, this time with himself instead of Victor. The five-year contract gives the Carters $75 per song and guaranteed them four songs per year; Peer takes all the royalties.
Single Life- A.P. and Sara Separate- 1933
Like his father before him, A.P. was a rambler. He would often spend days and weeks at a time on the road collecting songs. When he was home, he did precious little to help around the house, and when he went, he seldom left enough money to provide for Sara and the children. "She'd be cutting down wood, pulling mining timbers out of the mountains and Daddy out somewhere trying to learn a song," their son Joe recalled. "He never stopped to think what effect it might have on his family."
A.P. asked his cousin Coy Bays to help out by driving Sara around while he was away. Two of Coy’s sisters and one brother had contracted TB and Sara started making regular visits to check on them. Sara and Coy became close, and eventually they fell in love. According to biographer Mark Zwonitzer, “Sometimes they’d leave and be gone for two or three days at a time.”
“I fell in love with Coy the first time I laid eyes on him,” Sara said later. After a while A.P. knew and he was furious. When the affair became known, Coy's parents, Charlie and Mary Bays, decided that it would be best if they got Coy out of the valley, and the Bays family set out for California.
“Mama and Papa were opposed to it,” said Coy’s sister Stella. “They loved Sara but…this was a very sad thing in our life. This was a very embarrassing thing because it was their nephew (A.P.) and their son. And both loved the same woman.”
Crushed by Coy's departure and unable to live with A.P., Sara left the house and moved back to Rich Valley, leaving the children with their father. After the separation Ralph Peer and his wife, Anita, convinced the estranged couple that while their domestic life might be in shambles, there was no reason they should not continue to play music together on a professional basis, and so the Original Carter Family continued to perform and record new songs.
June Carter Cash: “But down in the valley, things weren't so good at A.P. and Sara's house. They were separated, but they continued to sing together and work together. As far as I can remember it was the first separation that ever occurred in the valley so we never talked about it. Their songs seemed to mean more, and their records sold more, and more but they were both good people and life went on.”
Carter Family Continue Performing
During this time Maybelle and Ezra were busy raising their talented daughters in the Carter singing tradition. A.P. and Sara reportedly got along better after their separation. A.P. still booked concerts as June Carter Cash recalled:
“Uncle "Doc" booked the school houses all through Virginia, North and South Carolina, West Virginia and Kentucky and the Carter Family played the old stages without the benefit of sound. I remember the concerts as if they were yesterday. The old coal oil lamps lined the front of the stage, and the stage was set with just two chairs. All the songs that they sang had a reason. A.P. Carter became A.P. Carter to me after I saw their first show. It was somewhere in North Carolina, and I felt very small. My mother and Aunt Sara sat down in the two chairs, mother with her guitar and Aunt Sara with her autoharp. A.P. stood alone. He walked slow stood with his eyes just over you, and demanded your attention without saying one word. You could hear a pin drop. They sang the songs of the "Wabash Cannon Ball," "Thinking Tonight Of My Blue Eyes," "The Worried Man Blues," "Jimmy Brown The News Boy," "Homestead on the Farm," "Wildwood Flower," and "You Are My Flower," "Jealous Hearted Me," and "On The Rock Where Moses Stood."
A.P. told a story with every song, why it was written, where it came from or the reason for its being. He talked with authority and he knew what he was saying. They sang of love, of their love for the mountains and Virginia, war songs, slave songs, songs from the coalfields, and the old gospel story songs such as "Little Moses."
Carters Change Labels: Under Peer’s guidance they changed record labels in 1935, re-recording much of their material for the American Recording Company (ARC) and the hit, “Can the Circle Be Unbroken.” At $75 a side the Carters made a lot of money re-recording their old hits.
A.P and Sara Divorce 1936
In September 1936, after three years of trying to reconcile with her husband, she finally sued A.P. for divorce. A.P. Carter was to appear at the circuit court the following Monday “to answer a bill in Chancery in our said court against him by Sara E. Carter. He did not even show up at court to defend himself. In a separate filing at the Gate City courthouse that same week, AP Carter agreed to pay Sara $1200 for a farm she had bought in the Little Valley.
Decca
After the divorce The Carter Family began a two-year association with Decca during which they waxed 60 more songs, and were at a performance peak. Unlike ARC, Decca insisted on fresh material. A.P. was never short on songs and these two years of recording (1936-1938) produced an impressive body of work. MCA has recently reissued many of these recordings on a new CD produced by the Country Music Foundation called "The Carter Family: Country Music Hall of Fame Series" (MCAD-10088), with programming and informative notes by Bob Pinson.
