Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  But from the day the Carters began recording in earnest, Maybelle sought out new tunes and new ways of playing them. When A.P. brought Lesley Riddle around to the rehearsals, Maybelle sat and listened to him play for hours, picking out blues licks she could use. If she was going to play the lead (and rhythm) on one of his blues songs, she would do it right. When the songs got too fast for her bare fingers, she would use a flat pick. She learned that from watching her brother Duke. More than her band mates, Maybelle had a feel for the compact between audience and performer. She understood they owed their fans variety. “She took the guitar and she used it in a way that nobody had thought of before, and not just the thumb lead, but listen to this,” says John McEuen of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, picking up a guitar and playing one of her descending licks. “Like on a guitar lick. Nobody had done that before. And, you know, like [’You Are My Flower’]. That lick. Hear how that string rings [on ‘I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes’]. People don’t usually think of playing an F chord with that A note ringing. Just like she’d play a C chord with a low E note. She was trying to get every note she could outta that thing! So it’s pretty cool how that happened—playing up high sometimes.”

  Maybelle was always watching for something new, and her ears were always open. Sometimes, after Carter Family entertainments, Maybelle would hang around the schoolhouse stage. A.P. and Sara were quick to leave, but if she could, Maybelle might stay for hours, jamming with the local musicians, picking up a new trick here and there. And by the time she started branching out, phonograph records and radio had made it possible for Maybelle to hear about any kind of music she wanted. She took what she could. “Anything to get a little something different,” she once said.

  As early as 1928 she was playing steel and slide guitar on “Little Darlin’ Pal of Mine” and “When the World’s on Fire.” Maybelle had picked up the Hawaiian style listening to Vernon Dalhart’s version of “The Wreck of Old 97,” a hit record in 1924 featuring the backing of guitarist Palakiko Ferreira (aka Frank Ferera), a Honolulu native whose early recordings had popularized the style on the mainland. “She played in three or four different styles, and she listened to the contemporary music of the day and incorporated some of the ideas into her music,” says the musician and musicologist Mike Seeger, who knew Maybelle and played with her in the sixties. “She heard people playing Hawaiian music in the late twenties, and she said she really liked that, and then she started playing some of those slidey recordings. What she did is she put a little thing under the nut of the guitar, that’s the fretted end, to raise up the strings, and then she played it with a Hawaiian bar.”

  At one early recording session, Maybelle forgot her slide, so she borrowed a bottle of Sara’s Blue Waltz perfume, which proved a less than ideal improvisation. In the middle of the song there was a crash of glass, and a shriek from Maybelle: “Law, Sary, I broke your perfume.” But they laughed about it, wondering how many days it would take to clear the studio of the overpowering fragrance of Blue Waltz.

  In the studio, onstage, at home, Maybelle seemed always imperturbable, but Sara and A.P.’s jangly relationship had put her in a difficult spot. She had long been witness to the sharpest edges of her in-laws’ existence together. In the worst times, Sara would retreat to Maybelle’s house. So Maybelle was one of the first to know of Sara’s affair with Coy—a secret she kept, and would always keep. In rehearsals, in recording sessions, on the road, it was Maybelle who had to steady the uneasy balance between A.P. and Sara. Maybelle kept the peace because she didn’t take sides. Nor did she turn the “tragic look” on either of them by way of judgment. When the two separated, she and Eck also opened their home as the best option for rehearsals. Their house had a big coal furnace that kept it warm on winter nights, and it provided neutral ground for A.P. and Sara.

  Despite the growing size of their family—by 1933, they had three daughters—Eck and Maybelle’s house could be made quiet, partly because A.P. struck such fear in the girls. He’d walk in and say, “Well, it’s okay for you girls to go out and play now,” and the girls knew it was time to skedaddle. Serious business was about to take place.

