Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  By the time Pleasant was twenty, Flanders Bays was teaching singing schools all over southwestern Virginia. Uncle Fland was much under the spell of James D. Vaughan, a publisher whose close-harmonizing gospel quartets were the new musical sensation of southern choirs. Four or five times a year, new gospel composition books would arrive at the Bays home from Vaughan’s publishing house in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. Then Fland would load up his horse with dozens of fresh new songbooks—Crowning Praise was a favorite—and head out through Hamilton Gap to the other side of Clinch Mountain, or farther out to Washington County or Russell.

  “He had a burning desire for music, and to see people saved,” says Fland’s son Vernon. “He’d always open his schools with prayer and with a short Bible reading. And he closed it with prayer. It was a devotional, religious service.”

  Next to the annual revival, Fland Bays’s dollar-a-day singing school was the biggest event of the year in hidden-away hamlets all over that pinched corner of Virginia. On the north side of Clinch Mountain, in Copper Creek, there might be thirty or more people who’d sign up for the school. They’d sometimes travel from neighboring towns and bed down with relatives for the chance to cram into the Saratoga school-house every day for four or five hours, ten days straight, learning how to read shape notes, how to master their voices, and, as they advanced, how to use those voices in the close harmonies of southern gospel. “Everybody would go,” says Daphne Kilgore Stapleton, who went with her girlfriend Maybelle Addington (later Carter). “All the young people would go to learn the notes and to sing up the scale and back down.”

  Fland Bays wasn’t one to put on airs; he often presided over the school in his denim overalls. But he was never lax about the music. “He always taught us to be able to read three notes ahead,” says Ruby Parker. “You would be singing notes to music, do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti-do, eight notes. And Flanders Bays would stand right over you and just listen, and when you missed a note he’d stop you, that quick. He could catch a sound as quick as anything. He knowed his stuff, buddy.”

  Sometimes, if Pleasant could get free of his farm chores, he’d go to his uncle’s singing schools to help out. He’d willingly walk down the Valley toward Hiltons, then over Clinch Mountain, across Moccasin Valley, over Moccasin Creek, and across Moccasin Ridge to Copper Creek. That would be a difficult daylong trip, but once Pleasant was there, he could stay as long as he wanted. Mollie Carter had been born on that side of the mountain, and she had family there yet. Besides, travel suited him. He could walk all day in solitary contemplation, never minded being alone, and loved seeing what was around the next bend in the trail.

  Despite A.P.’s talents, farming was still the surest way to make a living in the Valley, and that meant he needed a piece of land all his own. So in 1911 Pleasant followed his father’s path to Richmond, Indiana, to take a temporary job as a carpenter on the railroad. More than twenty years earlier, a Bays in-law named John Smith had married an Indiana girl, moved up north, and found work on the railroad. Since that time, the Smiths had provided a pipeline from Clinch Mountain to Richmond. Young men from the Valley were always going to Richmond for high-paying work on the railroad. Like the rest, Pleasant figured that in a year or two he could raise enough money to buy a farm in the Valley, or maybe a sawmill. But Pleasant Carter didn’t last long in Indiana. His first expedition outside Virginia was a bust. He returned home with a blazing case of typhoid fever and memories of gnawing homesickness. According to his sister Virgie, Pleasant also returned with his first song in his pocket:

  She clung to me and trembled

  When I told her we must part

  She said don’t go, my darling

  It almost breaks my heart

  To think of you so far apart

  Carry me back to old Virginia

  Back to my Clinch Mountain home

  Carry me back to old Virginia

  Back to my old mountain home

  My mother’s old and feeble,

  My father’s getting gray

  I’m going back to old Virginia

  And I expect to stay

  At my old Clinch Mountain home

  Back home at Clinch Mountain, Pleasant’s fever was so intense that they shaved his head to keep him cool. Mollie nursed her oldest boy back to health, and he not only recovered but grew back a head of hair his sister-in-law Theda claimed was more lush and wavy than ever.

