For her miracle, Maybelle turned to the Sears, Roebuck catalog. She’d ordered a new autoharp for June, and right on the instrument she wrote out the notes, the words, and the chord changes for a song. “Mama said, ‘You will learn to play the autoharp this week.’ And I did learn to play. I mean, to flail the daylights out of it. I learned eleven songs in that week.”
For the 1939–1940 season, Consolidated had a new scheme, involving Presto transcription disks. The Carters would live in San Antonio and go to a studio once or twice a week to record their shows onto acetate-and-aluminum platters. A.P., Sara, and Maybelle had recorded some shows on disk at the end of their stay in Del Rio the season before, but that was to save them a trip across the Rio Grande in the predawn darkness for the morning show. The XERA announcer could just replay the Good Neighbor Get-Together from the night before. But Harry O’Neill had got the idea to run off as many copies of the acetate transcription disks as they needed and ship them to whatever station wanted them. Four other border radio stations wanted them right away: Rosarito Beach, Piedras Negras, Ciudad Juárez, and Monterrey. Consolidated would cut in the commercials after the fact, along with intros, outros, and station breaks suited to each. In fact, the new announcer, Brother Bill Guild, could do them all, right in the studio in San Antonio: “This is station XET, Monterrey, down Mexico way. Now here’s that well-known and better-loved family of radio, The Carter Family: A.P., Sara, Maybelle, Janette, Helen, June, and Anita. And it looks like we’re on the ‘Sunny Side.’ ”
The Carters were often able to knock off an entire week’s worth of half-hour shows in a single afternoon in the studio above the garage at the home of Consolidated’s San Antonio agents, Don and Dode Baxter. Suddenly, the Carters’ audience was bigger than ever. The group even got raises. Helen, June, and Anita were getting fifteen dollars a week each. They’d take themselves to the movies, buy ice-cream cones or new roller skates. Janette was making twenty a week, but with what she spent on Joe’s footlong hot dogs and trips to the zoo, she had a hard time saving money to pay her way back to Poor Valley for Christmas.
Janette was the most miserable of them all; she’d been forced down to Texas against her wishes after Ma Carter warned A.P. that Janette was getting too serious with a certain young man. So in the autumn of 1939, A.P. had pulled Janette and Joe both out of the school in Hiltons and taken them to San Antonio. The trip itself was a trial. “I was looking forward to going to Texas,” says Joe. “My dad had an old ’35 Chevrolet, and we was driving along and came into a dust storm. It was raining, and muddy water was hitting the windshield. That was the big dust years.”
“I never seen so many flat tires,” says Janette. “I think we had three in one day. We hit them hot highways and them blacktops, and I remember one time we had a flat tire and Daddy went off under a bush or a cactus and said, ‘Now you and Joe fix it.’ And some man stopped and I think I was in tears. I’d had about all the flats I wanted. I was a-burnin’ up and was homesick. So that man fixed the tire.”
“Between Texarkana and San Antone, all through there we had flats,” says Joe. “Those tires was so hot, you could hardly handle them. And when you stepped off the pavement, you’s in sand burrs and something was sticking to you.”
“I thought my life had come to an end,” says Janette. “I never did like Texas.”
Janette and Joe both went to Alamo Heights School, where Joe was forever in trouble. “I had a French teacher, and she had a whistle in her accent,” he says. “Every day she went to talking and I’d go to sleep. I couldn’t stay awake.” The school was so big that sometimes Janette found it impossible to find her way from one class to another, but she never felt comfortable asking her fellow students for help. “They’d come up to me and talk to me, but they weren’t trying to be friendly,” Janette says. “They just liked my accent. They wanted to hear me talk and then make fun of my accent.”