  But when A.P. and Sara were no longer working in tandem at keeping a home and career, A.P. had trouble producing the number of songs Mr. Peer required. In 1935 he wrote a song called “The Fate of Dewey Lee,” about the man who killed Dewey and was shipped off to the pen in Richmond. It was based on a true story and ended with his own timeless verse: “Money won’t hire a lawyer, / When you stand before your God.” But after they recorded it and shipped it out into the world, A.P. came to regret the pain it might have caused the Lees. “Somebody gave him a poem about it, and he wrote it,” says Janette. “But he used to say, ‘He’s still got people living. I shouldn’t have done that.’ ” Once A.P.’s production started to slow, Maybelle began to pick up the slack. She suggested “Little Black Train” and “Sweet Heaven in My View,” which were old hymns she’d heard sung at Holiness revivals years before. She even began to work up songs on her own. Her method was like musical quilting, a patch here and a patch there, stitched by a practiced hand. She’d find a poem she liked, rework it, and put a tune to it. “There’s No One Like Mother to Me,” which the Carters recorded for Decca in June of 1936, was almost word for word from a poem Maybelle cut out of a magazine. So was “You Are My Flower,” recorded two years later. But “You Are My Flower” was another subtle but surprising turn; she gave the song the styling of a Mexican cantina tune.

  She got the idea for the melody from the radio. Among the stations Maybelle was dialing in were the big blasters that originated just across the border from Texas. By planting their transmission towers in Mexico, the American-owned stations circumvented the U.S. law that limited a station’s power to local range. By the mid-thirties, XERA, XELO, and XEG could be heard from the tip of Texas up into Canada, from one coast to the other, and every evening in Maces Springs, Virginia. “I used to love to hear Mexican music,” said Maybelle, “and I started messing around with it and came up with that tune [for ‘You Are My Flower’].”

  One thing Maybelle had going for her was the steadfast support of her husband, Eck. In fact, Eck was a lot more excited about the music business than his wife. Maybelle didn’t lack for confidence where music was concerned. “Mama always knew she could play anything she wanted to,” her daughter Anita once said. “It never crossed her mind that there was a stringed instrument she couldn’t play.” But it was Eck who first understood how far those talents could take them both. Eck may have caviled at A.P.’s notion of taking his wife off to Bristol to audition in 1927, but when he started seeing those Carter Family records being sold in towns up and down the railroad line, Eck became his wife’s biggest promoter. It was Eck who replaced Maybelle’s little Stella guitar with a new Gibson L-5 archtop from a music store in Kingsport. The Gibson cost $275, a fortune in 1929, but Eck saw it for what it was: an investment in their future. “Daddy had the vision,” his oldest daughter, Helen, said. “He’s the one who got Mother out of [the Valley], and us. We’d never have done anything had it not been for Daddy.”

  * * *

  Like his older brother Pleasant, Eck Carter could never be still. And like Pleasant, Eck was not naturally communicative but seemed to be always engaged in his own private dialogue. In a way, Eck had it worse. Where A.P.’s constant mild tremor was a kind of release for his nervous energy, Eck’s energy was like an electrical storm trapped inside him. Where Pleasant was deliberate, almost plodding, Eck sought release in speed. Where Pleasant was content to walk the railroad tracks in quiet contemplation, Eck Carter lived for the locomotion of throttled fire. Trains, automobiles, motorcycles—anything with a combustion engine, Eck rode. Eck’s idea of a great time was to fill his Packard full of children—his own and others—drive over to Highway 58 where the road was paved, and race at full speed around the curves and hills until the car literally flew up off the pavement. He kept one eye on the road and one eye on the rearvi
ew mirror so that he could watch the little bodies bouncing around the backseat like cans of peas. Occasionally he would put his daughter June on the back of his motorcycle and race all the way to Bristol or Kingsport. In Kingsport, he and June might even take a joyride in some barnstormer’s airplane. Then Eck would talk the pilot into flying low along the Valley Road so he and June could shout and wave to Maybelle as they flew by. Eck got a kick out of scaring his wife, and he knew she didn’t scare easy.

  Eck was different from A.P. in another way. He was ferociously competitive, with a streak of meanness. When Eck insulted somebody, he could cut deep. What he competed for above all else was notoriety. When he was growing up, Poor Valley was full of cocky young men who measured themselves against one another. Life in the Valley was a physical endeavor, and the first measure of a man was physical strength. Tests were likely to include drinking and fighting. One local boy gained fame by successfully wrestling a circus orangutan. “Give him the fifty dollars before he kills my monkey!” was the way everybody quoted the animal’s distraught handler when they told the story. From that day until his death, the young Poor Valley champion was known as “Monk,” in honor of his great triumph.