Carter Children Begin Performing: As the children of the Carters were born and reached childhood, they were added to the live performances. Never fewer than three Carters performed, but sometimes the number reached eight, including the very talented but little recorded Janette, A.P. and Sara’s daughter. A Carter family concert was usually a model of informality, the two women sitting in chairs with their instruments and A.P. standing. He would introduce the numbers after they sang their opening number, which was a simple little homemade song that went: “Howdy do, everybody, Howdy do, Howdy do, everybody, how are you we are here we must confess just to bring you happiness we hope to please you more or less Howdy do.”
“A.P. was a man of few words,” said June Carter Cash. “He introduced the songs and offered comments upon them, but very few at that. After the performance, the Carters would sell their songs folios and would usually spend the night with newly made friends, who had come to the concerts. Hardly a concert passed that the Carters didn’t make new friends, friends that they kept for their lives and in whose homes they would stay whenever they returned to that area. Doors in many homes were unlocked to the Carters.
The Carter Family worked when they needed to work, and because of their families refused to go on the road and stay there. But in 1938, they left the valley, and went to work in Del Rio, Texas. And so began a new way of life for simple mountain people. In time I even gave up my gravel flipper.”
XERA 1938: As the Depression lifted, the Carters' fortunes were on the wane. Peer arranged (through Consolidated Royal Chemical Corporation) for the Carters to do two radio shows per day (each of the three Carters would receive $75 each per week which would be approximately $1,000 today) for a year beginning in October 1938. They would get six months vacation during the summer to return to their Clinch Mountain homes and still get paid. In addition they were given a brand new Chevrolet which they drove to their new home in Del Rio, Texas. XER (Later known as XERA) was just over the Rio Grande in Mexico.
According to Charles K. Wolfe, "This gave them the largest radio audience they ever had, and soon even the old Bluebird [label] records were selling like wildfire." The border stations, wrote Bill C. Malone, "popularized hillbilly music throughout the United States and laid the basis for country music's great popularity in the late '40s and early '50s."
“Doctor” John Romulus Brinkley, a quack physician and entrepreneur from Milford, Kansas founded XERA. Around 1918, Brinkley had invented a "cure" for male impotence which involved grafting pieces of goats' testicular glands onto the patient's own testicles. He first saw a radio station five years later on a trip to Los Angeles, and decided that radio was the perfect medium for promoting his medical services. When Brinkley got back to Kansas, he founded a local radio station with the call letters KFKB, for "Kansas First Kansas Best," and used it to spread the word about his "miracle" operation.
Brinkley: “What is the use of pussyfooting around the subject? Why not drag it into the open? No man wants to be a capon. Contrast the castrated animal -- of any species -- with the natural male or female. Note the difference, for instance, between the stallion and the gelding. The former stands erect, neck arched, mane flowing, chomping the bit, stamping the ground, seeking the female, while the gelding stands around half asleep, cowardly, and listless.”
For this, and like surgical services, he had charged some fifteen thousand men anywhere from $750 to $2,000 apiece. From an impoverished Smoky Mountain boyhood of corn bread and turnip greens, the fifty-three-year-old Brinkley had transformed himself into a multimillionaire. He owned mansions, limousines, an airplane, and a yacht once used by presidents.
By 1930 both the federal government and the Kansas medical board had begun investigations into Brinkley's activities, eventually stripping him of both his radio and his medical licenses. Brinkley ran for governor of Kansas, and might have won if a large number of write-in ballots had not been disqualified for misspellings of his name. He then moved to the tiny border town of Del Rio, Texas and set up a new radio station across the river in Mexico, which could not be regulated by the US. With 500 kilowatts of broadcasting power, XERA was ten times as powerful as the biggest American stations, which were forced to live within the federal ceiling of 50 kilowatts. Its signal easily reached all forty-eight states, not to mention much of Canada, and within a few years spawned a slew of copycat border stations.
Anita Carter was only four years old when she first saw Dr. John Romulus Brinkley in 1938 at his mansion in Del Rio, Texas, but it was a sight she never forgot: a goat-bearded, diamond-studded, round spectacled man, floating down the stairs with a pet monkey on his shoulder.
