#3: Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music, by Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg

I had a great time reading this book. For one thing, I am a big fan of popular music and this book filled in a big gap in my knowledge. For another, this was the kind of book you come across every once in a while where you feel like you’ve been invited to a party where you get to meet all sorts of wonderful and interesting people and make friends with all of them. The authors say in their acknowledgements that “the Original Carter Family … gave few interviews, kept no diaries, wrote few letters, and saved almost no correspondence.” But there are plenty of people still alive who knew the original Carters, and their children and grandchildren continue (to various degrees) the family business that the originals—A.P. Carter, his wife Sara Carter, and his sister-in-law, Maybelle Carter—started. My theory is that the authors talked to so many people who were quite glad to remember and cherish their famous ancestors that the gracious and warm tone of these many conversations permeates the book itself. It’s a happy book.

Having said that, I would imagine that the lives of those original Carters were probably no happier than the average person’s. For one thing, A.P. and Sara Carter divorced in 1936 when he was 45 and she 35. She had fallen in love with a cousin whom A.P. had asked to chauffeur her around. The original Carters continued to tour and occasionally perform together for another seven years—the book does make clear that the cash flow the Carters realized from their music put them way beyond what their neighbors and relatives in Maces Spring, Virginia, could ever hope for. After 1943 A.P. and Sara dropped out—he returned to Virginia to putter around for the remaining 17 years of his life, and she moved to California to live with her second husband. The remaining third of the original trio, Maybelle, brought her daughters Helen, June, and Anita into the group and kept the act going another 15 years or so. The final manifestation of the Carters was as part of the cast of the Johnny Cash show from 1968-1971. June Carter, as most readers will know, had married Johnny Cash in 1968.

It was interesting to read how A.P. Carter, after finding that there was money to be had for songs, set about scouring the hamlets and farms of Appalachia in the 1930s to find new material to record. A.P. and the other Carters wrote plenty of songs on their own, but they didn’t have the concept of “originality” about their music that people have today. A good song was a like a good chest of drawers—it was much more important that it answer to its intended purpose than that it be the unique and indubitable work of a particular artist.

There is something really cool about reading a book about a group of performers and then being able to go onto YouTube and watch them perform. June, who I had only ever known as a slightly daffy and rather devout senior citizen, began her career as a kind of Grand Old Opry commedienne—here she is at the top of her form:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLFfHRTA9mc&feature=related

I dig that crazy dancing.

June was considered the least talented of the sisters, at least musically. Anita was considered a fine singer—an opinion I share, based on these samples:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4e700oABl4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flRnZT438Mk

The Carters in the 1950s knew and were very involved in the careers of Hank Williams, Chet Atkins, and of course Johnny Cash. They were nationally famous. And yet they remained very unspoiled, still working hard to make a living, still driving themselves to gigs all over the country, and still very much a family dealing with all the strife and stress of relationships, money, fixing dinner. When they weren’t working they would return to houses and communities in southwest Virginia where indoor plumbing was considered a luxury.

The music that the original Carters made sounds a bit odd to my ears—the performances seem stiff and the women sing quite a bit lower than is fashionable today. But after a couple of listens it begins to work on me. I begin to recognize how much Carter music I’ve been listening to second-hand for all these years—Bob Dylan’s great rendition of “The Girl from the Greenbriar Shore,” for example.

The connecting thread from the original trio’s first performances in 1927 through to the Johnny Cash days is Maybelle Carter—generally referred to as Mother Maybelle Carter. I’ve always found this moniker a bit offputting. It suggests a parochialism and a kind of emotional claustrophobia—“mother” is a term that I think should be used sparingly in professional situations. But, having read this book, Maybelle Carter is now OK with me. A consummate professional musician who just happened to be in business with her in-laws and then with her children, in the 1960s Maybelle took a job in a hospital sitting up with patients through the night. Why? To supplement her income. It would never have occurred to her that such work was beneath her. There’s a wonderful bit in the book where Johnny Cash recalls convincing Maybelle that she should give up this second career:

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

“Why’s that?”

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

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

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

“Of course I do.”

Years later, Johnny would proudly recall that day. “She never worked at the hospital again.”

In her final decade Maybelle was lionized, cheered vigorously at folk festivals around the country by dope-smoking hoardes. Singing “Wildwood Flower” and playing her distinctive guitar style--the Carter scratch, it was called. I wonder what she thought of The Beverly Hillbillies.