Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  * * *

  When A.P. got back to the Valley, he found out that Janette, who was just sixteen, had dropped out of school and was getting married. Ma Carter, Aunt Sylvia, and Maybelle all tried to talk her out of it, telling her she was too young, but Janette pointed out that she was just as old as her mother had been when she married, and just as old as Maybelle had been, too. The way Janette saw it, marriage would bring her something she’d not had: security. Finally, there would be somebody who thought of her first, who would look out for her above all others. But she was afraid to tell her father, partly because it would be the end of her music career, and partly because she was marrying Jimmy Jett.

  The Jetts were prominent in the Valley, but for all the wrong reasons as far as A.P. was concerned. First of all, they were Democrats. Party affiliation generally went back to the War Between the States, and even seventy-five years after, there were still venomous feelings on both sides. The big landowners in the Valley, like the slaveholding Jett family, had been Democrats, strong for secession. The farmhands, tenant farmers, and “rabble” often went for Lincoln’s Republican party. And they stayed. A.P.’s father was a stout Republican. Even in the trough of depression, Pa Carter would not stand for people sniping at President Hoover.

  The deepest undercurrent of Republican resentment ran right down to the north fork of the Holston River to Livingston Creek, where the Jett family farmed the richest bottomland in Poor Valley. At the time of secession, the John Jett place was the biggest estate in Scott County. The main house was a two-story Georgian made of bloodred bricks from the family’s private kiln. There were fourteen rooms in the main house, all with twelve-foot-high ceilings: the sleeping quarters; the big parlors with looms, spinning wheels, and musical instruments; and a chandelier-lit dining room that gave off onto the rear house. The back house held the ovens and kitchen, and quarters for the kitchen help. A covered walkway connecting the two buildings was called the “Whistling Breezeway,” because slaves delivering food were obliged to whistle all the way over to the dining room so that the Jetts could be sure their charges weren’t eating any table food on the way over. At the outbreak of war, John Jett owned hundreds of acres and seventeen slaves; and he sent two sons to fight with General Robert E. Lee.

  The Jetts lost their slaves in that war, but it hardly brought them to their knees. Both sons returned from battle (one with an arm shot off), and when they did, the family still held the best of the land. Seventy-five years later, they remained the richest family in the Valley—and the most talked about. Around Neal’s Store there would be stories of the raucous, unchristian goings-on at the Jett place. They always had booze on the table, people whispered. A cousin in Bristol even had his own distillery, when it was legal and when it wasn’t. There were tales of bacchanalian socializing at the Jett places, about dances made risky by hard fiddling and hard drinking. More than a few of those Poor Valley cotillions entered into local legend. One rainy night, while the dancing and drinking were going strong, the river got up and nobody could get out. So they just kept the party going, for three solid days and nights. There were tales of men pulling out their pistols and firing at the spinning hoop skirts of dancing women, just to see if they could hear the ping of the bullet glancing off the wire undercarriage. There were rumors of one drunken fracas where guns were pulled and a cousin was shot dead. When the circuit judge rode over a few days later to make an inquiry, a posse of well-armed Jetts met him at the edge of the property to explain that there would be nobody prosecuted on Jett land. Well, that’s how the story was told, anyway.

  The Jetts weren’t all bad. Back when there wasn’t a car in the Valley, and surely no hearse, Clarence Jett offered his wagon, no charge, to carry the dead to the bereaved family’s cemetery. If somebody died away from home and had to be shipped back to Maces Springs by train, it was Clarence who met the body at Neal’s and carted it wherever the family asked.

  By the 1930s, the Jett stills were all bonded: taxed and legal. But the Jetts were still doing devil’s work as far as A.P. was concerned, and Janette was afraid her father wouldn’t approve of her marriage to Jimmy. So Janette told Gladys her plan and asked her to tell their father.

  A.P. was not pleased, but he knew something about feeling alone, and he didn’t try to stop Janette. “Well, I do hope she’ll have some happiness in her life,” A.P. said to Gladys. “She’s not had much happiness.” Still, the day Janette got married, A.P. went up the mountain to pick huckleberries and refused to come down. Janette and Jimmy got one of the Jett cousins for a witness, and the three drove over to Gate City on May 25, 1940, to collect the license and the preacher. When Preacher R. T. Carter asked if they wanted to drive back over to Maces to get married, Janette said they didn’t have to go to the trouble. “My family’s not there anyway,” she told him.

  The preacher drove them just outside Gate City to a nice spot he knew, where he performed the ceremony beneath an apple tree in bloom. He nudged the car in under the tree, and the wedding party never even got out. Jimmy’s cousin witnessed from the front seat, next to the preacher. Jimmy and Janette said their vows from the backseat. After that, she and Jimmy moved to Bristol, and Jimmy wanted her to give up the music so that they could concentrate on starting a family of their own.

  * * *

  It was odd. Pleasant Carter was more famous than ever, and completely at sea. Losing Janette was a blow. The homeplace he’d bought for his family was now empty. Joe was living with Gladys and Milan, going to school up the road in Mendota. A.P.’s old buddy Lesley Riddle had moved north for work. Pleasant kept himself busy scouting and buying land, which he sometimes kept and sometimes held for a few years and turned around for a profit. Sometimes he and Mutt Skeens would go out and give entertainments. They spent a lot of time doing shows down around the Sandhills in North Carolina, where the pair had girlfriends. But those women moved away to California to try to get into the movies.

