Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  Sara gathered a small group of girlfriends and became someone the others looked to. She wasn’t one for confiding—nobody really knew her business—but Sara was full of sneaky fun, always had sharp little asides about the people of the Valley. “I loved Sara,” Ruby Parker says. “She was funny as a monkey. We’d walk down to Neal’s store together, and she always came up with something to make you laugh.” And she could be counted on from the day she moved to Poor Valley. Out visiting one day, she found one of her friends, who was six months pregnant, in a hot fever of Spanish flu. And the woman was still on her feet, trying to feed her six children. Sara, then seventeen, put her to bed, with promises to fix corn bread and beans so the family could eat. And she kept coming back until the woman was strong enough to get out of bed.

  Sara’s friends loved her best for her solidity and her self-assurance; she might be quiet, but she was not to be crossed, and she did as she pleased. Like a lot of her girlfriends who worked so hard and so ably, she felt whatever freedom she wanted to take was her due. She might be bonded to work, but the bondage stopped there. Her granddaughters like to say that Sara was liberated before there was such a thing. She hunted and fished; she wore pants and smoked cigarettes. She danced if she wanted, even when her husband caviled. This “liberation” wasn’t an idea Sara and her friends got from women’s magazines. It came right out of life. They had earned the right to do as they pleased—and they did.

  “The older women didn’t cut their hair,” says Sara’s granddaughter Flo Wolfe. “It was biblical. A woman should never cut her hair. Sara had long hair when she moved to the Valley. Then Sara, Myrtle Hensley, Dicey Thomas, and Aunt Vangie, who all buddied around, they decided to cut their hair short, and didn’t tell any of the men. The men probably didn’t like that too much.” Whatever the men thought, it wasn’t of much consequence. The deeply religious Pleasant may have been chastened by his wife’s newly bobbed hair, but all he could do was take the flowing (and now discarded) mane of hair and put it in a place for safekeeping.

  The bottom line was, A.P. and Sara annoyed each other. But A.P. needed his wife like he needed air. He adored her (though he’d never figure out how to tell her), and not least for her musical talent. As soon as she moved over the mountain, Sara had joined in with Fland Bays’s choir at Mount Vernon. When they went to singing conventions, Fland always wanted Pleasant and Sara along. In the twenties, singing conventions drew church choirs from all over Southwest Virginia. Hundreds of people would gather in front of a rigged-up stage, while a dozen choirs (or trios, quartets, and quintets) awaited their own call. At Gate City singing conventions, they even had a printed program, with a listing of all the groups and the songs they would sing. The stage would be set on the courthouse steps, and the main street had to be closed to traffic.

  At the conventions, Sara would not only sing, she’d also accompany the choir on the autoharp. Ruby Parker remembers how Sara’s lone contralto could move an entire gathering. “Everybody at the courthouse would be standing up, had their hands up in the air,” Ruby says. “She could get down so low. She was a special talent.”

  “The first song my mother ever sang in public as a solo was in Bland County, Virginia,” Gladys said. “She was there with Daddy and Uncle Fland Bays at a singing convention. They asked if anyone would volunteer for a song, so she took the harp and sang ‘The Wandering Boy.’ She said that the people came around and gave her money.

  “I know Mommy said somewhere her and Daddy went and sang at a church and some man gave her ten dollars. That was a lot of money. She told the man he didn’t have to give her anything, and he said you’ve got the prettiest voice I ever heard, and I want you to have it. It pleased her to death.”

  A.P. was starting to understand that music could mean money. And what with money being pressed into her palm, Sara wasn’t oblivious to it, either. Still, it was only in extremis that she would pass the hat. In 1925 A.P. and Sara borrowed Eck’s car to visit Buff and Mae, who had moved to Charlottesville. On the way home they’d barely made it out of Charlottesville when the car broke down. Dead broke and stranded more than two hundred miles from home, A.P. asked Sara for suggestions about raising cash. “All I know to do is sing,” Sara said. So A.P. got the permission of the local preacher, booked a schoolhouse, and told the town storekeeper to put out the word: They were going to give an entertainment. By the time they’d finished, Pleasant and Sara had raised enough money to get the car fixed and had some left over when they got home.