  Still, Pleasant had failed in his bid to stake himself. He tried to raise money doing farmwork for his uncle Lish Carter, but it must have been slow going on his uncle’s wages. Lish was one of the workingest men in the Valley, and he expected hard work from his farmhands. He was also tight as bark on a tree. “Lish wouldn’t give up a nickel for nothing,” one niece says.

  It was his musical uncle who rescued Pleasant. Flanders was acting as an agent for the Larkey nursery, selling fruit trees and house shrubs around Maces Springs. So pretty soon, he had his eldest nephew selling for the nursery, too—but Pleasant wasn’t content with the trade in Poor Valley. One day in 1914, with his leather side-pouch, his subscription booklet, and a color catalog of handpainted pictures of fruit and flowering trees, Pleasant Carter walked over Clinch Mountain to try for some sales by Copper Creek. Somebody had suggested he try his mother’s cousin Milburn Nickels, and Mil’s mother, Aunt Susie Nickels.

  The Nickels’ homes were even farther than the Saratoga school, but Pleasant must have thought it would be worth the extra effort. It’s a long, muscle-searing walk over Clinch Mountain, and the trip to Copper Creek probably took a few days, but as he crested the last little hill, where he could just see Aunt Susie’s house, Pleasant Carter heard singing coming from inside it. The way he’d tell the story later, the music quickened his weary step. It was deep for a woman’s voice, but a woman’s voice for sure. “Aunt Susie had one of these tall, old-fashioned sewing machines, and I was standing beside it and my autoharp was on top of it, and I was just kind of playing around with it,” the owner of that voice would recall many years later. “I remember I was singing ‘Engine 143,’ an old song I learned as a little girl, and this fellow knocked on the door.”

  Pleasant motioned for her to go on singing, and then stood very nearly still in Susie Nickels’s front room, watching the young woman. Sara Dougherty was only sixteen and still wore her long brown hair down over her shoulders. While it was Sara’s voice that first drew him, Pleasant always said it was the way her dark eyes held a constant play of sparking light that transfixed him. He listened to the entire song, a ballad about a train engineer burned to death in a bloody train wreck while trying to make up lost time. The engineer, it seems, hadn’t listened to his mother’s caution. And he ended up in a lonesome grave, pining for the engine he loved.

  “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.”

  Whether Susie or Mil Nickels bought a single tree or shrub from Pleasant Carter is lost in time. But the girl in the front room, Sara Dougherty, did manage to sell Pleasant a set of dishes out of her own subscription booklet. Pleasant and Sara’s first child claimed the inventory included a set of glasses, a clear pitcher with a cranberry design, a berry set, six dessert dishes, a three-legged fruit bowl, and a vegetable boat.

  Even Sara must have known that no bachelor traveling salesman needed six dessert dishes and a vegetable boat, but she made the sale just the same. For Pleasant, he liked to quote himself when he told the story. “I said to Sary, ‘If I thought I had a chance with you, I’d take the whole book.’ ”

  Sara Dougherty (Carter Family Museum)

  Thursa Mae, Sara (right), and their brothers, not long after their mother died (Carter Family Museum)

  Sara

  A. P. Carter was not without reputation on Sara’s side of the mountain. He’d spent a fair amount of time around Copper Creek already, been seen and heard. �
��I thought he was a good citizen,” the local schoolmaster, Ezra Addington, remembered seventy years later: “He was tall and slender, pleasant-looking, like his name.” Stories of Pleasant’s musical talents were also out on the vine. Besides helping out at Flanders Bays’s singing school, Pleasant Carter had lent his trembling bass from time to time to Ezra Addington’s choir, which met at the schoolhouse or at Ezra’s home a few miles over in Nickelsville. Ezra had three altos and four sopranos in his regular group, along with a couple of tenors, but an extra bass was always welcome. Most of the time they’d sing Sunday evenings. After church services and Sunday dinner, the group would walk by lantern light over to Ezra’s, gather around his eighteen-stroke organ and open their Windows of Heaven hymnals. “All we sang was hymns, church songs,” Ezra says. “The men wore ties—not bows—but regular ties, and white shirts. Maybe there were a few short sleeves in the summertime. A.P. sung with us a whole lot. A.P. was a great singer back then.”