Locals claimed the XERA transmitter had turned on the headlights of cars parked in Del Rio and made children's bedsprings hum in San Antonio. All across Texas, they said, you could pick up the signal on a barbed-wire fence. In actual fact, there were nights when XERA nearly obliterated Atlanta's WSB and, 1,500 miles north, elbowed aside Chicago's WGN. As it crossed into Canada, the signal still had enough juice to muddy CKAC in Montreal.
By 1939, South Texas had blossomed with an outlandish industry built on XERA and other border stations that had sprung up around it. XERA's roster included the Reverend Eugene F. Smith, who hawked a book on how to prepare for the Second Coming ("A month from now might be too late!"), and soothsayer Rose Dawn the Star Girl, Patroness of the Order of Maya, who promised to personally pray for any listener who sent her a dollar. Carter's Champion Chicks, a company that sold live poultry, also leased time from Brinkley; so did the makers of Kolorbak hair dye; Peruna, a tonic that prevented colds; and Sinose, a preparation guaranteed to clear up the sinuses in the unlikely event that Peruna failed to prevent infection. And just in case Sinose failed, too, the Sterling Company offered life insurance for only a penny a day.
Del Rio had become the "Hillbilly Hollywood." There was Cowboy Slim Rinehart ("Empty Saddles"), Patsy Montana ("I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart"), and the Pickards ("How Many Biscuits Can You Eat This Morning?"); there were the J. E. Mainer's Mountaineers, Doc and Carl, and countless others, all long forgotten. And there was also the Carter Family.
"They were the best loved in our valley," remembers one Arkansan whose entire family would walk three miles to the nearest neighbor with a radio. "They were singing our songs." But the border-radio appearances had reignited their popularity beyond even A.P.'s wildest imaginings. "Mercy, I never saw as much mail in my life," Maybelle once said. "When we left [Texas after the first year] and came home we had over five thousand letters that came in. We'd get mail every day, from every state in the Union."
"A thing that especially pleased country folk," remembers Tom T. Hall, a future songwriter and recording star who grew up in Olive Hill, Kentucky, "was that the Carters were a family." Twice a day, in between Cowboy Slim Rinehart and the Mainer's Mountaineers, came the Carter Family, leading off every set with their theme song, "Keep on the Sunny Side." For an hour a day, the Carters' radio show could close up the open spaces of lonesomeness that seemed to be widening all over the country. The lonesomest, neediest, most cut-off listeners could lean forward toward their radio sets, hear those songs, and think, That's just how it was....They understand.
Coy and Sara Marry In February 1939, without warning, Sara announced on the XREA’s Good Neighbors Get Together radio show that she would like to dedicate a song to her friend Coy Bays, in California, and sang a moving rendition of "I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes":
I'm thinking tonight of my blue eyes
Who is sailing far over the sea;
I'm thinking tonight of my blue eyes,
And I wonder if he ever thinks of me.
It had been six years since Coy and his family had left for California, and though Sara had written him her letters had been intercepted by Coy's mother, they had never reached him. But Coy was an avid fan of the Carters' show, and when he heard Sara singing out to him over the radio waves, he knew she had not forgotten him. Coy left immediately for Texas, and the two were married on February 20 in the town of Brackettsville, near Del Rio.
So when A.P. was suddenly -- and without explanation -- off the radio for a stretch in February of 1939, the Carters' vast and varied audience couldn't have guessed why. Nobody outside the family knew anything of the crisis that shook A.P., or of worried sponsors who pulled him off the show when they thought his agitation was actually coming through on the air. The Carters' following knew nothing of the fault line that ran right down the middle of "Country Music's First Family."
“When Sara Left A.P. it broke his heart in two,” said his grand daughter Rita Forrester. “In Texas when he would see Coy coming down the street he’d walk on the other side.” And A. P.’s son Joe remembered that his father had no zeal after that remarking, “He was Lost.”
June Carter Cash remembered: Aunt Sara was divorced from A.P. in 1938 and remarried happily to Coy Bayes in 1939. They live in Angles Camp, Calif., where Coy takes care of the fair grounds. He was always good as an electrician and mechanic. They have a trailer, a camper, and a small airplace that you can taxi up to their front door. They hunt a lot but Aunt Sara nevers sings professionally anymore. Sometimes she visits us in Nashville and goes home to Virginia to visit with her children once a year. A.P. Carter never married again. They say that he loved Aunt Sara until he died on November 7, 1960.