“They did me the same way,” Helen said. “I was in junior high and they’d take me behind the building and make me talk and just break up. And I thought, ‘Well, you idiots, I’m talking fine.’ ”
All the Carter kids were alien beings in Texas. They’d ask for a “dope,” which was a Poor Valley colloquialism for Coca-Cola, and the other kids would look at them like they were crazy. “I was always asking for a ‘poke’ to put my candy in, and they’d look at me like I was a snake,” says June. “They had no idea what a ‘poke’ was, and I’d say, ‘Don’t you know anything? A poke! I need a poke to put my candy in!’ Finally I had to go behind the counter and show them I wanted a paper bag.” Where Janette and Helen could be hurt by the teasing, June began to see there was something to being odd. And she started to work on her own kind of hillbilly minstrelsy, the country equivalent of “blacking up.” On the radio shows, she even started playing the poor country girl, reading ads for Kolorbak hair tonic with an extra-thick helping of gravy on her Poor Valley drawl.
Actually, with the girls added, the Carters’ radio show was even better than the year before. It probably helped that Coy wasn’t in Texas at the beginning of that season. A.P. had regained himself; in fact, he was at his best. More and more he braved solos, accompanying himself with guitar. And while his playing wasn’t top-notch, his singing came from the deepest center of him. His best work was heartbreaking to hear, even if the radio audience never knew what had transpired between him and Sara. His voice had a way of ranging from proud defiance to hopelessness, all in one breath. The tenderness he brought to the Gussie Davis song “One Little Word” was almost unbearable.
One little word would have changed my future life
One little word would have made her my wife
Too late. Too late. Now my fondest hopes are dead
One little word, that word was never said.
On gospel tunes like “Lonesome Valley” (“Everybody’s got to walk this Lonesome Valley, / We’ve got to walk it by ourselves”) his bassing in was more forceful than ever. A.P. seemed to thrive in the Texas warmth that winter. He looked healthy again, and even put on some weight eating the local Mexican cuisine, though he did stop short at fried rattlesnake. “On the weekends we went over to the zoo, Breckenridge Park,” says Joe. “There were hippos, snakes in there, every species of ducks, flamingos. Daddy liked that. He’d go down and watch that with me.” Part of Pleasant’s ease owed to Sara’s presence. Even if they were no longer married, even if they would never be married again, A.P. felt better that his former wife was near, that they could still make music together.
Meanwhile, Sara and Maybelle could sound buoyant. When they’d knock off “Dixie Darling” or “Funny When You Feel That Way,” the old Rich Valley joy bubbled up through the surface. The women tried new cowboy songs they’d picked up in Texas, or straight instrumentals such as “Chinese Breakdown.” “You get tired of singing the same old things over and over,” Sara told Kahn.
“We had to just learn songs or think up new songs,” said Maybelle.
Maybelle made only one real mistake that winter. She loaned her Gibson guitar to the “least good” of their Good Neighbor Get-Together compatriots, Cowboy Slim Rinehart. Cowboy Slim went on a bender and lost the guitar to a local army airman in a poker game. “[Maybelle] had to get the base commander to intercede,” says her grandson, who owns the guitar now, “but she got it back.” That incident was a little bump in an otherwise smooth road.
Even the new announcer added real country flavor. He was a minister, with a charismatic’s energy. It wasn’t money that enticed Brother Bill Guild onto the radio show, but Don Baxter’s promise that he could fit his radio schedule around his church work, and that he could mention God on the program whenever he felt like it. “Brother Bill would almost shout every time we’d sing an old hymn,” remembered Sara.
The girls, meanwhile, were holding their own . . . even June. She started by singing so low she could barely be heard, but eventually braved a solo on her autoharp: “Engine 143.” It wasn’t a thing of beauty, but the audien
ce was apparently willing to forgive the artistic shortcomings of a ten-year-old. Like their mother, Helen, June, and Anita were getting sackfuls of fan mail, and so was Janette, in spite of herself. Janette had agreed to perform on radio, but not without trepidation. “I remember the first song I ever sang on the radio was ‘Dark-Haired True Lover,’ ” she says. “That was the first time I ever stood in front of a mike, and I remember wondering, ‘Where on earth is my voice a-goin’?’ It seemed like my whole breath was goin’, you know? I was trembling. But Mama and Daddy and Maybelle was standing over nearby.” Meanwhile, Joe took a pass. He was scratching around on the guitar at the time, but he refused to perform in public. “I kinda had stage fright,” Joe admits. “I dreaded to get up there.”
