But Sara stubbornly refused, and Peer, who counted on income from Carter Family records, asked his wife to get into the fray, woman to woman. In the first week of May 1933, Anita Peer’s letter arrived in Copper Creek, betraying a certain amount of desperation. “My dear Sara, . . . Of course, it is really none of my business. . . . I realize it would be distinctly awkward for both you and A.P. to work together again, but on the other hand, the ‘Carter Family’ has become well known and there is a chance to make some more money, even in these days of depression. Let me know if there is anything I can do. I have been divorced once myself . . . so I can sympathize with you perfectly, and I will be glad of a chance to talk to you and perhaps give you the benefit of my experience. . . . Isn’t there some way you can get together and fix up some songs for recording? . . . I’ll do anything you suggest to get things organized again. Even if you never live together again you could get together for professional purposes like movie stars do. Practically all of them are divorced or should be.”
Anita Peer’s letter did get to the heart of the matter: There was still a chance to make money. Sara had no other way. If she could give little else to Gladys, Janette, and Joe, she could give them the benefits of money. So as the June recording date neared, Sara began spending time again in Maces Springs, and the Carter Family fell into their old rhythms. They’d work the fields by day, and gather at Eck and Maybelle’s in the evenings to rehearse new songs. But now when the music was done, Pleasant would head back to his house alone. Eck and Maybelle had made room for Sara, and she stayed with them whenever she was in Maces.
The uneasy reuniting did breed hope. Ralph Peer had already sweetened the trip by booking the Carter Family on a live radio show, to be broadcast from RCA’s fabulously plush new Radio City Music Hall—in the heart of New York City. Sara and Maybelle went out and bought new blue outfits and fox-fur pieces, though the furs caused a panic in young Joe, who was greatly discomfited by the fox eyes. Joe yanked the piece from Sara’s neck with such a force that she had to spend the better part of an afternoon mending a rip. The purchase of those new outfits was just a warm-up for the big day of shopping the women had planned. They were going to go to the finest department store in New York City, from whence each would walk out with the most stylish dress and hat on the rack. The two women wanted to take Gladys along, too. They’d celebrate her fourteenth birthday on the trip, and Maybelle would buy Gladys a city dress of her own, in thanks for six years of baby-sitting.
For Gladys, this bounty was due. From the first session in Bristol in 1927, when the little girl had been charged with watching Joe, Gladys had faithfully executed her baby-sitting duties for both her siblings, as well as Maybelle’s daughters, Helen, June, and the new baby, Anita. And when her mother left, Gladys had become—at thirteen—the de facto cook, seamstress, and hand of discipline in her father’s house. “I never had a chance to play music,” Gladys once said. “I had to feed hogs, milk cows, and wait on young’uns.”
So that June, A.P., Sara, Maybelle, and Gladys loaded up the Chevrolet and headed for Camden, New Jersey, where they would make their recordings. The night before the session, Sara wrote out on a piece of stationery provided in their room at the Plaza Club Hotel (“Camden’s Newest and Largest”) a list of the songs they would do. And like the songs themselves, that lineup, written in Sara’s flowing hand, is a record of what might have been lost had she not seen the need to keep making music. In a single day, they recorded sixteen songs, including “I Never Will Marry,” “I Loved You Better Than You Knew,” and a three-part harmony of the hymn “On the Sea of Galilee.” If Sara had any reluctance about continuing the music, it was not discernible on record. She was spectacular that day, ranging up to get the higher notes on “Sea of Galilee” and then performing spirited yodels—which she always hated—on “Home by the Sea” and “When the Roses Come Again.” She also performed a song that would so touch Emmylou Harris forty years later that she would record it herself. “ ‘Gold Watch and Chain,’ ” says Harris, “God, the first time I heard that song, I mean, I thought about my grandparents and I cried. There are these emotional memories that maybe aren’t even yours; they belong to your grandparents and your great-grandparents, and somehow it strikes a familiar chord in you and you just, you know, you respond to it. And I found [the Carters’] music very haunting.”
Whether A.P. and Sara’s uneasy separation added a feeling to the song that particularly touched Harris is hard to know. But both rancor and tenderness were left unspoken between them in 1933; their emotions joined only in music. On every chorus of the song, A.P. “basses in” in solid support of his estranged wife.
