Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  “One night—Ezra had planted a new piece of lawn out by the side of the house—we decided we were going to play Drop the Handkerchief. It was nighttime and there was no electricity, but I think the moon could shine the brightest I’ve ever seen there on Clinch Mountain. Well, the next morning Maybelle got up and looked out the window. She said, ‘Stella, look out there. Look out there. Eck’s gonna kill me.’ We had torn up that fresh patch of grass. It was in a circle, and it was like horses had been tramping around it. She’d say, ‘Eck’s gonna kill me.’ And then she’d laugh.” She knew Eck would never be bothered by a little damage caused by fun. Whatever it was, it could be fixed.

  That was Eck. He never shied at the cost of living high. He’d still burst into the house from his work trips with armfuls of bounty. “Ezra would come back for Christmastime, and he’d always come back with a lot of food,” Stella says. “He’d come back with walnuts and grapes and bananas and oranges. Ezra loved to have plenty of food. He loved to have plenty of food in the house all the time.”

  Sometimes Stella would visit Sara at home; the younger girl wanted to learn to play the autoharp. Just being in Sara’s presence made Stella feel stronger, steadier, more of a woman. But Pleasant and Sara’s house wasn’t like Eck’s. It was a bit somber, and a lot less plentiful without the sure and steady income of a federal job such as Eck had. A.P. was making a little change from the three families renting on his farm in Little Valley but still wasn’t taking much out of the land for himself. By the end of 1931, the Depression was closing in on them. Record sales were slower than ever: The recording with Jimmie Rodgers had sold only seven thousand copies, a tenth of what they might have sold three years earlier. Royalty checks were next to nothing. People didn’t have the spare fifteen cents for Carter Family entertainments, even when Sara did agree to go on the road. The good news was that Ralph Peer wanted them in Atlanta in February of 1932 for another recording session. And he wanted to renew their contract.

  The contract Ralph Peer presented A.P. that February was a bit different from the one that was expiring. The new contract was with Ralph Peer, and not Victor, which was now merged with RCA. Peer had bought his way out of Victor and hoped to stake his Southern Music Publishing Company to a chance to make hits where the real money was—in pop music. Besides the money he made on the copyrights for music in Hal Roach motion pictures, Peer’s only real income was from the artists he had signed up for Okeh and Victor—his race and hillbilly music. In return for the book value of the Southern Music Publishing, RCA Victor agreed to let him take all the copyrights and all the artists he’d signed up to that point, and not to try to re-sign Peer’s artists for five years. So Peer made A.P. Carter this proposition: If the Carter Family would sign an exclusive five-year artist-manager contract, he would up their pay to seventy-five dollars per cut, with a guarantee of four sides a year. But in return, Southern Music would get all the publishing royalties from the songs A.P. copyrighted in that time. With RCA Victor precluded from making an offer, the Carter Family was not going to get a better deal. So Pleasant signed the deal, and the trio was back in the recording studio, where they cut eight sides over the next two days.

  The eight cuts that came out of that session were right in time with the national mood. Taken together, the theme of the sides was hopeless and irretrievable loss: lost homes, lost parents, lost loves. In fact, young Stella could testify that the session was a lot less a reflection of Eck and Maybelle’s swirling home than of A.P. and Sara’s tense, somber dwelling. Not one side had the driving rhythm of Maybelle’s best guitar playing. Taken as a whole, A.P. sounds more distracted than ever, and Sara flatter. But that doleful, resigned tone and feeling put the Carter Family solidly in sympathy with their Depression-weary audience. The signature song of the session (if not the best) was “Tell Me That You Loved Me,” a grave plea from someone leaving a lover.

  * * *

  It is impossible to know when exactly Pleasant Carter understood that loss was bearing down on him. He may have felt the uneasiness come over a room when he entered, and he may have heard the whispers. But Sara Carter was the kind of beauty around whom swirls all sorts of unsavory and unfounded talk. It’s impossible to know exactly when Pleasant realized that the talk was no longer completely unfounded. It’s impossible to know exactly when Pleasant understood he had a problem—and that the problem was his own cousin, Coy Bays. “I would say Coy was a show-off,” says a niece of Pleasant’s. “He and A.P. were totally different. Coy was more of a fancy guy, and he may have turned [Sara’s] head. It may have been years ago when she and Uncle Doc weren’t getting along.”