Still, Joe did like to be around. When the family drove down to Del Rio to do the occasional live show, Joe always went with them. But he wouldn’t go into the studio. There was too much fun to be had outside. “The old building itself had this half-tiled roof that held water, and bats lived under that tile,” says Joe. “Hundreds of them. After nightfall, I’d get me a bamboo pole and stand out there and whack at them. Every now and then, I’d hit one. They’d squeal and carry on up there.
“There was this little concession stand outside the station. Little old shanty built out of reeds. I could buy a soft drink for a penny each, because the exchange was five to one. I think I just about bust open drinking Coca-Colas. Handful of pennies and as much pop as I wanted.
“And that radio station was so powerful, you’d touch a barbed-wire fence right next to the station and it would burn you. It wasn’t even connected, just the molecules through the air, I guess. This ole boy who ran the concession stand, what he had for a radio was a wire from the roof of his shanty that went to a tin can sitting on a solid piece of metal. You could hear entirely what was going on in the studio.” Somebody down at the station even showed June that if she angled the iron gate at the XERA driveway just right, it would pick up the signal.
But the power of the X-station signal did not explain the power of radio. Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who in 1939 was carving Mount Rushmore on a granite outcropping in far-off South Dakota, called radio a gift to cut-off rural America: “Radio suggests whispering messages from the heart of the world across the heavens to every listening soul; it stirs the imagination; it reaches into unlimited space—joy, tears, song, the very dream of life, vibrating its way toward the stars.” Beyond Borglum’s pronouncements of radio’s stirring grace, there was also this: Radio could cut against the loneliness of the country’s age of dislocation, could find the homeless wanderers who had escaped the rural South for dreams of better lives, and then lost their own sense of where they belonged.
That winter of 1939 and 1940, border radio allowed the Carters to soothe a dust- and Depression-ravaged rural population, and a dislocated nation. The Good Neighbor Get-Together was different from the other big cross-country radio shows such as Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and The National Barn Dance out of Chicago. And the Get-Together was perfectly suited to the Carter appeal. The other radio shows were performed before a live audience—a big live audience—which added a call-and-response feel, pushing musicians to dig deep, like preachers competing for souls at a big revival. But the live audience also reminded those listening that because they weren’t there, they were missing much of the event. The listeners couldn’t see what that new star Roy Acuff was wearing, or how much the fiddle player cocked his elbow. Or what sideman was reaching for the fruit jar to get something cool—or not so cool—to drink. When Uncle Dave Macon set the Opry crowd to shouting and stomping with “Go Away, Mule,” the radio listener had to wonder if “the Dixie Dewdrop” had his banjo up over his head or down between his knees.
Roars of approval washed through the gleaming metallic threads woven into the fabric of Sears’s new Silvertone radio . . . for things that could never be seen by a listener in his living room. It was a reminder that the action was somewhere else. Moreover, that big crowd presence on those radio shows had a way of nudging and wheedling a listener, of telling them what they should be feeling. At The Good Neighbor Get-Together, no noise got between the Carter Family and their listeners. Without that live audience, the action seemed to be happening right there in the listener’s own living room. Sara Carter might as well have been five feet away, with her autoharp in her lap and her shoes kicked off.
That winter, a young kid in Johnson County, Arkansas, named Bud Phillips could listen to Janette Carter sing “Cowboy’s Wild Song to His Herd” and conjure his own private image of her beauty. For Bud, it was well worth the three-mile trek through the river valley—even in a snow-storm—to get to the only neighbor who owned a radio. And Bud wasn’t walking that valley alone. His family, his friends, and his neighbors all gathered to listen to the Carters. “The Carters were the best-loved in the our valley,” says Phillips. “They were singing our songs.” Johnny Cash listened in, and Chet Atkins and Tom T. Hall and Waylon Jennings. The Carter Family gave rise to their own fevered dreams. Buck Owens, whose own family was chased out of Texas by the dust and stranded fourteen hard years in Mesa, Arizona, listened faithfully to the Carters on the border stations. And how many others like Buck? But so, too, Lesley Riddle’s sister, now living far away from home in Detroit, could be soothed by the sacred songs of her Burnsville, North Carolina, youth. And how many others like her?