  Still, for Sara, music was mainly fun, for playing with friends and neighbors. Maybe the local postman, Price Owens, would join in, or Cleo Vermillion. They’d make music right in that little cabin at the foot of Clinch Mountain, and people would amble over to sit on the porch and listen, then Sara would invite them in for blackberry cobbler. The music got to be even more fun when her cousin visited from Rich Valley. The girl was just a teenager, but she had already made herself a queen of the guitar; she even had a way of plucking out the rhythm part under her own melody. Add Sara’s lush voice and her autoharp and there was no better music in either valley. The two were so good that a local teacher invited them to play for her students at the Maces Springs School.

  Seventy-five years later, one of those students can still conjure the picture of the two of them that day, sitting with their instruments at the head of the class. She can still see Sara, with her regal, stiff-necked bearing, and the young cousin’s lively blue eyes, her curly dark hair. Sara’s cousin was so tiny, she could have passed for a grade-school student herself that day. But she was like a miracle to those kids, working her Stella guitar so hard she busted a string—and went right on playing. “It was the grandest thing there ever was,” the long-ago schoolgirl remembers. “Sara and Maybelle.”

  Maybelle Addington (Lorrie Davis Bennett)

  Maybelle’s father, Hugh Jack Addington, sitting at right with high lace-up boots. Her mother, Margaret Kilgore Addington, standing with her hand on Hugh Jack’s shoulder. Uncle Mil (sitting at far left) and Aunt Nick (standing at far left) raised Sara. (Carter Family Museum)

  Maybelle

  Not long after the schoolhouse performance, Maybelle was invited back to Maces Springs to perform with Sara and A.P. Half a century later, Maybelle remembered the date plainly, December 13, 1925: “I’d gone to Sara and A.P.’s to do a show at a schoolhouse,” she told her good friend Dixie Deen Hall. “A.P.’s brother was in the play, and he was going with a schoolteacher there at the school. Well, he was supposed to take her home, but he didn’t. He came with me back over to A.P.’s house, and that was the beginning of it. Everybody had been expecting him and this schoolteacher to get married, and I had a boyfriend, too, who was kindly disappointed.”

  That evening in December, Maybelle Addington fell for the most eligible young bachelor in Poor Valley: Ezra J. “Eck” Carter. That was Eck for you, charmed for life. Eck’s friends and his brothers had been dragging themselves across Clinch Mountain in search of a Rich Valley girl, and one walks right in Eck’s front door. And not just anyone, but maybe the finest flower in all Rich Valley. Here was a young woman—a girl, really—who could sing, dance, play a guitar, ride a horse or a motorcycle or a running board, and bake a banana cream pie to curl your toes. She also provided instant ballast for Eck’s orneriness. She could sit for hours making new friends while Eck would sneak off after “Hello.” She never got rattled. Hard work didn’t scare her a bit, and neither did hard play. Meanwhile, she also thought Eck Carter was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, which was just fine with him.

  Eck was so impatient (and Maybelle so undemanding) that they didn’t wait for her seventeenth birthday, or even for Eck to build Maybelle a house of her own. “All of a sudden, the first thing I knew, we were married. I met him on the thirteenth of December and we were married on the thirteenth of March. We eloped . . . just slipped off and got married. I think I was only ever out with him three times alone—my father and mother were pretty strict on all of us,
and one of my brothers always came along. We got married in the preacher’s home in Bristol, and Virgie—Eck’s twin—and her husband, Roy, were the only two with us. We didn’t have a honeymoon. That night, the same play we had given in Maces Springs was supposed to be given at Hiltons, so we caught the train from Bristol and rode down to Hiltons. The snow was knee-deep, and you talk about cold! I had my guitar, because we were supposed to play, but the weather was so bad they canceled, and there we were in Hiltons . . . stranded. Well, we walked back up to Maces, to Uncle Lish Carter’s, and my husband’s first cousin Gordon Bays, who wasn’t married, walked up the railroad track through the snow with us, carrying my guitar . . . not knowing I was married.”