  Coy was almost fifteen years younger than Pleasant, slightly taller, and a bit more stout. He had about the same amount of schooling as Pleasant had had, but the way he told it, the end to his schooldays was a swashbuckler. One day in fourth grade, he simply started from his seat, crawled out a window, and never came back. He had other plans. Coy loved anything that traveled: motorcycles, automobiles, and most of all, airplanes. “Coy was mechanical-minded,” says his cousin F.M. Bays. “He was a wizard.”

  When they were living in Kingsport, Coy and his brother Stanley were always building model airplanes from scratch, with rubber bands and hollowed-out sticks for the skeleton. The things actually flew, though the steering was problematic, and on a few occasions they took out some of Mary’s chickens. Later, when Charlie’s bootlegger friend’s pilot crash-landed on the jury-rigged airstrip at the Bays’s Kingsport farm, Coy helped him rebuild the plane, pulling the lightweight strips of canvas over the frame and applying steely-smelling lacquer for stability. In return for his help, the pilot taught Coy to fly the plane.

  Flying was perfect for Coy. He loved the quiet above the earth, where nobody could bother him about his drinking or what needed to be done: what needed carrying or loading or rewiring. “Coy could do anything with his hands,” says Vernon Bays. “He was not overzealous, perhaps, to do a lot of hard physical labor, but he could do anything with his hands.”

  Most of what Coy wanted to do involved having fun, or making it—and he kept at that all day long. He was a jokester, a teaser, and a tickler. Unlike most of the men around the Valley, and unlike A.P. Carter, he was naturally an affectionate man. To this day, some in the family speculate it was Coy’s gift for showing affection that attracted Sara. Nobody knows exactly what it was that turned her head, but it clearly wasn’t something she thought out. The way she said it, it was a feeling she simply couldn’t control: “I loved him better than anything I ever set my eyes on,” she’d say later. Or, “I fell in love with him the first time I laid eyes on him.”

  Either Coy and Sara didn’t do a very good job of hiding it, or they didn’t try. Pleasant was often away hunting songs—Mr. Peer wanted them back in October—so it wasn’t hard for Coy and Sara to get time alone together. Sometimes they’d leave and be gone for two and three days at a time. One of the Poor Valley transplants in Richmond, Indiana, tells a story of seeing Coy come riding up to his farm on his Indian motorcycle with Sara on the back. After a while, Pleasant knew, and he was furious. “Actually, it was kind of scary,” says Stella Bays. “There were guns carried on both sides. They didn’t have any love for one another. It wasn’t a family love right there.”

  There were plenty of stories around the Valley about shooting scrapes. Chester Hensley used to collect them at the local country stores. Mandy Groves’s husband, Abraham, had had a famous shoot-out with the McMurrays. “He said, ‘Yeah, old Jerry’—that’s the McMurray was shooting at him with a shotgun—’old Jerry was eating us up with that shotgun,’ ” Hensley says. “They was down at the bottom where they didn’t have nothing to get behind and Old Man Abe had a cap-ball rifle up there with him. He said, ‘Jerry stuck his old belly out from behind them white walnut trees, and I put a rifle bullet through his belly. That brought him out of there.’ He did. He shot him right through the stomach with a cap-ball rifle. Jerry got over it, but that hurts, you know. That’s
bound to hurt. That was over a line fence.

  “One woman was a-building a hog lot, and Squire Bill McMurray started pulling up her posts. She split his head open with an ax. That happened back in the early twenties. She died in prison. I remember it quite well. I was small, but I remember it quite well. Her name was Martha McMurray. She’d married Chubb McMurray; that was Bill’s brother. She killed her brother-in-law. Over a piece of land that I wouldn’t give my pocketknife for.”

  The ax fell over land, and it fell over love, too. When one Valley woman found out her sister was fooling around with her husband, she hit her sister in the head with an ax. “It didn’t kill her,” remembers one local, “but it left her in pretty bad shape for the rest of her life.”