Oh I’ll pawn you my gold watch and chain, love
And I’ll pawn you my gold diamond ring
I will pawn you this heart in my bosom
Only say that you’ll love me again
That day, they also recorded their first version of what would become a classic, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”
Once the marathon session was done, they set off for their date at Radio City Music Hall, a cash payment due from Mr. Peer, and a trip to the fanciest department store they could find. But hard luck and a stubborn pride got the better of them. “The car tore up in New Jersey before they were to get paid the next day,” Gladys wrote in I Remember Daddy. “When it was paid for, it left 35 cents in the whole crowd. It took the dress money and my savings of $5.20 that I’d saved for almost a year. My dear parents and Maybelle would have starved before they’d ask for their money [a day early] and let the Peers know they were flat broke.”
A.P. did, however, call Peer about needing new transportation to the city. Mr. Peer sent his chauffeur, installed them in a New York hotel, and messengered over tickets to a Broadway show. But there was still a problem. “They didn’t send a bit of food along,” Gladys wrote. “The next morning Daddy, Mama and Maybelle walked to a little café on the corner. Coffee was then 5 cents a cup and doughnuts 5 cents each and no tax. That left 5 cents for me to get a doughnut. They knew Mrs. Peer would feed me, as she was going to show me the town while they broadcasted, and the coffee and doughnut would do them until dinner, even though they had no supper the day before. Only these people, whom we were hoping would treat us to a dinner at noon like we eat, had their dinner from nine o’clock to midnight.”
Before Anita Peer swept off with Gladys to show her the town, she insisted on taking Sara and Maybelle to the store to help them pick out hats. The Carter women demurred, but Mrs. Peer insisted. After all, there was an hour and a half to kill before the broadcast. “Of course, they went along and tried on the most beautiful hats in the world and had to find faults with them all, as there wasn’t a red cent in anybody’s pocket,” wrote Gladys. “That was a miserable hour for them to pass, and I guess Mrs. Peer thought she would never take them hillbillies on another shopping spree. They left for the radio station, and I was on my own with Mrs. Peer, starved to death, in my first pair of high heels and my feet killing me.”
In her chauffeured limousine, Mrs. Peer took Gladys up one side of New York and down another: to the zoo, the Queen Mary, Coney Island. “I had all the souvenirs I could carry for myself and the children. I’d have gladly exchanged them all for a bag of popcorn.” At around five, the Peer limousine returned to Radio City Music Hall and whisked the entire entourage away for “a drink.” Anita Peer had champagne, the Carters lemonade . . . and not a bite of food among them. “They got paid, the goodbyes said, and the chauffeur was to drive us through the big Hudson tunnel and get us on the right road home before dark,” Gladys wrote. “Daddy told him to stop at the first hamburger joint across the river. I don’t know what he thought of us, the way we ate, but we never told him either.”
When asked if the Carters’ return to the recording studio gave her and Joe hope that their parents might reconcile, Janette is firm: “I never did think so.” And then Joe adds, “No, but if I knew then what I know now, I’da had a heart-to-heart talk with Daddy. I blam
e him more for not getting back. Mommy waited around a couple of years hoping that they could work things out. Daddy put the Old Testament as a barrier between him and her. And he just wouldn’t forgive her. That’s the way I see it. I’da told him, ‘You’re wrong, man! You’re leaving the woman that loves you. You’re deserting them kids out hunting songs.’ Mommy was taking care of us kids, chopping wood, and all that. I’da said it right to his face.”
“Your opinion and Daddy’s opinion is different, Joe,” says Janette. “You looked at it your way, and he looked at it his way, and that’s the way it was.”
What is so maddening for Joe, to this day, is that he believes his parents’ feeling for each other wasn’t extinguished. “They still had love for each other, but they were just so contrary, they wouldn’t back down,” Joe says. “Daddy put the Christianity strong. . . . He’d go back on the old Bible. If he would have just said, ‘Well, you’ve done wrong; I’ll forgive that if you forgive me.’ . . . but they didn’t come after it like that. The longer they was separated, the further apart they got.”