  Still, whatever pleasing qualities were attributed to Pleasant Carter, it’s also true that the citizens of Copper Creek had a fairly rounded-out picture of him. Reports of Pleasant’s “wiftiness” had also made their way across Clinch Mountain. As Ezra’s own wife recalled, “He was a good boy, but he was a jumbled person, wasn’t he?” Maybe that was the root of A.P.’s initial difficulties with young Sara. Or maybe one has to take Sara at her word. When Pleasant Carter first began to show interest in her, Sara told one relative she would never marry him, because she simply didn’t like him.

  Sara Dougherty was one to look at all sides of a prospect; she was not going to get swept away by romance. Her delicious brown eyes, wavy dark hair, and rich, textured voice might have launched scores of romantic flights of fancy among the local boys, but Sara had her feet planted firmly on the soil. She was a shy girl, a bit standoffish as she grew older, and later still, she could be downright remote. The earliest picture of her shows a four-year-old staring intently, almost broodingly, at the camera. The natural set of her already full lips pushes down toward a frown. That first picture captured precisely her own wide streak of stubbornness. Her girlhood nickname was Jake, in honor of her straight-backed bearing and her nearly masculine reserve. To this day, family, friends, and acquaintances are most likely to remember her as “regal.”

  Sara was one of five children, born to Sevier and Elizabeth Kilgore Dougherty on July 21, 1898, just north of Copper Creek in Wise County, where her father ran a shift at a sawmill in a growing coal-mining camp. But Elizabeth died of typhoid when Sara was just three, and that family was lost. Nobody remembers Sevier Dougherty doing much work of any kind after that; he just traveled around, staying with friends and relatives. Wherever he went, he carried a sack full of books. Sevier loved to read, to no real end but for the simple pleasure of it, for the escape. The three Dougherty sons—Bob, Nathan, and Stephen—spent their childhoods shuttling among friends and relatives, while Sara and her older sister, Thursa Mae, were sent to live with their mother’s sister and her husband. Sevier was often at that house to see them, but he was never a steady presence in his daughters’ lives.

  Whatever hurt Sara suffered as a parentless child, she kept inside. Singing the ballads of death and dying, of family members cold in their graves, of orphaned children, lonely women, and jailed men seemed one of the few releases she allowed herself. Besides, what Jake liked best (though it was not always easy to see) was being in the middle of fun. Around Copper Creek, that was never very hard.

  A.P. Carter’s home came by its name honestly. The farmland in Poor Valley, especially as it recedes from the Holston River, is mineral-shy and arid, not the best growing ground. But Sara’s childhood home, called Rich Valley, had dark and loamy land, with raw limestone out-croppings jutting through to announce the minerals within. And where the Poor Valley landscape was full of rocky escarpments that seemed to close in on its citizens, Rich Valley was wide open, with gentle, undulating hills. The farming was a little better, the fields a little greener, the pastures a little flatter. Life in Rich Valley was less severe. In Poor Valley, Mollie Carter sought calm in deep religious faith; in Rich Valley, her cousin Milburn Nickels found ease in the pure fun of living.

  It was Milburn and his wife, Melinda, who took in Sara and her sister. Uncle Mil and Aunt Nick (as Melinda was called) never could have children of their own, but over the years the couple raised or cared for more than a dozen orphaned children. Mil and Nick took all comers in their four-room, wood-planked country cottage . . . and they were poised for more. Aunt Nick kept her table set twenty-four hours a day, the food covered with a cloth, in case anybody—friend or stranger—happened by hungry. The Nickels never wanted for food. They cut ice from Copper Creek in winter and packed it in sawdust. It usually lasted deep into the summer, keeping the meats without curing. Even in the longest winter, the dug cellar was stocked to the end. Aunt Nick kept three waist-high staved barrels in the cellar: one for beans, one for kraut, and one for salted brine pickles. Uncle Mil did a little teaching, raised hogs, corn, and tobacco, laid out apple and peach orchards. When they got old enough, Sara and Mae (Thursa) helped out by picking berries for jam, pickling, canning, quilting, and keeping house. In the late spring and early summer, after they’d walked home from the Saratoga school, there was always time to go the extra quarter mile down the hill to the “bent” of Copper Creek.