Second And Third Seasons 1939 to 1941- XERA Consolidated Royal asked the Carters back to Texas for a second season in 1939-1940, this time with Maybelle and Eck's three daughters, Helen, Anita, and June as well as Sara and A.P.’s daughter Janette.This time they were held in San Antonio, Texas with a new announcer Brother Bill Rinehart. The programs were pre-recorded and distributed to multiple border radio stations (XELO, XEG, XERB, and XEPN).
One day, Maybelle told little Anita to sing her favorite song into the microphone, the one about the "purty liddle kitty kat" that wore "a great big cowboy hat." The show's producers were ecstatic! That cute little girl had the Carter gift, they said. Were there any more at home like her? Why, yes, Maybelle said. There were her two daughters, Helen and June, and there was A. P. and Sara's daughter, Janette. For the next three years, two generations of Carters sang to an audience spanning the continent, and a generation of budding country stars got a musical education that shaped them forever.
With the girls on the show and A.P. delivering some of his most heartfelt performances, the 1939-1940 season stands out among even the Carters' enviable legacy. But by then "Doctor" Brinkley was once more under investigation, this time for tax evasion. At the same time, the victims of his cure for impotence -- and the next of kin of those who had not survived the operation -- were crawling out of the woodwork, suing him for medical malpractice. In 1941 Mexico signed a radio treaty with the United States dividing up the spectrum between the two countries. A year later XERA shut its doors for good. Brinkley died the same year.
In 1939, Helen and June joined Maybelle, A.P. Sara, Anita, and Janette who all preformed on these broadcasts from time to time. At the beginning of their careers, the individual Carters led fairly routine private lives while each went his own way. Both of the Carter women had become mothers, each with three children, but the group got together to practice whenever they could, and whenever the recording sessions might be as far away as Camden, Charlotte, Louisville, Memphis, or Atlanta.
Typical Border Radio Show 1939
Here’s a typical radio program broadcast by the Carters: Theme/Why There’s a Tear In My Eyes; Sleep Baby Sleep/Just Another Broken Heart (Janette); Corrina Corrina (Carter Sister's); I Can Not Be Your Sweetheart/Red Wing (A.P. Sara & Maybelle); A Broken Down Saint; Weeping Willow; You Are My Flower/Gathering Flowers From The Hillside (June Carter); The Last Letter (Janette) / I Won't Mind Dying
Who's That Knocking At My Window (Sara & Maybelle); Diamonds In The Rough (A.P.) / The Fatal Wedding; It's Hard To Lease Your Mind (Carter Sister's) / Death Is Only A Dream; Theme/
XET Station Break
Theme/The Church In The Wildwood; Are You Tired Of Me Darling /Sourwood Mountain (Carter Sister's); Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie (Janette)/My Bonnie Blue Eyes; Yankee Doodle (Helen)/ Storms On The Ocean; Sugar Hill; Hello Stranger; Cowboy Jack (Sara & Maybelle); Nobody's Darling (June Carter )/ Funny When You Feel That Way (Sara & Maybelle); Dixie Darling; Shortening Bread / Solder And His Sweetheart (Sara & Maybelle); Polly Wolly Doodle All The Day / My Gold Watch Chain ( June & Helen Carter ) River Of Jordan; I Will Never Marry (Janette) /God Gave Noah The Rainbow Sign
Time Out & XET Station Break
Performance in 1940
June Carter Cash, Maybelle's daughter (who would later marry performer Johnny Cash), tells the story of a gig the Carters played in Hugo, Oklahoma, around 1940: "There was a big crowd outside the building where we were playing, but when we got inside, there couldn't have been more than fifty people in that building. We looked outside, and the place was just covered with people. But they had no money to come in. Well, Uncle A.P. went down and opened up the doors and let everybody in, and we sung."
Last Recording Session- World War II preempts Feature in Life Magazine
The Original Carter Family concluded their recording career in 1941, returning to the Victor label and recording fourteen songs in a New York studio on October 14. The session marked the first time that Sara received credit as a songwriter. The songs included “Dark and Stormy Weather,” “Girl on the Greenbrier Shore,” and “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room.”
That fall, Life magazine sent a photographer to Maces Springs to take pictures and interviews the Carters. The pictures are to appear on the magazine's cover, but on December 7, less than a week before the magazine goes to press, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Immediately the magazine pulled the Carter Family feature to report on the war buildup. The Carter Family story never ran.
End of the Original Carter Family 1943
Mexico and the United States sign a broadcasting treaty that shut down XERA in March 1942. So Consolidated Royal sponsored the Carter family for another season in the fall of 1942 on WBT, a radio station in Charlotte, North Carolina. Sara traveled from California, where she lived with her husband Coy Bays, to participate in the show. The Carter Family, which was now A.P., Sara, Maybelle and her three girls, rented rooms in the Roosevelt where they woke before dawn each morning to perform on the sunrise slot with the program airing between 5:15 and 6:15 a.m.
