Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  She wants a new coat and a hobbled skirt

  And you can’t get in for the young’uns and dirt

  And when she gets out, oh, how she’ll flirt

  It’ll aggravate your soul

  Now, young men, take a warning from me

  Don’t take no girl to Tennessee

  For if you get married and don’t agree

  It’ll aggravate your soul

  It’s another bracing set, that spring 1934 session. Pleasant was still hunting hard, but songs were coming in over the transom all the time now. People from all over the country sent the Carters sheet music, poems that could be turned to music, or little snatches of lyrics. A.P.’s house was filling up with them, and Sara’s trunk in Copper Creek also. The June 1934 session—as much as any—bespeaks the variegated musical fruit dropping from the trees: hymns from both black and white churches, cowboy songs, country blues, English story songs, remade parlor songs.

  Even with sales so slow, Peer wasn’t about to give up on the Carters. He had them back in the studio a second time that year, and this time they cut a remarkable twenty songs in a single day. One was a song Pleasant had written with the help of Riddle, the surprisingly hopeful “March Winds Goin’ to Blow My Blues All Away.” But it would be six years before the Carters recorded for RCA Victor again.

  For nearly five years, Ralph Peer had been in a death struggle with a RCA Victor executive named Eli Oberstein, and the Carters found themselves caught in the middle. In the eight years Peer had directed the de facto division of hillbilly and race records for RCA Victor, he had essentially eaten up the competition. Even after he bought back Southern Music Publishing from RCA Victor in 1932, he continued to work for the company as he always had, scouting the talent, coordinating the recording sessions, making final selects for pressing, and promoting them as best he could. As RCA Victor went, so went Southern Music. Peer had hired Oberstein away from Okeh and set him up as a salesman in the field who could get southern distributors excited about RCA Victor’s new catalogs. But right from the start, Peer was sure Oberstein coveted his job, and he was sure it was Oberstein who started rumors that Peer was padding his expense reports and pocketing huge sums of money. All of that Peer could have lived with, if Oberstein hadn’t approached A.P. Carter with the idea of dumping his exclusive contract with Ralph Peer and signing a separate recording contract with RCA Victor.

  Had he played it with subtlety, or cunning, A.P. surely could have gotten a nice new set of contracts with both RCA Victor and Peer—one that didn’t give Peer all the publishing royalties from new copyrights. And one that was more in line with the sums RCA Victor paid its pop artists. It wasn’t that Pleasant Carter was entirely without guile, but he had a strong sense of loyalty. Ralph Peer had given them their start; without him, their success would have been impossible. Besides, A.P. had signed Peer’s contract; he wasn’t going to weasel out of the deal. So no matter how many times Oberstein pointed to the inequities in Peer’s business scheme, or to the money the Carters could be making, A.P. would not betray Peer. And when he told Peer about Oberstein’s approach, that more or less tore it with Ralph and Eli.

  Ralph Peer walked away from RCA Victor, giving over the hillbilly and race operation to Oberstein, but not before he signed the Carters to a recording contract with a new conglomerate called American Recording Company (ARC). He set the first ARC sessions for May of 1935, and Oberstein fired off a desperate letter that March to try to persuade A.P. to stay with RCA Victor. “[Peer] is naturally trying to keep things for himself and get all he can. . . . I offered to get together with Mr. Peer but as usual he wants everything and would like to give you people little or nothing. . . . The point he is angry about is that we want to give you copyright royalties and he wants those for himself with a very small portion to you. . . .” Of course it was more or less true. Peer needed the money. He was struggling mightily to set up Southern Music as a player in the pop music–publishing industry. And in spite of a hit with the Hoagy Carmichael/Johnny Mercer song “Lazy Bones,” Peer was swimming upstream. His library of hillbilly and race songs was all that kept him afloat. “It was the worst year we’d ever had in the music business,” Peer said. “I remember talking to [established publisher] Sol Bourne. We had lunch together. He said, ‘Ralph, I’m going to get out of this business. We just can’t do a thing with it.’ He was ready to give up completely. And he had Irving Berlin!”