  Some afternoons Sara would walk over to Ethyl Bush’s house to listen to Ethyl and her friend Eb Easterling play their five-bar autoharps. “They used to show me a lot about playing. I was just a little girl then, less than ten years old, I guess,” Sara once said. “I was about ten or twelve when I got my first [autoharp]. I sold greeting cards to raise money and ordered it from the Sears, Roebuck catalog for about eight or ten dollars. It was an eight-bar.”

  Playing an instrument put Sara right in the swim of the Nickels house. Music was the fun in that house, as present as oxygen, and free to boot. Most days, Uncle Mil would rise before the sun, start the fire, pick up his fiddle, and play for an hour. He favored older tunes like “Pine Dreams,” “Soap Suds,” “Fatal Wedding,” and “Johnny Put the Kettle On and We’ll All Have Tea.” Mil was the melody in the house, but he was always happy for his wife’s makeshift accompaniment. Aunt Nick would grab her knitting needles and tap out the rhythm on the fiddle’s wood frame, or follow along on a harmonica of her own making, a comb with a piece of paper pulled tight across it. Some Saturdays, Ap Harris—Rich Valley’s blue-ribbon fiddler—would show up to play with Mil. When news got out that those two were making music together, people would head straight for Mil’s house. The two fiddlers would do the fast tunes, and Aunt Nick and the neighbors would have to push back the furniture or put it out in the yard so that people had room to dance. It wasn’t long before Sara was able enough on the banjo to join in, and then she was hooked for good.

  Before Sara reached her teens, she had already formed a girl group with her cousin Madge Addington. Madge’s home was a five-minute walk up the hill, and in that house, musical instruments didn’t have to be improvised. The Addingtons had a banjo, a guitar, a five-bar autoharp, and an old-timey organ. Madge and Sara both played guitar, banjo, or autoharp, so they switched off, playing old ballads and gospel songs. In the first years of the twentieth century, older folks all over Rich Valley had songs to sing, and they were happy to share them with eager young girls such as Madge and Sara.

  In Sara’s childhood, before the phonograph, music was passed around Rich Valley in two ways. The first was a straight lineal transmission. Old fiddle airs and archaic Scotch-Irish ballads came across the ocean with forebears and were passed down through generations. Each generation added (or subtracted) verses to fit the times, but the songs retained a general integrity. When the local fiddlers played tunes at frolics, the songs were pretty close to the ones being played in North Carolina or Georgia or Texas, or even out in Montana where the Welsh and Irish were flocking to the mines—and also pretty close to the old airs still being pl
ayed in Liverpool or County Cork. Ballads worked the same way. Around Copper Creek, old folks sang “The Storms Are on the Ocean” or “Sailor Boy Song” in the unaccompanied ancient modal way, with a high nasal delivery favored in the Old World.

  But when Sara was a girl first learning the autoharp, a more modern mode of song transmission was taking root. New, professionally written songs were traveling, too. The old minstrel shows and the newer vaudeville and “physic” shows would come through Scott County, and even if the denizens of Copper Creek couldn’t make it to the big town for a show, the music made its way around. After any show, sheet music was made available to the audience. The bigger touring vaudeville shows had rafts of sheet music, sold by the page or by the book. Even self-employed minstrels sold their songs on “ballets” they’d had printed up. So somebody might come back to Copper Creek from the Gate City theater carrying a new song to sing. The songs felt like their own, too, because newer songs written by Tin Pan Alley professionals owed much to the imagery and (often dewy) sentiment of traditional Anglo-Irish ballads. The new songs leaned heavily on mother and home (and the leaving of same), lonely wandering in the cruel, cruel world, and dying wishes. The songs also owed much to the first great American tragedy, the Civil War.