Country’s First Family
Country’s First Family
© BRI
The Carter Family’s impact is far reaching – they saved Appalachian music for posterity, began the country music recording industry, and inspired the careers of legends like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.
Everything’s Relative
A. P. (Alvin Pleasant) Carter, founding father of the Carter Family, was born in Poor Valley, Virginia, in 1891. He played the fiddle as a little boy and wrote his first song in 1911. He played the fiddle as a little boy and wrote his first song in 1911. Local girl Sara Dougherty was a singer, and when the two met in 1914, A. P. was smitten. They married a year later and settled in Poor Valley. The couple often sang and played music together at church meetings or gatherings with friends. In the 1920s, they asked Sara’s cousin Maybelle to join them, and the trio that would become the Carter family was born.
Sara and Maybelle loved music as much as A. P. did and were blessed with clear, pure voices. Maybelle was already a whiz on the autoharp, banjo and fiddle. Now she taught herself how to play guitar and perfected a flowing, rhythmical style of flatpicking later known as the “Carter scratch.” Sara played autoharp and sang the lead with her powerful alto voice. The trio performed old folk tunes, gospel hymns, mountain ballads, and A. P.’s original songs: hillbilly music was about to go national.
Thanks to Ralph
The man who made it all possible was Ralph Peer. In 1927, Peer was looking for recording artists for his record label, the Victor Talking Machine Company. The new medium of radio was introducing new types of music to American audiences, and the symphonies and operas that were Victor staples weren’t selling as well as they had just a few years before. Ralph Peer suspected that rural music – the “voice of the people” – might just be the genre that would drag Victor into the present.
He placed ads in the local newspapers in and around Bristol, Tennessee, announcing auditions and recording sessions. A. P. read one of the ads and hauled Sara and Maybelle (who was eight months pregnant at the time) to Bristol in a car borrowed from his brother (and Maybelle’s husband) Eck. There, the trio recorded six songs and were paid $300.
American Idols
Victor released a trial record of two of the Carter’s songs. It sold so well that in 1928 the company invited the family to come to its recording studio in Camden, New Jersey, to make more records. The Carters recorded a dozen songs – including their famous “Wildwood Flower” – and were paid $600. Within two years, their records had sold more than 700,000 copies.
Inspired, A. P. started collecting old, near-forgotten songs. He traveled the remote hills and valleys of Appalachia in a quest for obscure tunes that would have been lost had he not tracked them down. He wrote down the words of the songs but couldn’t read music, so he hummed the tunes from memory for Maybelle and Sara to learn. The girls couldn’t read music either, which drove the New York sheet music producers crazy when they tried to translate the Carter songs into musical notes.
D-I-V-O-R-C-E
As rewarding as A. P.’s scouting trips were, his absences from home made Sara unhappy. She didn’t like the life of a singing star. Lonely and overworked, with kids to raise and a farm to run, she was becoming more and more distant from her husband. She often refused to make personal appearances, so A. P.’s sister Sylvia filled in for her. Finally, she fell out of love with A. P. – and in love with his cousin, Coy Bays. Sara and A. P. divorced in 1936, but it would be six years before Sara and Coy got together: his family moved him to California to keep him away from Sara.
Surprisingly, A. P. and Sara’s breakup wasn’t the end of the Carter family. For one thing, Ralph Peer persuaded the ex-couple that they didn’t have to be a couple to continue performing together, so the group stayed together professionally for a time. But more importantly, the next generation was coming along behind them. A. P. and Sara’s daughter Janette joined the Carter family radio shows in 1939. And Maybelle’s three young daughters – Helen, June, and Anita – also became part of the act.
Under the Influence
In 1938 the family started singing on the most powerful radio station in North America – XERA, which broadcast from a 500-kilowatt transmitter just over the Texas border in Mexico so it could evade U. S. laws restricting broadcast range. Now that they could be heard across America – and even into Canada – the Carter family’s influence spread to future generations of country performers. A teenaged Chet Atkins listened in Georgia; young Johnny Cash tuned in in Arkansas (and loved hearing little June yodel); Waylon Jennings listened in Texas.
Sara took the opportunity one night to dedicate a song to Coy Bays, her “friend in California.” She sang the plaintive “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” and when Bays heard it, he hopped in his car and drove all night to find her. They were married three weeks later.
Eventually, A. P. returned to his farm and country store in Poor Valley, and Maybelle formed a new group – Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters – with her three girls. Performing on the radio and in personal appearances, the group struggled at first, but by 1950 were performing at the Grand Ole Opry. When June Carter went solo (she eventually married Johnny Cash), Maybelle, Anita, and Helen kept the family’s songs alive – often as Cash’s backup singers on his records and his television show.
Music for the Ages
Amont the Carter family’s most enduring songs are “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” with its universal theme of loss, grief, and hope; the uplifting “Keep on the Sunny Side;” and “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?” Legions of stars – from Johnny Cash to Emmylou Harris to Joan Baez – have recorded old Carter family songs, and folk singers Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan both rearranged Carter family songs to create the hits “This Land is Your Land” and “The Times They Are a-Changing.”
A. P. died in 1960 after a long illness; Maybelle passed away in 1978, and Sara in 1979. And though the original Carter family is gone, their music remains popular and beloved. The old recordings have been remastered and still sell well throughout America and Europe. In 2005 the group was posthumously awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys.
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