  As tight as money was at the Pleasant Carter homeplace, he was not going to forsake Ralph Peer. Sara and Maybelle were less sanguine about their personal manager. Sara had already begun questioning the royalty statements. Even then, she and Maybelle knew the score. “Mr. Peer made us famous,” they both used to say, “and we made him rich.”

  In fact, the move to ARC immediately put more cash in their pockets. The Carters recorded forty sides for their new record company over four days in May of 1935. At Peer’s rate of seventy-five dollars per side, A.P., Sara, and Maybelle walked away with a thousand dollars apiece for that session. And the session itself was like cherry picking. Besides new sides, ARC wanted the Carters to re-record their tried-and-true hits. The Carters did new versions of “Keep on the Sunny Side,” “River of Jordan,” “Single Girl, Married Girl,” “Wildwood Flower,” “My Clinch Mountain Home,” “Little Darlin’ Pal of Mine,” and “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” among others.

  The middle years of the 1930s were A.P.’s most prolific as a songwriter. Without Sara in the house, he had to keep vigilant watch on both the children and the farming. Consequently, his song-hunting trips were less frequent, and A.P. was thrown back on himself. Woody Guthrie used to say he could write only about what he saw; Pleasant Carter was writing about what he felt. One of his most fascinating songs of that period was a retooling of the Blind Lemon Jefferson song “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” In the Blind Lemon song, the singer’s heart stops, his hands get cold, a coffin lid slams shut, a church bell rings, and two white horses cart the dead singer to the graveyard. There is a haunting plea from inside the coffin, for one kind favor: that his grave be kept clean. But the request evaporates, like the peal of the church bell, into thin air. There is no family in attendance, no friend. The departed is absolutely alone.

  Despite his marital woes, and maybe because of them, A.P. Carter’s version of the song “Sad and Lonesome Day” leans on the bond of family. In A.P.’s rendition, the song becomes the story of a mother’s funeral, with mourners in attendance. “They carried my mother to the burying ground, / And watched the pallbearers let her down.”

  In 1935 the Carters also re-recorded the unreleased “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” another mother’s funeral song A.P. had rewritten. For a melody, the Carters used a tune similar to the one they’d used on the gospel number “Sunshine in the Shadows.” It was a melody familiar to a lot of folks outside the Carters’ main audience. The tune was summoned, for instance, by the hallelujah shouters of The Elders McIntorsh and Edwards Sanctified Singers—of the Church of God in Christ, Chicago’s hotbed of black Pentecostalism—for their 1928 recording “Since I Laid My Burden Down.” The Carters’ version of “Circle,” when finally released, was their big seller of 1935, and it would go on to be one of their best-known and best-loved songs of all time.

  Throughout the mid-thirties, Sara’s absence remained a daily hardship and an artistic spur. Much of what A.P. wrote in those years was about love and abandonment, and the records themselves sometimes sound like the uncomfortable release of feelings he had always found too hard to talk about with Sara. There was the romantic hopefulness of “My Virginia Rose Is Blooming,” the sweet sadness of “Lover’s Lane,” the bitterness of “Dark-Haired True Lover,” and the menacing jealousy of “Gathering Flowers on the Hillside.”

  Sara was writing material for those same recording sessions, such as the sad lament “Farewell, Nellie.”

  Fly across the ocean, birdie

  Fly across the deep blue sea

  Take thi
s message to my darling

  She’ll be glad to hear from me

  When the whippoorwills are singing

  Across the dark and lonely sea

  When you’re thinking of ten thousand

  Will you sometimes think of me?

  By 1936 Sara Carter was just a few years shy of forty and more alone than ever. When she was at Copper Creek, she had nothing but time on her hands. She’d work around the house, maybe work up a song or two, but sometimes she just had to get out and go. “She was still living with Uncle Mil and Aunt Nick; she stayed down there a long time,” says Daphne Stapleton. “She’d sing and play for you, you know. She came to our house one time and played for us. We lived in a little house down in the hollow, and she was real friendly to everybody. She was by herself. Back then, people walked for miles by theirselves. You didn’t have to invite people. They’d just come to the house. She was just passing by and just stopped.”

