Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  In 1930 the Carters had begun to put African-American sacred songs on record: “On a Hill Lone and Gray,” “I’m Working on a Building” (which was a “Holy Ghost building”), the rousing “Let the Church Roll On,” and “On My Way to Canaan’s Land,” in which A.P. would shout in Seymouresque exclamation, “Praise God!” In “Canaan’s Land,” it didn’t matter if mother, father, sister, and brother weren’t going on high, the singer was going it alone with Jesus. Maybe the best was “When the World’s on Fire,” which had been recorded as “Rock of Ages” by Blind Willie Davis, a black singer-guitarist from McComb, Mississippi. On the Carter record, Maybelle played in Davis’s bottleneck-guitar style. Woody Guthrie would be so taken with that melody that he’d make it the basis for his American anthem to inclusion, “This Land Is Your Land.”

  A.P. also had an instant affinity for the secular country-blues music Riddle brought him. Riddle, who used to lock himself in his room and make music when he was feeling down, never saw the blues as a racial statement. For him, it was just a way to channel a feeling toward sonic release. “Sometimes I’d get the blues and I’d be making chords that I can’t even remember. Get the blues and take off,” Riddle once said. “Blues ain’t nothing but a man feeling sad.” Woody Guthrie, another man who traveled back and forth between the worlds of white and black musicians, didn’t see any great divide between the races where the blues was concerned. “I always just called it just plain old being lonesome,” he told Alan Lomax in 1940. “You can get lonesome for a lot of things. People down around where I come from, they’re lonesome for a job. Lonesome for some spending money. Lonesome for some drinking whiskey. Lonesome for good times, pretty gals, wine, women, and song like they see stuck up in their face by other people. Thinking maybe that you were down and out, disgusted, busted, and can’t be trusted gives you a lonesome feeling. That somehow the world sorta turned against you or there’s something about it you don’t understand. . . . Blues are awful popular in jails.”

  The way Guthrie saw it, though, the most potent blues started with one of America’s most isolated indigenous wanderers, the runaway slave. He noted that “Lonesome Road Blues,” the song used in the 1940 film of Steinbeck’s great Okie story, The Grapes of Wrath, came from just that man. “It was wrote by a colored slave that run off from his master and went up north,” Guthrie told Lomax. “It’s pretty cold up there. He worked up there a little bit, stayed in jail, got treated like a dog. So he wrote this song, or got it started.” The runaway slave was America’s ultimate existential man, cut off from a heritage of his own, beyond family, without home. And in this song, even after he makes it north to freedom, he finds no peace. The terrifying discovery at the end of the road is that he’s got no place to be, no place except maybe the road itself. The best he can hope for is to get “where the climate suits my clothes.”

  A.P. knew what it was to be lonesome for something. He’d grown up set apart by odd and undefined longings, and had always been on the road to a destiny he couldn’t describe. With his ear to that tune, and with Maybelle’s ability to pick up the guitar licks Riddle showed her, the Carters began making some pretty convincing church-house blues. Their audience responded to it immediately, making “Worried Man Blues” their biggest seller of the year.

  * * *

  In “Worried Man Blues,” a man goes across the river to sleep, wakes up a prisoner in chains, and has no idea what he’s done wrong. That song spoke a simple unjustifiable truth: Some men were born to the poor and lonesome class in America, and despite the national promise, that class was hard to escape. Even if somebody did, the hellhounds stayed on his trail. Having come up in Poor Valley, A.P. had to know deep down his own good fortune could vaporize, and without reason. If life in Poor Valley taught him anything, it taught him that truth. But when the nation started to slide deeper into economic depression in the early thirties, the Carters were still doing a lot better than their neighbors. They were doing better than most of their professional brethren, too. By 1931 Pop and Hattie Stoneman’s royalties had dried up, and they hadn’t saved a dime. The Stonemans and their many children were living in a lean-to shack with an old army-issue canvas tent for a roof. Other musicians were failing to make recording dates. The Norton, Virginia, banjo player and singer Dock Boggs missed a date because he simply couldn’t raise the train fare. Record sales were down to a tenth of what they’d been in the high times of the late twenties. Okeh was bankrupt and gone.