In March 1943 with the Charlotte contract having run its term, Sara returned to he home in California, and the original Carter Family was no more. Maybelle and her daughters continued performing first as The Carters Sisters and then as Mother Maybelle and The Carter Sisters.
A.P. went back to his Clinch Mountain home, and lived out the next two decades in relative obscurity, the odd man out in a new and reconfigured Carter musical clan. He ran a store, maintained a modest orchard, and enjoyed the company of his daughters, Janette and Gladys, and his son, Joe. “I really felt so sorry for him,” said Helen Maybelle’s daughter. “He loved the business. He loved music. His family was just so busted up he just didn’t have anyone to sing with.”
Mother Maybelle and The Carter Sisters- Chet Atkins and His Famous Guitar
After the Original Carter Family broke up Maybelle and her three Helen, June, and Anita moved to Richmond, Virginia to do a radio show on WRNL in June 1943 as “The Carter Sisters And Mother Maybelle.” The Sisters would tour in Maybelle’s new 41 Packard between radio spots and made most of their money playing across the region because smaller radio stations didn’t pay much.
Then in Sept 1946 they played on WRVA’s Old Dominion Barn Dance. Two years later Lowell Blanchard booked them on WNOX, his Tennessee Barn Dance radio show in Knoxville. Anita Carter remembered their encounter with two Country legends, “When I heard Chester (Chet Atkins) and Howmer and Jethro start playing my mouth dropped about ten miles. There was no better group in the world.”
Maybelle’s husband Eck was managing the Carters and invited Chet Atkins to join them. They were now booked as The Carter Sisters And Mother Maybelle, Chet Atkins and His Famous Guitar. On their first road trip Atkins and the girls were crammed into a single Frasier automobile driving through a blinding rainstorm when the car began to wobble. Being the only male, Chet got out to inspect. “Flatter’n hell,” Chet remembered, “and a car full of women.” While Chet was knelling down to change the tire each passing car would splash mud on him. He referred to it as, “the night I taught those girls how to cuss.”
June Carter Cash: “Most of you know if you are dear to me because my closest friends are few and it may surprise you to know that some of the closest are men... A man can be a true friend. Chet Atkins has been and is my friend, and this started about 1948, in a little town called Knoxville. It takes a lot of going hungry, winding around curvey East Tennessee roads, playing school houses about the size of a good hen house, sleepin' half the night with my mother, father, Helen and Anita and Chet plus two huge RCA amplifiers coming home from a show date. And there was the matter of Chet's D'Angeleco guitar. All of his life he had wanted a special guitar made by D'Angeleco and his dream came true in 1950, just as we joined the Grand Old Opry. You would have to be a true friend if he forgave a stumbling idiot who ran right into it and broke it into pieces- I was the idiot- and forgive me he did.”
“When Chet first started working with us in Knoxville, we were working for Lowell Blanchard at WNOX...mother, Helen, Anita, and I. And we hired the first outsider who ever worked for The Carter Family. Chet would sit for hours and play his guitar. He played every waking hour of the day, that he wasn't fixin' flats or settin' up public address systems. He was the best I had ever known...We loved him...All of us. He was our brother that we never had and he was our pal... He sometimes had bad asthma attacks, and if we were out in the car going to a show, mother would stop the car while he had one of the attacks, and Helen, Anita, and I would bawl our heads off until he was better. We did that a lot of times. Good for Chet...Good for Chet...He's done well.”
For a brief time A.P. Carter got a spot on WNOX in 1948. He wouldn’t accept pay, instead he sold his pamphlet, “Bible Questions and Answers,” on the air. “He’d get up and sing a few songs and then he’d sing bass with the Carter girls,” said WNOX’s Ray Edenton. “And man, the mail! They brought it by the basket loads. They loved him, those country people.”
Carter Sisters debut on Grand Ole Opry- Hank Williams- Elvis Presley
During a stint on KWTO sponsored by Red Star Flour in Springfield, Missouri, they became very popular finally in 1950 accepted an invitation to play on and the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. According to June, their first performance at the Ryman was so well received “the roof came off of the building.”