  For more than three years, Sara had been cut off from the day-to-day lives of her children. Gladys was getting serious with a boy named Milan Millard. Janette was winning scholarship ribbons. Joe was learning to play the guitar. When Sara did go to Poor Valley, she’d spend time with them at the homeplace, but she stayed overnight with Eck and Maybelle, who were now akin to royalty in that valley. Eck and Maybelle had a house filled with stuff, including Mary Bays’s mahogany dining-room set and piano. Their three little girls—Helen, June, and Anita—were like princesses, always with new outfits, and a full set of schoolbooks, bought new. They were, people said, the prettiest girls in the Valley. In fact, people said it all the time, until one day, Sara couldn’t stand it anymore. “Your children might be pretty,” she said to Maybelle, “but mine are a lot healthier-looking.”

  Whenever Sara came back to Poor Valley, she made it a point to bring presents for Gladys and Janette and Joe, and also for the cousins who didn’t have as much as Maybelle’s girls. Once when Sara came across the mountain, she brought her niece Lois a dark blue silk dress with a sleeveless leopard jacket. It took Lois’s breath away; it was the finest thing she’d ever owned. Sara Carter’s gifts, like her person, were growing more exquisite.

  In the years Sara spent away from her family, her bearing had become more regal than ever. She made it a point to look perfect always, as if she didn’t want her children to remember her any other way. To some of her nieces she might well have been the Queen of Sheba. Fern Carter was fixated on Sara’s hands. They were not like the hands of her mother or the country women Fern knew. In the late thirties, Sara’s hands were soft-looking. She wore rings and bright red nail polish. One day when Sara was visiting Fern’s parents, the little girl sat and stared at Sara’s hands, desperate to touch them. “I wanted to see if they felt as pretty as they looked,” she says.

  That was how Sara seemed to so many people now: untouchable, remote. She wore her self-containment as a shield; she wasn’t going to let anybody get close enough to see her hurt. She was beginning to think the business with Coy Bays had been a colossal mistake. When Coy had first gone west he sent her letters, and Sara could track his movements through New Mexico and Arizona and up into California. Sara wrote him faithfully, until she realized that his letters had stopped. First it was a week, then a month, then months, and no word from Coy. News came that his sister Charmie had died at a TB sanitarium in northern California. And then his brother Stanley passed. And what of Coy? Was he stricken with consumption now, too? Or had he found somebody else to love? Sara had no way of knowing.

  Meanwhile, attempts to reconcile with her ex-husband went nowhere. There were times when A.P. was cold, and times when his anger still flared. In the first week of June 1936, one of Sara’s sister’s daughters overheard him talking to Sara: “He said that just as soon as he got back from making records that he was going to get his divorce and that he was going to bring him in a woman. He said that he already had her picked out.”

  Sara finally gave up on any chance of putting the marriage back together. On September 3, 1936, she went to Gate City to see a lawyer named L. H. Bond and told him she wanted a divorce. Bond wrote to A.P. and told him Sara’s wishes and that A.P. could probably sue for divorce. He certainly had grounds. But A.P. wrote back that he would never ask for a divorce, and that he would fight any suit Sara might bring. Two weeks later, the Scott County Sheriff’s Office served the papers. A.P. Carter was to appear at the circuit court the following Monday “to answer a bill in Chancery in our said court against him by Sara E. Carter.” This was not what A.P. wanted, and he sat down and wrote Ralph Peer to ask his help. Peer passed on that. As long as the Carters kept recording, the exclusive artist-manager relationship did not extend into domestic quicksand. Peer wasn’t wading in there for double the royalties. “[A.P.] apparently wanted me to exert some pressure upon you,” Peer wrote to Sara, “but I told him that this was a matter which people had to settle for themselves and something in which I did not want to interfere.” He did, however, wish to add his two cents on one count: “From a business standpoint,” he wrote, “it is important that the Carter Family should not be too badly broken up.”