  Still, with so many young men, and so little chance to shine, talk sometimes got ahead of ability. “Willie Gardner, for instance, was a smart-ass,” says Chester Hensley. “He could do more than anybody else. He could drink more whiskey. He could fight better than anybody else. Anything that come up, he was the best. Once some fellows went over [to the Jetts’, who had a legal still] to get them some whiskey. Willie told Mr. Jett, said, ‘I’ll drink a pint of the strongest stuff you’ve got here if you’ll give it to me.’ Mr. Jett kindly grinned and got a tin cup out—now, they held a full pint. Filled that full of whiskey. Willie drunk it straight down, stood right up there about thirty minutes, and fell just like a beef that’d been shot. He was laying there the next morning, yet.

  “Then there was the time Lindsay Bright raised a racket. He thought he was smart; thought he was tough. He was up there in Bristol about half drunk and raised a fight with a fellow right on the street there. And that fellow hit him and knocked him plumb through one of them glass windows [into a store]. And I asked Lindsay once, ‘What’d you do then?’ So Lindsay said, ‘He come in there and we tried to fight again.’ I said, ‘How come you didn’t?’ He said, ‘They held us . . . but I wasn’t hard to hold.’ ”

  While Eck was more than happy to take a drink, he never made a contest out of it. And he sure didn’t go in for fighting. Eck preferred a battle with less fleeting rewards; he measured himself by his stuff. From flatware to phonographs, automobiles to produce, appliances to clothes, Eck wanted to have the first, the most, the best. He wanted to be known throughout the Valley as the man with the finest. With his job as a railway mail clerk—steady pay, government-issue firearm—he was. And he jealously defended his position. The truth is, A.P.’s first success kind of galled Eck. “Ezra was a little bit jealous,” says his niece. “He didn’t like other people in the family to have money.”

  But when A.P.’s family life began to fall apart, and the Depression cut into his music money, Ezra was ascendant again. He was still making good money on the railroad; the U.S. Treasury check came every month, and it cleared, too. Everybody in the Valley knew where Eck stood; they didn’t have to look any farther than his home. He’d bought a little cottage from Beecher Hartsock, and he immediately began making improvements. He had plenty of help. When Maybelle’s father’s old hollow-sounding lungs gave up to pneumonia, she’d invited her younger brothers, Bug and Toobe, to come and stay with her and Eck. A year later Maybelle’s sister died, and her boys, Ford and Jack, were invited in, too. Eck found plenty for them to do. The house was surrounded by blue spruce and pine trees, but he added a big early-blooming magnolia tree out back, and ringed the front with boxwood bushes. Behind the bushes, Eck and the boys built a wraparound, three-sided porch, and they added a top floor. Then he dammed the little creek that ran beside the house, rigged up a waterwheel, and ran a generator off it so that his was the first and only house in the Valley with electric lights. When he was done, there were nine glorious, good-size, well-lighted rooms. They were filled, of course, with stuff, and with people, and Eck kept the entire household hopping, literally. When he decided he had to have a basement to hold a coal furnace, he ran into a giant piece of ledge right underneath the house. He read up on it and figured the fastest, most efficient way to crater out a basement was . . . dynamite. “Every once in a while he’d yell, ‘Everybody out of the house!’ ” said his daughter Anita. “Boom! You had to move pretty fast.”