Carter Sisters cut their first recording on Feb. 2, 1949 for RCA Victor. The eighteen singles on RCA and Columbia cut during the next four years never made the charts. Anita, Helen, and June were great entertainers, treating their audience to fine singing and musicianship, mountain dancing and lively down-home humor. Eighteen-year-old Anita was a beauty and one of the finest Carter singers of all time. The hard drinking Hank Williams, who was one of the hottest Country singers on charts, pursued Anita during his brief stay at the Opry. To forget his problems with his wife, Audrey, Hank began spending time with the Carters.
At the height of their marital problems June Carter attempt to reconcile the couple. She brought Audrey to the Williams house to talk with Hank. A fight ensued and “June got between them pushing Hank in the chest.” Hank retreated to his car and when he came back he was carrying a pistol. June blocked his way into the house and yelled, “You can’t do this Hank!” Williams stepped back pointed the barrel at June and pulled the trigger.
The shot barely missed and the noise “rattled my head,” she recalled. “I thought I’d never hear again.” June fell to the ground stunned but not injured. Hank jumped in his car, burned some rubber and sped off. A week later Hank appeared at a radio show and apologized- but the family was through with him.
In the 1950s The Carter Sisters remained as fixtures on Grand Ole Opry. June married Opry star Carl Smith, and started a new generation of talented Carters with the 1954 birth of daughter Carlene (who later became a Nashville recording artist). In 1955 the Carters became part of a tour with Hank Snow and a new upcoming star Elvis Presley.
Hank Snow headlined the tour but Elvis was the star. During the tour Elvis and Anita began an extended flirtation. He called Maybelle “Mama” and Eck “Pop” and became an extended member of the Carter Family. He loved to sit at the piano and harmonize gospel songs with the Carter girls. Later in 1956 when Elvis went to Hollywood they lost all contact with the superstar.
Can The Circle Be Unbroken
While Maybelle and her daughters were keeping up the Carter family's musical tradition, A.P. was back in Poor Valley living with his daughter Gladys and leading the peaceful life of a storekeeper who never sold very much, but collected music royalties twice a year.
A.P. tried one last time to get the Carter Family together and managed to get Sara to Bristol in 1952 to cut records for the Clifford Spurlock’s bargain label Acme. Maybelle couldn’t attend because she was busy touring and playing at the Opry with her daughters so Joe and Janette (Sara and A.P.’s children) joined them. In 1957 A.P Joe and Janette put out their last round of records for Acme. In total thay recorded almost 100 tracks for Acme Records. These included a 1956 recording made with Mrs. Jimmie Rodgers, which consisted of talk and a version of "In The Sweet Bye And Bye". The Carters never received any royalties from the preacher Shurlock and their Acme records venture was over.
In 1953, A.P. opened his "Summer Park" in his beloved Clinch Mountains, near the home of Joe and Janette, and held concerts that featured such artists as the Stanley Brothers. As he neared his death, he asked them to do their best to keep the music alive. They did so without even leaving their farm. Having built a large performance space on their property called the Carter Fold, Joe and Janette, along with their featured guests, continued to perform Carter Family songs and traditional country music every Saturday night to enthusiastic audiences and some of the wildest buckdances to ever step out on the floor! The Summer Park still holds concerts by the third generation of Carters today.
By February 1960, A.P. was old, sick, and bedridden, and he died that November. A special marker was put on his grave; a likeness of a 78 record with the words of the Carter’s theme song, “Keep On The Sunnyside.”
By the time A.P. died, the royalties were starting to flow again, thanks to such covers as the Kingston Trio's remake of “Worried Man Blues,” Elvis Presley's recording of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and a music of the Carter Family album by Flatt & Scruggs. In that decade the folk music revival took off in earnest, with Bob Dylan plying the concert trail and the first re-releases of the Carters' old monophonic 78's.
In 1967 Sara was persuaded to appear with Maybelle at the Newport Folk Festival; the same year she and Maybelle, with Joe Carter taking his late father's bass part, recorded their classic An Historic Reunion album, which included their rather nostalgic "Happiest Days Of All," recorded in Nashville. The trio surprised the recording engineers by cutting 12 tracks in just over four hours - an unusual event. It was the first time the two had recorded together for 25 years (in 1991, Bear Family Records reissued these recordings, plus a version of "No More Goodbyes" that had not been released by Columbia Records, on a compact disc; it also contained a reissue of Mother Maybelle's 1966 album A Living Legend, and a further previously unreleased recording of her instrumental "Mama's Irish Jig").