  The big record companies were starting to cut their losses, putting money into already established acts such as the Carter Family. By 1931 no mountain group sold better, and even while sales dropped precipitously, Carter records had found a floor. After the two recording sessions with the Carters in 1930, Peer called for two more in 1931, and two in 1932. Ralph Peer was always looking for ways to spark sales, and he dreamed up a record that would introduce the Carters to the vast audience of his biggest-selling artist. Peer asked the Carters to come to Louisville in June of 1931 to make a record with Jimmie Rodgers.

  Of the hundreds of acts Ralph Peer had recorded, none had sold like Rodgers. Neither Peer nor anybody else at Victor saw it coming, nor did they make it happen. “Hits were accidents,” Peer’s old expedition mate Polk Brockman liked to say. “Nothing was planned.” In fact, Rodgers had to be pretty pushy to make it happen. According to his biographer, Nolan Porterfield, just a few weeks after Jimmie recorded at Bristol in August of 1927 (and before a single record had been released), Rodgers had already printed up new business cards and a letterhead: “National Radio Artist—Victor Recording Artist.” When his first record was finally released in October of 1927, Rodgers badgered the Victor office for sales figures. And when he wasn’t summoned by Peer, he hied himself to New York, checked in to a Manhattan hotel befitting a “Victor Recording Artist,” and gave Peer a call. Just happened to be passing through town, Rodgers said. Did Mr. Peer want him to stop over and cut a few more sides?

  Peer didn’t hesitate. By the time he’d made a second set of Rodgers recordings, the Victor man understood that this was a singer made for commerce. Rodgers wasn’t the “Blue Yodeler” for nothing. He had a way of being what listeners wanted him to be. He had enough Mississippi fried catfish in his voice to read “cracker” to any listener, but he was also bluesy enough to get with “the race” and randy enough to put a blush on the twenties’ most cynical café-society crowd. He was also young enough to find his way into the “lost generation.” (The first song he ever recorded for Peer in Bristol, “The Soldier’s Sweetheart,” was about a young girl who lost her lover to the “no-man’s-land” of the Great War.) Rodgers could also do something Peer had rarely heard. The other song he recorded at Bristol, “Sleep, Baby, Sleep,” was an old vaudeville song without much pop; Jimmie’s own wife called it “a thousand-year-old lullaby.” But Jimmie worked his way from chorus to chorus in a warble of throaty, high-pitched bawling so encompassing that it sounded like a railroad gandy-dancer shout, a roundup cattle call, and Polish polka yips all at once. At the second session, Rodgers re-created it on “Blue Yodel” (aka “T for Texas”). “I thought his yodel alone might spell success,” Peer said. “Blue Yodel” would go on to sell a million copies.

  Over the next few years, Peer never stopped trying to put Rodgers over as a popular star, backing him with Dixie string bands, juke-joint pianos, blues combos, and jazz orchestras. It paid off. Nearly every song Rodgers recorded sold a quarter of a million copies, and some would eventually top a million. Even at a fraction of what they had been, Rodgers’s 1931 sales were still well in front of the field. Jimmie Rodgers was arguably the first modern pop star. He was also, like so many pop stars who would follow, hard-drinking, hard-living, and hard-loving, and his music never obscured those hard facts. Rodgers’s “What’s It?” is a bouquet of unrestrained lust about a two-hundred-pound cornfed mama who likes to get out in the dark and pet.

  She takes her little what’s-it where she goes,

  Her what’s-it never
grows.

  When she walks down the street,

  Her what’s-it can’t be beat.

  She’s my gal, my dog-faced gal

  From Nashville, Tennessee.

  What made Rodgers’s randiest songs modern was that they were leering but never menacing. When mountain men got their blood up in song (“I been in the bin with the rough and rowdy men”), their women friends tended to end up in shallow graves. Jimmie wasn’t out to possess, and he had a way of letting a gal know he wanted to be pleased, but he wanted to be pleasing, too. Jimmie Rodgers didn’t know how to stop. Though Maybelle never would talk about it, her daughters all got the idea the Blue Yodeler made certain unwelcome advances at the session in Louisville. In June of 1931, however, Jimmie might have been all bark and no bite. He was so weak with tuberculosis that Maybelle had to play his guitar parts at the recording session. He could barely get through the cornpone skits he and Peer wrote:

  “Hey, hey, howdy folks, yodel-ay-ee-hee, so this is Virginia, huh? . . . Gee, I’ve been waiting to see you folks for a long time. . . . Say, what ole mountain is that laying over there? Ain’t that a pretty ole mountain? What is that mountain laying over there?”