The widening gulf most affected the middle child, who was so like her father, sensitive and easy to bruise. When Janette Carter talks of her childhood, she paints vivid, near photographic moments: of waiting for the train in hopes her mother might be on it, or of sicknesses that always fetched her mother. “Her hands were soft,” Janette says. “She had a kind of a square hand, short, stubbylike hand. And I know one time, when she’d come to the Valley after they separated, I was sick and my head was a-hurting. She was up at Maybelle’s and I was crying, so somebody went up there and told her. And here she comes. She said, ‘Sit down there by the bed. Now what do you want?’ And I said, ‘Mother, would you sing to me?’ So she sung—’My Native Home’ and ‘In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain.’ I always loved that song [’Clinch Mountain’]. And I know I kept a-crying and she was wiping the tears away.”
Of her father, Janette best remembers those moments when he was simply there. “When someone died, somebody would go ring the church bell. You could pretty well hear it up and down the Valley. I guess you could hear it in Little Valley, too. You’d more or less know who it was because this person probably had been sick for a while. They’d have the funeral and the service and carry them out to the graveyard and put the coffin down in the ground. And then they’d start shoveling the dirt before they took the family away. They’d start right there. That just about killed me to hear them clods, and young’uns—when it was their mother and daddy—running around a-screamin’ and a-hollerin’. I’d clutch my daddy’s hand, because I was glad he was there.”
She also remembers the few times her father raised his hand to her, like the time she announced she was tired of dishes and she wasn’t washing any more. “Daddy never did whip me but three times, once when Joe and I was fighting—”
And then Joe cuts in: “I got three in one day, I can remember. . . . Daddy was always mad when he whipped. You couldn’t reason with him. [When Mom left] that made it worse. Aside from that he was easygoing, but he had a lot of pressure. Mother was constantly on his mind.”
By 1934 Pleasant Carter was wound tighter than ever. His house was being more or less run by his oldest daughter. “I was just thirteen years old and I didn’t know beans about cooking or nothing, and Esley [Riddle] was over at our house part of the time, and he showed me how to make corn bread,” Gladys once said. “Grandma and Mommy showed me a little bit, but not much. But Esley, he would help cook some at our house.” Not that A.P. could do much for his friend Riddle. Money was becoming scarce. Payouts for the songs the Carters recorded the previous June netted them around three hundred dollars apiece after they’d split it three ways. And copyright royalties on phonograph records, music rolls, and sheet music were no longer a solid hedge against the fierce winds of the Depression. Even with 76,027 records sold in the first quarter of 1934, the Carters’ take was only $69.94 apiece. Worse yet, RCA Victor was releasing fewer of the songs they recorded. In the previous session they’d recorded sixteen songs, and barely more than half were released. RCA Victor never even released the original version of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”
A.P. was still trying to kick up a few extra bucks from entertainments. Sometimes he’d get Mutt Skeens to go along and join in with his dobro or flattop guitar, or he’d get his cousin Kate O’Neill from Norton, but for a lot of dates he’d take his sister Sylvia to fill in for Sara. Aunt Syb was an able stand-in musically, but she proved a less than seasoned road warrior. On one trip, A.P. was barreling down a country road when he heard a yelp from Sylvia and turned to see her hanging off the door, which had swung open over the road when she leaned on it to throw out an ice-cream cone. He slowed the car as fast as he could, but Sylvia let go and all A.P. could see through the haze of dust was his youngest sister rolling like a ball down the gravel road. She walked away from it unhurt, brocaded with road gravel and angry at having lost her wristwatch in a ditch.
With the music money drying up, the family depended even more on what they could raise from the farm. But things hadn’t changed much on that account, either. The way Pleasant worked his land, his family was headed right back to poverty. Sometimes he’d take Joe and Janette over to the farm in Little Valley, set them atop boards he’d laid on the harrow, and lead his mules, Kit and Maude, up and down his field. Even his children knew enough to make suggestions—Joe telling him it was too wet to plow; it’d leave nothing but dried clods after the sun came out. But if A.P. did take his son’s advice and wait, he was sure to wait too long. “Sure enough it’d get so hard you couldn’t stick a pick in it,” says Joe. “He always waited. Never had a tobacco bed. He’d get a plat when other people did and he’d always get it out late and then you’d have to cut it green and it wouldn’t ever cure out right. He was no farmer at all.”