  Bob and Mollie Carter and Charlie and Mary Bays were not going to let anything like that happen in their family. They all decided it was time for Coy to leave town. Charlie dressed it up pretty good. He said he was moving the entire family west where the dry air would be better for Stanley’s and Charmie’s diseased lungs. He said he had a line on a ranch he could buy in Portales, New Mexico. He said he needed a fresh start away from the Valley. And everybody agreed it was best. Stella was thrilled for the adventure. She picked out Zane Grey novels and started reading about the Old West.

  Charlie and Mary auctioned off their big furnishings, including the player piano Dewey had bought for his mother, and her mahogany dining-room set. Maybelle wanted them both, but she was out of town during the time of the auction, so she sent Mollie to bid for her. Mollie had to fight off one of the Bays cousins, but Maybelle got the piano and the dining-room set. After the auction—and after Charlie bought a Cadillac limousine from the undertaker in Kingsport—Charlie and Mary had three hundred dollars cash to start a new life in the West.

  By the first week in February of 1933, the caravan was ready to go. The Valley road was rutted and iced over, but the Bayses weren’t waiting for the sun to come out. Their two cars were full to busting, and so were both of the trailers. The whole family was going, even Alma. (That morning, Alma had shown up—eight months pregnant, with her three-year-old daughter in tow—and announced she was going to California, too. She was leaving her husband in Kingsport and didn’t care if she ever saw him again.) Stanley was at the wheel of the Cadillac, and Charmie reclined in the backseat, which was filled with pillows and throws for her comfort. Coy—in his driving cap and goggles—was at the wheel of the Chrysler.

  “The Cadillac was a seven-passenger car,” Stella says. “Two little seats that let down behind the front seats. It was a family funeral car—lot of room. Coy and Stanley built trailers that were tarped over. And over the wheels of one trailer Coy built a box that Mama carried her pots and pans in. We put our mattresses, quilts, bedding, pillows in one trailer. In the other trailer, Mama had a barrel of flour, she had meal, we had smoked ham with us, bacon. In between the Cadillac and the second trailer we had a cage built, and we took Charmie’s goat with us. Charmie drank goat’s milk.

  “That was a sad day when we took off from Virginia. A very sad day. The day we left there was quite a few people there. My aunt Mollie came over. Maybelle was there with the girls. Oh, they was hugs and they was tears and they was prayers. June was only about three, and even she could remember.” In her own book, June described the scene: “Daddy tied the last crate of chickens on the rear bumper of the Cadillac, just before the trailer that hauled the tent, the pots and pans, pillows and blankets. . . . Mommie and Aunt Sylvia cried.”

  Then the Bayses were gone, disappearing down the Valley road, with the icy Poor Valley mud cracking under their wheels for the final time.

  Sara in Rich Valley (Gladys Greiner)

  Joe, Janette, and Gladys in front of the homeplace (Carter Family Museum)

  From a Business Standpoint

  Within weeks of Coy’s departure, Sara Carter removed herself from Poor Valley and went to live across the mountain, at the only other home she’d ever known. It might have been shame that made her run. It might have been anger at the cabal that enforced her separation from Coy. It surely had something to do with her husband’s temper. A.P. was hurt by his wife’s affair, and embarrassed. Sara would later swear under oath that he would sometimes tell her to get out of his house and never come back, that he threatened her with physical violence, and that he had, on occasion, acted on those threats.

  When Janette looks back at it, she does not dwell on the worst times. The way she sees it, her parents’ separation seems nearly preordained. The wonder was that A.P. and Sara lived under the same roof for seventeen years. Both her parents were proud, and stubborn, and A.P. wasn’t the only one who had real cause to be jealous. For most of her marriage, Sara fought a mistress that couldn’t be faced down and couldn’t be satisfied. “The thing that really mattered to Daddy was his music,” says Janette. What Janette can’t understand is how her mother could have left her and Joe and Gladys. Gladys was thirteen years old that winter, Janette was nine, and Joe barely six. In all the years after, their mother never offered the three an apology, or an explanation that sufficed. Sometimes Sara would repeat the plain truth: “I loved [Coy] better than anything I ever laid eyes on.” But that was cold comfort to her children. She left them to reckon her decision as best they could. It’s a legacy the two survivors struggle with almost seventy years later. “It never was right in a way after they broke up,” Janette says, “but they did. They just separated. And it’s no fair to put blame on somebody. I couldn’t have left my children, but she didn’t have no job. She didn’t have nowhere to go. She had people back there [in Copper Creek]. She went back over to Uncle Mil and Aunt Nick’s.”