Meanwhile, all Janette could feel was her own frightening dislocation; she just wanted to go home. As Christmas neared, Janette announced to her father that she’d saved enough money to get herself back to Poor Valley. A.P. had other ideas. Janette was a good singer, and getting better. She kept a notebook full of collected songs, poems she could put to music, or pieces of lyrics she’d written herself. She could do songs her parents didn’t even know, such as “The Orphan Child,” an inversion of the Little Orphan Annie story, where a poor little locked-out orphan girl ends up frozen and lifeless on the rich man’s porch. Janette already sounded like a pro, and A.P. wanted his daughter to make a little investment in the future. “Daddy was trying to get her to buy that guitar out in San Antone,” says Joe.
“He wanted me to buy that guitar, and I wanted to come back home for Christmas, and I wouldn’t buy it,” Janette remembers. “But he bought the guitar, and he says, ‘If you give me your money, what you got, I’ll take you home.’ I think I had seventy-five dollars.”
New Year’s, 1940, Joe and Janette were back in the Valley, and happy for it. They planned to stay right there. But their cousins Helen, June, and Anita were still in Texas, spending their Thursday afternoons at the Baxters’ in San Antonio, cutting the weekly transcriptions. Sometimes they’d strap on their roller skates and hit the Baxters’ driveway while somebody else was recording in the studio, until one day Don Baxter came out and pleaded, “Girls, you gotta quit skating. It’s coming through. We’re picking it up on the recordings.” It was hard, but they stopped. Eck’s girls had become pros now, too. They’d sing. They’d play. They’d yodel. “On ‘Chime Bells’ we yodeled so high!” remembered Helen. “We were three yodelin’ little mice.” At six, Anita was already writing songs, taking inspiration from the double features they’d go to every Saturday. “You can tell,” Anita said later, “I went to a lotta westerns.” Her first song the girls performed on the radio included these lyrics:
Saddle ole Paint on a prairie
Just heading for a great big ride
Ropin’ and a-ridin’ on a prairie
Out on the Great Divide
Git along, little dogies
We’re headin’ for a great big ride.
National celebrity had made the Carter girls plainly different from their friends and family in Poor Valley; in fact, they were living a life almost completely insulated from the hard times that were ravaging most of their listeners. They got a look at that when they made a trip to Hugo, Oklahoma, to perform a live show. “When we got into Hugo, there was a big crowd outside the building where we were play
ing,” says June. “But when we got inside, there couldn’t have been more than fifty people in that building. We looked outside, and the place was just covered with people. But they had no money to come in. Well, Uncle A.P. went down and opened up the doors and let everybody in, and we sung. But we didn’t play any more dates. We just stayed on the radio.”
Sara Carter Bayes, meanwhile, was simply biding her time until the end of March, when the season would be done, and she could go back to California. She lived in a boardinghouse with Maybelle and the girls. It was a trial. Helen was terrified, for instance, of fire. And every time a fire engine went by in the middle of the night, she would wake in a terror, and Sara would go comfort her. “I can remember her taking me all over the house to show me it wasn’t on fire,” Helen said. Coy was once again an eager and able correspondent, and his typed-out postcards were always welcome: “Sara Bays, 303 San Pedro Avenue, San Antonio, Texas. Just in from deer hunting. No buck yet but have eight more days to hunt, yet. You bet we will be hunting when I get down there. I fixed that up that morning at the breakfast table in Del Rio. Well, hon, hope you are feeling fine by now. I listen to your records XELO 630 Pacific Standard Time, evenings. So by [sic] til next time. Your Hubbey.”
Toward the end of the 1940 stay, Coy came to San Antonio, and he and Sara set up a separate household for themselves. Sara had hoped maybe Coy would live in Virginia again after the radio season was over, but her husband made it clear he meant for them to keep California as a permanent home. So at the beginning of April, Sara and Coy got back in the big red Dodge and headed west for Greenville, California, while A.P. piloted his own Chevy back through the dust toward Poor Valley.
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? Page 26