  When Sara’s divorce complaint did reach the judge, A.P. did not fight it, but neither did he acknowledge it. As the October 15, 1936, divorce decree stated, “the defendant has failed to demur to, plead to, or answer said bill,” and Judge E. T. Carter ruled that “said marriage be, and the same hereby is, dissolved and annulled. The court doth further adjudge, order, and decree that the custody of the children . . . be awarded to A.P. Carter, with whom they shall remain but the said Sarah [sic] E. Carter shall be permitted to see and visit the said children at seasonable times and intervals.”

  “When A.P. and Sara divorced, I can remember Ma Carter going up and down that valley to check on them kids,” said Maybelle’s daughter Helen. “You know, she’d walk a mile, back and forth. I’m sure it broke her heart.”

  In a separate filing at the Gate City courthouse that same week, A.P. Carter agreed to pay Sara $1,200 for a farm she had bought in the Little Valley. The document laid out a plan of payment: Half of A.P.’s portion of the royalty payments were to go directly to Sara, until the $1,200 (plus interest) was paid in full. All transactions regarding the marital split, in fact, were rendered in coolly precise, matter-of-fact language. No document betrayed a hint of emotion or loss or pain. In an odd way, the land agreement temporarily bound A.P. and Sara closer than ever, professionally. The more recording they did, the greater the royalty payments. The greater the royalty payments, the faster A.P. could pay off his debt to Sara.

  By the time of the divorce, the Carters had a new recording company. Peer had set them up with Decca, whose management wanted lots of material, and wanted to license it to the Montgomery Ward catalog. In separate recording sessions in 1936 and 1937, the Carters cut a total of nearly sixty songs for their new label. Even after the divorce was official, the Carters could still knock them out. In the June 1937 session there was a flat-out upbeat song called “Funny When You Feel That Way,” and the classic “Hello Stranger,” sung as split solos by Sara and Maybelle. In fact, some said it was the best-sounding work they’d ever done.

  The 1937 session was a great relief to Ralph Peer; his greatest hope for the family had been delivered. The Carter Family was not too badly broken up . . . from a business standpoint.

  Ezra “Eck” Carter, also known as Pop (Carter Family Museum)

  Maybelle with Helen, Anita, and June (Lorrie Davis Bennett)

  Stuff

  It was a point of pride among the Carters that they rarely had to do more than one take of any song, even under the most difficult conditions, like, for instance, recording twenty songs in a single day. This distinction owed in part to the Carters’ diligence in preparation, but by the mid-thirties, Maybelle understood the other factor at play: Mr. Peer and his engineers simply weren’t that particular. They took every song the Carter Family offered, even when Maybelle would try to point out the flaws. “This song don’t make no
sense,” she’d say. “The words aren’t working right.” But Mr. Peer always said it would make no difference to their fans; people would get the gist of the story. That was bad enough, but what really galled her was when she’d make a mistake on her guitar and they would tell her not to worry. It was fine.

  Maybelle knew what was fine, better than they did. She was never too loud about it, but she would gently prod Peer to let them do another take. Maybelle could make it difficult to say no. She wasn’t a pleader, but she had a way of looking at people with her striking pale blue eyes—the “tragic look,” her daughters called it—that made a person turn back on himself. That look registered such disappointment—in you. So sometimes Mr. Peer would relent to another take, but more often he would try to joke his way through, tell her it was okay to make a mistake because it made the record sound “authentic.” Or he’d tell her people would listen closer, maybe listen over and over to see if they made the same mistake again. Maybelle might smile and move on, but her performance was no joke to her. Even thirty years later she was still grousing, though she always softened her most pointed jibes with a little chuckle. “Maybe I’d persuade them to do it over,” she told Ed Kahn in 1963. “Then they’d put out the one with the mistake on it. They were certain to do that.”

  A.P. got the women out of the house, into the recording studio, and onto the stage, but from the beginning Maybelle was the most musically adventurous. Maybelle was a natural musician; she heard a tune and she could just do it, even if it meant playing in an entirely different way. Most of her earliest melodies were tunes she’d heard her grandmother or her mother play on an old five-string banjo or what her uncle played on banjo or what the local fiddlers played. Many melodies were generations old. Often as not, Maybelle didn’t even have a name for them. “Sometimes I didn’t know what I was playing,” she said. “Just songs I’d always heard.”