By the time he neared ten, a lot of the work fell to Joe, who was strong for his age but not a natural-born worker. Some days he’d get into epic bouts with Kit that wasted away an entire morning. “Kit would run my legs off [when I was] trying to catch her,” Joe says. “A hundred and some acres. She’d run three hours and then she’d finally give up. I’d finally get on her back, mad as anything. I’d say, ‘You’ve run me all over this pasture; now I’m gonna get you.’ I’d have a nail and poke it in her backbone, and she’d reach back and snap at me, trying to bite me, run me up against a fence trying to rub me off.
“In Little Valley one time, Daddy had one mule and he was wanting to do something that day that needed two mules, so he told me to go to Uncle Ermine’s and get that mule of his, ole Roadie. I went out there and Ermine was gone, so I turned around and went back home. I told him, ‘Ermine’s gone and Aunt Ora said he’d be gone awhile. I can’t catch Roadie.’ Daddy got mad. He said, ‘Why can’t you catch her?’ I said, ‘Nobody catches her but Ermine. You touch her ears and she’ll kick you.’ He said, ‘Give me that bridle. I’ll catch that feather-headed mule.’ ”
“A.P. came out and said, ‘I want Roadie,’ ” remembers Ermine’s daughter Fern. “Daddy wasn’t home. And Mama said, ‘Now, Doc, you can’t catch Roadie. Nobody can catch him but Buck. She called Daddy ‘Buck.’ He would not listen. He went up to the pasture field, and Joe was helping him corral it in a corner.”
“Roadie had her head across the fence and Sue was there, too, standing in a V, and one was as bad as the other for kicking,” says Joe. “And he walked up behind her—’Whoa, Roadie, whooooa’—up her back, talking to her, patting her on the back, up the mane on the neck. Her head raised up, ears went straight up, and eyes walling. And me telling him, ‘Daddy, you better back out of there.’ Before you could snap your fingers, Roadie wheeled and kicked him with both feet. Right in there on his belt. And he went down. Had the breath knocked out of him. I was there chewing my tongue. I knew he’d kill me if he’d a-heard me. Biting my tongue ‘til blood was coming out of it to keep from laughing, and him laying there a-grunting.”
“He laid there and moa
ned,” says Fern. “Joe would say, ‘Are you hurt, Daddy?’ Giggle. ‘Are you hurt, Daddy?’ Giggle. Uncle A.P. went to the house and went to bed and stayed there for the rest of the day.”
Looked at in a certain Poor Valley–Methodist way, the entirety of A.P. Carter’s travails could be seen as the Lord’s will, a humbling from on high. God didn’t favor those who strove too keenly for worldly success and fame. (A.P. had to look no further than Jimmie Rodgers, who had risen higher and faster than any of Peer’s recording artists. The Blue Yodeler was dead and gone, struck down by TB while recording in New York in May of 1933.) Even A.P.’s children suffered. A Carter sister-in-law remembers a time when one of Pleasant’s children went to Neal’s Store to buy food on credit, and Mr. Neal refused them because they were too much in his debt. Around that time, A.P. and Sara were even forced to put up their house and their farm as security on a five-hundred-dollar loan.
Still, Pleasant Carter jealously tended the field of his dreams. Peer had set another recording date for May of 1934, and A.P. was working up new songs. Without Sara around, it was harder than ever. “Daddy would write music in the house,” says Joe. “He’d get the beat and start writing. He never used the guitar much to write, but it had to be quiet. He’d do it right in the living room. And he’d get upset when Janette and I were fighting. He was always telling us to be quiet.” There were the times, though, when A.P. found his own nagging problems an inspiration. Once, he woke Gladys in the middle of the night so that she could hold a lamp over him while he wrote out the words to a song he called “It’ll Aggravate Your Soul.” It was one of the songs that A.P. wrote entirely from scratch, and at the recording session in Camden on May 8, 1934, he performed it as a tremulous solo. He did have the powerful good sense to change some of the salient autobiographical details, but it was a long-awaited answer to Sara’s lament for the “Married Girl.”
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? Page 19