  “That’s Clinch Mountain, Jimmie.”

  “Izzat that ole mountain you all been singing about so much? ‘My Clinch Mountain Home’? Izzat it? Izzat that ole Clinch Mountain? ‘My Clinch Mountain Home’?”

  “Say, Jimmie, things is getting good up here now. I went out last night, and my ole coon dogs treed two possums up one tree.”

  “Huh?”

  “Two possums up one tree.”

  “Two possums up one tree?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Yodel-ay-ee-hee! Boy, that’s too many possums up one tree. . . . Doggone, I ain’t never heard of that before. What kind of tree was it?”

  “That’s a black gum tree.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  None of the four showed much capacity for delivering this kind of tricked-up showbiz palaver, but throughout the session they all seemed game. Jimmie did two vocal duets with Sara, including “The Wonderful City,” which was the only gospel song he ever recorded. All four joined in on the decidedly un-Carteresque “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Porterfield has noted that not one of them seemed to know the words, but he also called it “the wildest, most audacious thing on the record—a scant twenty seconds of country scat, Sara in the lead, Maybelle solidly behind her, A.P. boldly bassing in, Rodgers filling in the gaps with the shimmering little yodels punctuated at the end by a big one. ‘Hey, hey,’ says Jimmie, heading off for another snort. ‘Boy, tell ’em ’bout us.’ ”

  Porterfield has also noted that by the time of the Louisville recording session, Ralph Peer had hit upon a central tenet of the modern music industry: To boost sales, record companies needed more than performers—they needed stars. The audience wanted more than music; it wanted personalities. And though the Carters were never hungry for celebrity, they were willing to do almost anything to keep their new livelihood on track, to keep away the Depression-era woe they saw all around them. More than anything, they were eager to please their audience, no matter the size.

  It was around this time that Minnie Adams’s father moved the family over to Hiltons, where he had been hired to fix up another state road. Living not more than five miles down that road, Minnie found out, was the Carter Family. “We were overjoyed,” remembers Minnie. “My aunt and me walked from Hiltons on the railroad all the way to the home-place to see them. We didn’t know them at all, but we were so anxious to see them because we had heard them all this time.”

  When Minnie and her aunt got to Maces Springs, they asked around until they found A.P. and Sara’s home. But when they knocked at the front door, A.P. and Sara weren’t there. Gladys was there alone, taking care of Joe, while their parents were out of town giving an entertainment. It was getting toward dark, so Gladys brought the two girls in, fed them supper, and let them spend the night. When A.P. and Sara came home the next day, Gladys told them how the Adams girls had walked all the way from Hiltons to meet them. So the Carter family sat the girls down and gave them a private entertainment. “Sara took off her shoes to get comfortable, and they made music right in the front room for us.”

  “Oh, their [celebrity] didn’t make them no different,” says Clyde Gardner. “They acted just about like they always did.”

  “I never did think I was very famous,” Maybelle told a young musician thirty years later. “Honey, I just didn’t look at it in that way. I was happy because our records were selling and people liked them.”

  Mary Bays at her son Dewey’s grave (Stella Bayes)

  Sara (center) with Stella, Stanley, Alma, and Coy (clockwise from left) (Stella Bayes)

  Sara’s Problem

  Sara Carter happily would have chosen comfort over fame. To put it plainly, as Sara always did, she couldn’t stand “all the folderol.” Though earnings from the music had given A.P. and Sara some margin of comfort in desperate Depression times, the demands of the business put extra weight on their marriage. For one thing, Sara was growing to hate the entertainments. She never could get comfortable onstage, behind the rigged-up lights, with an audience full of strangers staring at her. “Let’s just cut some more records,” she’d say. She soon began to balk at performing for live audiences, even when her husband pleaded. So A.P. would grudgingly fill out the act with his sister Sylvia and leave Sara behind with the children.