  It should be noted that Eck let his cousin perform his chivalrous courting duty, without a word. “When we got to the house we told them, and Gordon just hollered, ‘What! Well, I guess I’d better just go on home then.’ ”

  * * *

  On that snowy wedding night, March 13, 1926, Eck and Maybelle stayed with Uncle Lish. After that, they moved in with Bob and Mollie Carter, in the one-room cabin with the sleeping loft above. Even so, Eck was still living a charmed life. In the middle of one moonlit night not long after the wedding, a racket commenced in Pa Carter’s front yard: first the tub-thumping, then the cowbells, and then the shouts and yodels. Poor Valley was there to shivaree Eck. A shivaree is a vaguely barbaric and unsettling old pagan ritual wherein a new husband (and sometimes a new fiancé) is stripped down, tied to a greasy pole, slathered with assorted and odoriferous substances, and carried around his house and outbuildings. Either it had been too long since Bob Carter himself was a newlywed, or he’d been fast asleep and wasn’t thinking on a waked mind, so he went out onto the porch in his split-tail long johns and started jumping up and down, telling everyone to go home. This only got the party’s blood up. So without further preliminaries, they tied Pa Carter to the greasy pole and paraded him around the house while Eck slept peacefully next to his new bride.

  Actually, the living arrangement worked out just fine. Eck’s railroad job took him away from home for three or four days at a time, and Maybelle didn’t like being alone. So they stayed with Bob and Mollie nearly a year. Maybelle gladly helped her new mother-in-law with the cooking and the cleaning, watched the younger children, and added a warm and easy glow to the cabin. Even the cousins from the other side of the Knob started tramping over to see this new girl. “There was a sleeping loft in the cabin,” remembers one of those cousins, Stella Bays. “We went upstairs, and Maybelle was sitting on the side of the bed with a guitar. She had bobbed hair, but long, down below her chin. Black hair. She had on dark-rimmed glasses, and she had freckles, brown freckles. Had a lot of freckles. She was sitting on the straw tick on the bed. Maybelle was a little shy at the beginning. At first, she never liked to play her guitar for just family. Whenever we’d say, ‘Maybelle, play something for us,’ she would hesitate. Then when she got started, she opened up.”

  Maybelle Addington was born May 10, 1909, across the mountain in Midway, Virginia, just a quarter mile from the Copper Creek home where Sara Dougherty was raised. Maybelle’s mother and Sara’s mothers had been sisters, both Kilgores. Maybelle’s daddy was a sometime farmer, rolling-mill operator, storekeeper, and moonshiner named Hugh Jack Addington. Hugh Jack was a big square-jawed man with bright, piercing eyes, who proudly traced his family heritage back to a British prime minister, Henry Addington. The family freely admitted that Prime Minister Henry had been more or less run out of office on a rail, but not before he gave sage advice that led to General Wellington’s shellacking of Napoleon.

  The first of this Addington line in America was William, an educated young Londoner who emigrated for the sheer adventure of it. As a commissary officer in the Revolutionary War, William Addington had been charged with helping to feed and supply Washington’s army. William nevertheless made it through the conflict without being shot by one of his own, and was at Yorktown to witness Cornwallis’s surrender. After the war, William took his soldier’s land grant and settled in Southwest Virginia with his wife and young son, Charles Cromwell Addington, who was born in 1777. In 1805 Charles moved to Copper Creek, where he lived until his death at the age of 104. When the town threw him a centennial party in 1877, the table was two hundred feet long, and its bounty fed more than a thousand people. By then Charles had been married three times, and accounted for 16 children, 107 grandchildren, and 443 great-grandchildren.

  When Maybelle was growing up, Rich Valley was crawling with Addingtons, all close or distant kin. Her own schoolteacher was A.P.’s old singing buddy, Ezra Addington. Two of the three horseback mail carriers were Addingtons (and so was the first substitute). In and around Nickelsville, a town of 150 souls, there were four different Joe Addingtons. “There was Big Joe, Little Joe, Caverat Joe, and Pennywhinkle Joe,” says Daphne McConnell, who grew up with Maybelle. “Pennywhinkle. Like the little shells they used to gather them on the side of the creek. Big Joe was my great-uncle. . . . No, Little Joe wasn’t his son. Little Joe was Pennywhinkle’s son. I know it’s confusing. Like Opal Addington married Will Addington. Lot of Addingtons married Addingtons.”