  The entire enterprise of “Life with Eck” should have driven Maybelle right around the bend, but she had perfected a kind of down-home Zen. The crazier Eck got, the more placid Maybelle became. The more Eck teased her, the less attention she paid to him. Before their third daughter was born in March of 1933, Eck kept telling Maybelle he was going to name her Ina, after the schoolteacher he’d almost married. For a while, the birth seemed no laughing matter. The baby was so big, and Maybelle’s labor so difficult, that they had to call on Doc Meade, who came racing down the Valley Road from Mendota to help Mollie Carter oversee the delivery. Eck and Maybelle’s little girls, Helen and June, were sent away from the hushed house to stay with the neighbors. Nobody was sure Maybelle was going to survive the birth. After it was over, and Eck was allowed in, he found his wife nearly bloodless, her normally rosy complexion paled to the color of white chalk, her lips shading to blue. Eck dutifully sat by her side until she regained herself, but once it was clear she was okay, he picked up his rotund baby girl, put her in a U.S. Mail pouch, and carried her to Neal’s Store. “How much will you give me for this?” Eck yelled as he put her on the scales, where she weighed in at an astonishing ten and a half pounds.

  Then, sure enough, Eck named her Ina Anita Carter. But his wife got the last word; one look from Maybelle was all it took—nobody ever called that girl anything but Anita. That included Eck. It was poetic justice—or flat-out payback—that Anita Carter proved a thorn in her daddy’s side from the beginning. She was rambunctious, athletic, and contrary. “Daddy was just really nervous,” said Anita. “And I was not very quiet when I was young. Daddy’s mind was clicking so much that sometimes he just couldn’t stand the noise. When he would come home, we’d have to be very quiet. He’d work three days, I think, and then he was off four. And I made the most noise. Mom said I never went through the house walking. I went through doing cartwheels and handstands and all of that. That’s how I traveled. Wherever I was going, that’s how I went. I imagine that was hard on someone who was nervous. He just couldn’t stand the noise. And I was the noise.”

  Sometimes, when he was driven most crazy, he’d fix a look on Anita. “You can’t be mine,” he’d tell her. “You’ve got to belong to Brown Thomas.” But Eck knew when he was beat. After a while he didn’t even try to stay in the house. He made himself a lair in the top of the smokehouse across the creek, and when he’d come off the rails, he spent most of his time there. “Eck was shy,” says his sister-in-law Theda Carter. “He just didn’t talk much. Whenever there was company [which was pretty much always], Eck would make an appearance, say hello, then he’d be gone.”

  Eck’s smokehouse space had all sorts of advantages. It was quiet, it was off limits to the girls, it was his. Down below, he made a little woodworking shop where he stored his collection of exotic wood until his friend Garn Larkey could carve it into new furniture. Up above, he made a replica of the slot-box in his railway mail car, so he could practice sorting, keep himself sharp for the proficiency tests the government was always throwing at him. Or he could read his science books and magazines without disruption. Maybe best of all, the smokehouse was a place where he could have a quiet drink of whiskey from his mountain still without being bothered about it. But given Eck’s prodigious energies, his whiskey nights were not always safe, like when he’d get a load on and fire up his gr
ist mill. “Once he couldn’t get it shut down, and it was hotter than a two-dollar pistol,” says a niece who was a teenager at the time. “He lifted me up there high enough to turn it off. It was a wonder I didn’t get burned.”

  Eck tried to keep his drinking confined to when Maybelle was on the road, but as his girls got older, Eck found himself sandwiched, generationally speaking. The women in his family were too numerous and too observant. “I found it—right behind the toilet—as big as life—a dirty old bottle of liquor hidden in the bushes,” June wrote in Among My Klediments. “ ‘Daddy, Daddy, somebody left a terrible bottle of whiskey behind our toilet. Daddy, I have it here with me.’ He ran to me. I’m sure he was trying to figure a way to save his precious bottle and its contents. But just as he reached me, I sailed that thing out over the waterwheel and it broke into a thousand pieces. He never said a word to me, just hung his head and walked slowly toward the shop, with me trailing along, hollering, ‘Who do you think that terrible person could have been, Daddy? Who could have been so bad to bring that horrible old liquor and hide it behind the toilet? You’d whip him, wouldn’t you, Daddy? I know you would. You’d give it to him hard.’ ”

  The women around Eck meant to save him from his wicked ways, and they were sure they had the Lord on their side. “Ma Carter would take me to church with her, and this was before Daddy was converted and we weren’t going to church as such, you know,” said Helen, “but Grandma dragged me out to church and I sat up there with her, and I can remember her praying for Daddy and his brothers, you know, that were considered being sinners at that time.”