  It was one more thing to argue about in an already tense household. Running the house now fell to Sara alone. A.P. was constantly away on song-hunting trips, and the truth was, the way he spent money on big-ticket items, there wasn’t always a day-to-day cash margin. “You’ll hear Joe say [his father] would go out song-collecting and leave Sara with three kids—in February—up on that mountain, with no firewood, not a nickel to buy flour or sugar, and be gone for weeks at a time,” says one of A.P.’s old friends.

  Sometimes when Pleasant was gone, Sara would have to drag timber down off the mountain to sell to Eastman Kodak for a few dollars to keep the family fed. Bud Derting once saw Sara across the road at A.P.’s sawmill, chopping wood to fire the steam boiler. He says she was sweating hard in her work dress that day, barefoot, muddied up past her ankles, with little Joe at her knee playing in the ashes. “She’d be cutting down wood, pulling mining timbers out of the mountains—and Daddy out somewhere trying to learn a song,” says Joe. “He never stopped to think what effect it might have on his family.”

  Even when he was home, A.P. was not inclined toward the mundane, day-to-day tasks of scratching a living from the Valley. Some days, A.P. would grab Lesley Riddle and his guitar and they’d go sit under a tree, A.P. telling stories about the recording trips or the entertainments, and Riddle straining to teach A.P. to play a guitar. “I tried my best to learn him how to play, how to chord,” Riddle said. “I got so he could make G, C, and D, but he never could keep them in line. Instead of playing G, C, and D, he’d play D, G, and C. He turned around and played it backwards all the time. He tried to learn to play ‘Wabash Cannonball.’ He could sing it, but he tried to learn how to chord it, too. I don’t think he ever did learn. I had him so he knew two or three pretty good chords, the match-up chords. C, G, and D and things like that.

  “He liked to sing. He liked music. And he’d sit out there half a day if I’d sit with him. Lot of times I’d get disgusted and just get on up and go somewhere.”

  As frustrating as he could be as a pupil, Pleasant Carter was becoming even more difficult as a husband and father. A near solipsistic self-involvement had always been A.P.’s most maddening tic, and now that he was consumed by the recording business and the Carter Family’s place in it, it seemed Pleasant never stopped to think about anything or anybody else. When he was at home, he was more distant than ever, more jealous of his own thoughts, more apt to flare in anger when something impinged on his valuable songwriting time. “Mother never spanked me. Her voice was kind and calm.
Daddy had a violent temper,” Janette once wrote. “I felt, if she said, ‘Punish Janette,’ he would. He always used a razor strop, if not a wild cherry switch.” The tenderness he put on record, the way his own quavering voice graciously supported his wife’s star-vocal turns, was often missing at home. Sara bore her husband’s lack of regard in her stoic, unsentimental fashion. If A.P. had dropped to his knees and professed his undying love for her, Sara probably would have rolled her eyes and said, “Aw, pshaw.” That was the sort of thing, she’d always told herself, that she could do without.

  But there were times when life simply wore Sara down, when exhaustion made her tender in ways she never suspected. Returning home with the children one day, Sara found the big cedar by the house chopped away, cleared out to make room for a new maple A.P. was going to plant. Janette watched in wonder as her mother sat on the front porch and wept. She had never seen her mother cry over anything, and never would again. “I’ve often thought about that,” Janette says almost seventy years later. Even then, not yet ten years old, Janette knew this was about more than just a tree.

  Sara continued to wipe her children’s tears, cool their fevers, patch their cuts, bruises, and burns, and keep them in relative security. It was Sara who took the three children by train to Bristol to outfit them for school each year. She’d buy them each gloves, galoshes, cotton socks, new shoes, and Sunday dress-up clothes. Gladys and Joe got new winter coats, but Janette could always wear Gladys’s hand-me-down. Sara would also buy material so that she could sew the girls’ everyday dresses, which she did every year with the help of her friend Myrtle Hensley. After the shopping was done, Sara would hop on the train and haul the kids and the loot back to the Valley.