  Hugh Jack married Margaret Elizabeth Kilgore, but he did his part in producing Addingtons: Their issue included Madge, Dewey, D.J. (“Deejer”), Willie B. (“Sawcat”), Norma, Maybelle, Linnie Myrl, Hugh Jack Jr. (“Doc”), Milburn B. (“Toobe”), and Warren M. (“Bug”). They moved all around the area—even got burned out of two homes—but always kept a big house. They lived in two-story English-style whitewashed cottages, with wood-rail fencing, cisterns for water, and walk-in cellars for winter storage. Hugh Jack liked to keep an ice house, too. In winter, he’d take a mill saw down to Copper Creek, cut out three-foot cubes of ice, and drag them up the hill with his team of oxen. During the flu epidemic of 1918, neighbors knew if they came to his house, Hugh Jack would gladly give over what ice he could to ease their fevered and dying kin. Even if the folks were hurried and fretting, Hugh Jack was glad for the company. Nothing made him happier than having a new ear to bend. “Hugh Jack was the big talker,” says his niece Mary Bell Easterling. “I remember him sitting out on the porch telling tales. Hugh Jack was full of life.”

  He loved running the Green Store, which was his own general store that stood on top of the big hill running up from the “bent” of Copper Creek. Like they did at Neal’s general store in Poor Valley, people congregated at the Green Store. Sometimes there were even fresh faces who didn’t already know Hugh Jack’s tall tales. And truth be told, his clientele always had a little more ready cash to spend—especially toward the end of the year, when wholesalers would come into the area and buy up geese and turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Between that and a healthy trade in moonshine, a lot of folks had spare cash. So besides the staples like flour, beans, and coffee, Hugh Jack stocked his store for the up and coming. He had writing quills (a lot of unschooled farmers around Nickelsville were willing to pay to learn to read and write at the summer “subscription schools”); new shoes (some people in Rich Valley had one pair of shoes for church alone; they’d walk to church in one pair, then change into a fresh, unsullied pair before going in); a little jewelry (Hugh Jack liked bringing beads and crystals home to his wife); and sparkling sets of pressed-glass dishes. Margaret’s pride was her store-bought pressed-glass punch bowl. When the Addingtons entertained, she’d fill that punch bowl to the brim and surround it with home-baked cakes.

  But it wasn’t just Elizabeth’s food and Hugh Jack’s drink that made the party. When Dewey was old enough, he started playing dance music with his uncle Steve Kilgore. Both could play banjo and guitar, and sometimes Ap Harris would join in with his fiddle. Passersby would see the furniture set neatly on the front lawn, with the rugs rolled up and set gently on top, hear that music, and know there was dancing going on inside.

  When her older siblings first started making music, Maybelle was too young to join in, and anyway, she was her mothe
r’s daughter straight down the line: She wasn’t one to step forward on her own. She had her mother’s stature (when Maybelle first started going to school, she wasn’t much bigger than the little doll she’d carry with her on the little rock footbridge that spanned Copper Creek and led to her school), and she had Margaret’s temperament (nobody ever heard Maybelle raise her voice). As a young girl, she was so small and unassuming that she might have disappeared altogether in a crowd. But there was something magnetic about Maybelle. First off, her eyes were riveting. They were blue, but so pale they had a silvery, mirrorlike quality. And she had a way of making people see their own best selves in her eyes, because those eyes almost always looked pleased. Her hair was black and wavy, but when it was humid out, and especially when it rained, those waves would curl in unruly tendrils around her face.

  Maybelle showed no particular genius at the Saratoga school, not in Ezra Addington’s classroom and not even at Flanders Bays’s singing school. But long before she hit her teens, she proved herself precocious in one way: After she pulled her mother’s autoharp down onto the floor, she’d quickly learned to play it. Then she moved straightaway to “banjo pickin’ ” (which she learned from her mother) and claimed first prize at a Copper Creek banjo contest when she was just twelve. When she was thirteen, her brothers got a guitar. Around this time, Gibson and Martin were making guitars with stronger bracing for higher tension on the strings; the brightness of the new guitar sound captivated Maybelle.