According to their biographer Zwonitzer, Johnny Cash, then married to his first wife, greeted June Carter by saying, “Hello, I'm Johnny Cash and I'm going to marry you someday.” That prediction ultimately came to pass, though
the two would not take vows until March 1, 1968, soon after the release of the Carryin' on With Johnny Cash & June Carter duet album. That same year, Maybelle, Helen and Anita became regular members of the Johnny Cash Show.
Sara and Maybelle were both present when the Original Carter Family became the first group ever to be elected to the Country Music Hall Of Fame And Museum on October 14, 1970. Their plaque stated that the Carter Family are "regarded by many as the epitome of country greatness and originators of a much copied style."
Maybelle Carter continued to perform until her death in Nashville on October 23, 1978. Maybelle finished her career with Johnny Cash, and he would preach at her funeral. "Having her in my show was a powerful confirmation and continuation of the music I loved best," he wrote in his autobiography. "It kept me carrying on the traditions I come from."
Sara Carter died in Lodi, California, after a long illness, on January 8, 1979 and was taken back in Scott County, Virginia where she was born. Several hundred people gathered at the foot of Clinch Mountain as the Red Clay Ramblers sang “Anchored in Love.” She was buried two rows from A.P.’s grave at the Mt.Vernon Cemetary in Hilton. Her grave had the same headstone as A.P.’s with a gold record saying, “Keep on the Sunnyside.” The Original Carter Family was finally reunited in a “better home a-waitin’ in the sky Lord, in the sky.”
Recordings: From Aug. 1, 1927 until Oct. 14, 1941 the original Carter Family recorded some 292 song that were released and others that were never issued. They recorded on RCA Victor and their discount Bluebird label until May 5, 1935 when they started recording for ARC. On June 1936 they recorded for Decca until Oct. 3, 1940 when they began recording for Okeh and the discount Conqueror label. Their last session was back on RCA victor’s Bluebird label on Oct. 14, 1941.
The Complete Original Carter Family Recorded Songs: Amber Tresses; Anchored in Love; Answer to Weeping Willow; Are You Lonesome Tonight?; Are You Tired of Me, My Darling?; Away Out on Saint Sabbath; Bear Creek Blues; Beautiful Home; Beautiful Isle O'er the Sea; Behind Those Stone Walls; Birds Were Singing of You; Black Jack David; Blackie's Gunman; Bonnie Blue Eyes; Bring Back My Blue Eyed Boy; Bring Back My Boy; Broken Down Tramp; Broken Hearted Lover; Buddies in the Saddle; Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow; By the Touch of Her Hand; Can the Circle Be Unbroken (Bye and Bye); Can't Feel at Home; Cannonball (Blues); Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in Texas; Carter's Blues; Charlie and Nellie; Chewing Gum; Church in the Wildwood; Coal Miner's Blues; Cowboy Jack; Cowboy's Wild Song to His Herd; Cuban Soldier; Cyclone of Rye Cove; Dark and Stormy Weather; Dark Haired True Lover; Darling Daisies; Darling Little Joe; Darling Nellie Across the Sea; Diamonds in the Rough; Distant Land to Roam; Don't Forget Me Little Darling; Don't Forget This Song; Dying Mother; Dying Soldier; East Virginia Blues; East Virginia Blues No. 2; Engine 143; Evening Bells Are Ringing; Faded Coat of Blue; Faded Flowers; Fate of Dewey Lee; Farewell Nellie; Fifty Miles of Elbow Room; Foggy Mountain Top; Fond Affection; Forsaken Love; Funny When You Feel That Way; Gathering Flowers from the Hillside; Girl on the Greenbriar Shore; Give Him One More as He Goes; Give Me Roses While I Live; Give Me Your Love and I'll Give You Mine; Glory to the Lamb; God Gave Noah the Rainbow Sign; Gold Watch and Chain; Goodbye to the Plains; Gospel Ship; Grave on the Green Hillside; Happiest Days of All; Happy in the Prison; Happy or Lonesome; He Never Came Back; He Took a White Rose from Her Hair; Heart That Was Broken for Me; Heaven's Radio; Hello Central, Give Me Heaven; Hello Stranger; Hold Fast to the Right; Home by the Sea; Home in Tennessee; Homestead on the Farm; Honey in the Rock; I Ain't Goin' to Work Tomorrow; I Cannot Be Your Sweetheart; I Found You Among the Roses; I