  Sara’s return to the Nickelses’ farm must have felt like a double homecoming, for it conferred on her once again her orphan status. She’d first come to live with Mil and Nick after her mother died, dropped there with her sister Mae because her father could not raise them. In the winter of 1933, Sara returned to Copper Creek as an exile from the family of her own making, cut off, in no small part, by physical distance. It was less than a dozen miles as the crow flies from Maces Springs to Uncle Mil’s cottage, but it was a hard journey. On foot, it began with a steep two-hour walk up Clinch Mountain’s loose-rock trails, and when the weather was mildest and the climbing easiest, the trails teemed with copperheads. The down side of Clinch Mountain was more slippery. And even after the traveler had found the flatland, he still had to cross Moccasin Creek and Moccasin Ridge. It could take all the light in a long summer day just to get to Copper Creek. By car, the trip was still long and treacherous, over winding roads that were impassable when Moccasin Creek ran high and fast. Even when it was down, the winding creek had to be forded five separate times. By train, the passenger was dropped at the flag station in Dungannon, which left a good six-mile hike to the Nickelses’ farm.

  Even so, Pleasant would not withhold the children from Sara. “We’d go back across the mountain,” says Joe. “Daddy would take us over sometimes, me and Janette both, for a week.” After he dropped them off, Pleasant could head over to a town called Ben Hur, in Pennington Gap, where his friend Mutt Skeens would have new songs, or to Herbert Springs to visit his distant cousin Bobby Bays. Bobby always had new coal-mining songs he’d play for A.P. on his harmonica. In later years, A.P. would take Joe to Ben Hur, and Mutt would teach Joe to play the guitar. But for now, Joe was more than happy to stay with his mom on Copper Creek.

  Uncle Mil and Nick always had plenty, and they still kept a jar of candy under the bed—all the kids knew that. Joe would listen to his uncle Mil play the fiddle, or watch him cook down a panful of tree sugar for molasses. Sometimes Joe and his cousin Paul Hartsock walked to the bent in the creek, where they could throw rocks at the biggest bullfrogs he’d ever seen, or watch Uncle Mil gig carp. For a six-year-old boy, Uncle Mil was a fascination. “Mil Nickels was a little old squatty man,” says Joe. “Not very tall at all. He’d go up to harness the horses about four o’clock in the morning when he woke up. He’d fee
d his horses and put the harness on. And if he was feeling good, he could step up and get ahold of them joists in the barn. He’d get the joist from the underneath side, and he’d pull hisself up, and he’d go to hand-walking with his grip. And hand-walk across that barn. He was built in the shoulders but skinny below, so he could handle his weight.

  “He had two thumbs on one hand. One that turned up like a sprout on a tree. He could pinch a piece out of you with those two thumbs. Get ahold of you and clamp down with that thing. You think a piece is gonna come out of you. He had a grip like a vise.”

  Janette’s memories of those visits were less about the staying than the leaving. In her own book, Living with Memories, she writes of a time when Pleasant dropped her and Joe across the mountain to spend Christmas with Sara. “I can still see Daddy walking away through the fields—alone. My heart broke. I started running, and crying, ‘I want to go with you!’ So he took my hand, and we spent that Christmas together in Poor Valley.”

  From the start, Sara’s removal threatened more than the emotional well-being of the family; it threatened her husband’s dream of continued renown in the music business. Just weeks after Sara left, A.P. informed his wife that Mr. Peer was ready to set dates for a recording session in Camden, New Jersey. Sara said she’d pass on that. Besides, she pointed out, Mr. Ralph Peer still owed them money for songs they recorded the previous year. So she left it to A.P. to tell their personal manager that the recording session was off. On April 15, 1933, A.P. wrote to Peer, explaining the situation as best he could and suggesting that they might have better luck with his estranged wife if Peer agreed to record them near home. “Nobody will go to the expense of sending out a recording expedition,” Peer wrote to A.P. on April 25. “Please let me know when you are ready and I will get everything lined up. I expect to get more money for you on this trip, although I think you will come out all right on the last recordings as soon as you are paid for the extra numbers.”