Have an Aged Mother; I Have No One to Love Me (But the Sailor on the Deep Blue Sea); I Loved You Better Than You Knew; I Never Loved But One; I Never Will Marry; I Wouldn't Mind Dying; I'll Be All Smiles Tonight; I'll Be Home Someday; I'll Never Forsake You; I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes; I'm Working on a Building; If One Won't Another One Will; In a Little Village Churchyard; In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain; In the Shadow of the Pines; In the Valley of the Shenandoah; It Is Better Farther On; It'll Aggravate Your Soul; It's a Long Long Road to Travel Alone; Jealous Hearted Me; Jim Blake's Message; Jimmie Brown, the Newsboy; Jimmie Rodgers Visits the Carter Family; John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man; Just a Few More Days; Just Another Broken Heart; Keep on the Firing Line; Keep on the Sunny Side; Kissing Is a Crime; Kitty Waltz; Last Move for Me; Lay My Head Beneath the Rose; Let the Church Roll On; Let's Be Lovers Again; Little Black Train; Little Darlin' Pal of Mine; Little Joe; Little Log Cabin by the Sea; Little Log Hut in the Lane; Little Moses; Little Poplar Log House on the Hill; Lonesome for You; Lonesome for You Darling; Lonesome Homesick Blues; Lonesome Pine Special; Lonesome Valley; Longing for Old Virginia; Look Away from the Cross; Look How This World Has Made a Change; Lord, I'm in Your Care; Lover's Farewell; Lover's Lane; Lover's Return; Lulu Walls; March Winds Gonna Blow My Blues All Away; Meet Me by the Moonlight Alone; Meeting in the Air; 'Mid the Green Fields of Virginia; Motherless Children; Mountains of Tennessee; My Clinch Mountain Home; My Dixie Darling; My Heart's Tonight in Texas; My Home's Across the Blue Ridge Mountains; My Home Among the Hills; My Honey Lou; My Little Home in Tennessee; My Native Home; My Old Cottage Home; My Old Virginia Home; My Texas Girl; My Virginia Rose Is Blooming; Never Let the Devil Get the Upper Hand of You; No Depression in Heaven; No More the Moon Shines on Lorena; No Other's Bride I'll Be; No Telephone in Heaven; Oh, Take Me Back; On a Hill Lone and Gray; On My Way to Canaan's Land; On the Rock Where Moses Stood; On the Sea of Galilee; One Little Word; Only Girl (I Ever Cared About); Over the Garden Wall; Picture on the Wall; Poor Little Orphaned Boy; Poor Orphan Child; Rambling Boy; Reckless Motorman; River of Jordan; Room in Heaven for Me; School House on the Hill; See That My Grave Is Kept Green; Sad and Lonesome Day; Sailor Boy; Sea of Galilee; Single Girl, Married Girl; Sinking in the Lonesome Sea; Something Got a Hold of Me; Spirit of Love Watches Over Me; Sow 'Em on the Mountain; St. Regious Girl; Stern Old Bachelor; Storms Are on the Ocean; Sun of the Soul; Sunshine in the Shadows; Sweet as the Flowers in May Time; Sweet Fern; Sweet Heaven in My View; Tell Me That You Loved Me; There'll Be Joy, Joy, Joy; There'll Be No Distinction There; There's No Hiding Place Down Here; There's No One Like Mother to Me; There's Someone Awaiting for Me; They Call Her Mother; This Is Like Heaven to Me; Two Sweethearts; Wabash Cannonball; Walking in the King's Highway; Wandering Boy; Wave on the Sea; Wayworn Traveler; We Will March Through the Streets of the City; We Shall Rise; Weary Prodigal Son; Western Hobo; When I'm Gone; When Silver Threads Are Gold Again; When This Evening Sun Goes Down; When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland; When the Roses Come Again; When the Springtime Comes Again; When the World's on Fire; Where Shall I Be?; Where the Silvery Colorado Winds Its Way; Where We'll Never Grow Old; Who's That Knocking on My Window; Why Do You Cry, Little Darling; Why There's a Tear in My Eye; Wildwood Flower; Will My Mother Know Me There?; Will the Roses Bloom in Heaven; Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?; Winding Stream; Wonderful City; Worried Man Blues; You Are My Flower; You Better Let That Liar Alone; You Denied Your Love; You Tied a Love Knot in My Heart; You're Nothing More to Me; You've Been a Friend to Me; You've Been Fooling Me, Baby; Your Mother Still Prays (For You, Jack); You're Gonna Be Sorry You Let Me Down; You've Got to Righten That Wrong; Young Freda Bolt