  A.P. still loved to get out and go, and there wasn’t much keeping him home. One time Jerry Parker asked him to look at a sawmill north of Roanoke. So Jerry and A.P. and Vernon Bays hopped in Jerry’s pickup truck and took off. All the way up, Jerry and Vernon kept up a friendly patter, but Pleasant just stared out the window, humming. “Every once in a while he’d break out into a song,” remembers Vernon. “It was strange. He just wasn’t in the conversation.” Then, all of a sudden, he’d come out with some arcane factoid: “If you want to know how big a town is,” A.P. would say, “just start looking at the telephone wires as you get near. The more wires, the more people.”

  Just west of Roanoke, A.P. told Jerry to pull off of Highway 11, where he wanted to show them something. He took them over to see the grave of an old farmer who wanted to be able to see his land after he died. They’d buried him up in the hills, standing in a glass coffin. “A.P. had been all over, so he knew about this kind of stuff,” says Vernon.

  Before A.P. left for Texas for the winter season of 1940–1941, he made a move to put a little life back in the homeplace. For one dollar, and “the further consideration of his natural love and affection for his daughter, the said Gladys Millard,” he deeded it to her and Milan. They moved in there with Joe before A.P. took off for San Antonio.

  Actually, the Carter Family headed to Texas by way of a Chicago recording studio. Even with Doctor Brinkley’s world crumbling around him, the radio audience was bigger than ever, pushing Carter Family record sales up out of their Depression-era slump. RCA Victor was reissuing old cuts, and now they wanted new recording sessions in Chicago and new material. In separate sessions in October of 1940 and 1941, the Carters cut a total of thirty-three songs. The songs weren’t much different from the Carters’ best-known guitar and swirling-harmony stylings, but the recordings reflect the startling distances these three people had traveled. Maybelle and Sara contributed more than ever to these sessions, including the first songs Maybelle wrote from scratch: an up-tempo but sad cowboy song, “Buddies in the Saddle”; “Why Do You
Cry, Little Darlings?”; and “Lonesome Homesick Blues.” The last song was down-home blues, with that old Lesley Riddle lick. Maybelle wrote it while living in Texas, where she was missing Eck. “I’m gonna ride that ol’ lonesome train, / To the one I left back in Maces Springs,” the song went.

  “Keep on the Firing Line” and “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room” were hymns Sara said she heard in California, at Charlie and Mary Bayes’s Adventist church on Main Street in Greenville. She even wrote a blues song of her own, “Bear Creek Blues.” And they also recorded a song they got in San Antonio from Brother Bill, a Holiness hymn called “There’ll Be No Distinction There” (“For the Lord am just, the Lord am right, / And we’ll all be white in the heavenly light”).

  The radio show had made A.P.’s singing more confident than ever, and the last solos he performed on Carter Family recordings, “I Found You Among the Roses” and “There’s Something Got Ahold of Me,” were as good as any he’d done. For all his troubles, Pleasant Carter’s own joy cuts through. And why not? His dream of recognition for himself, for his family, for their music was complete. In the fall of 1941, Life magazine sent a photographer to Poor Valley to shoot a spread on the entire family.

  Nobody in the Carter family, nobody, was more excited than June. “He was from New York, and we couldn’t understand a word he said,” June later wrote. “He made motions and we all smiled. Anita did her sitting-on-her-head routine, and not to be outdone, I showed him I was still a pretty good stomach-mover.” When the photographer left, June pulled all the spent flashbulbs out of the trash and saved them. At twelve, June knew she’d never have her sisters’ musical talents, but she’d already figured out how to deflect attention from her shortcomings and to get the applause she craved. It was a lesson she’d learned back at the San Antonio middle school.

  Just before the Life photographer showed up, the Carters were playing a show in Birmingham, and Maybelle brought June over to meet the Grand Ole Opry’s resident comedienne, Minnie Pearl. “Maybelle told me that June wanted to be a country comic, like me,” Minnie Pearl once said. “I told June then not to imitate me, but to create her own country character.”

  The next week June got a letter from Minnie Pearl, with a collection of some of her best-loved Grand Ole Opry routines. But June took Minnie’s advice. “I never used one of those routines,” June once wrote. “I developed my own.”

  Fern Carter remembers her father coming home from Eck’s house one night, bragging about June. She’d done a comedy act for a bunch of friends and neighbors. It was corny as could be; her country character made that old Clinch Mountain hermit Brown Thomas look like David Niven, but everybody had loved it. June performed her act live for the first time at a show at Midway High School in Rich Valley. Between songs, she crossed the stage dragging a big wooden plank.

  “Hey, where ya goin’?” Maybelle asked.

  “I’m looking for a room,” she answered. “I’ve got my board.”

  A.P., back in Poor Valley (Carter Family Museum)

  Anita, June, and Helen in Richmond (Carter Family Museum)

  On the Road . . .

  The big spread never ran in Life magazine. The week after the photo shoot, bigger news squeezed out the Carters: Japanese fliers bombed Pearl Harbor, and the country was, officially, at war. But the Life photographer, a Jewish émigré–New Yorker who had photographed Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky, framed a shot of himself and A.P. Carter and kept it on display at home. A.P., he said later, was the most exotic subject he’d ever photographed. It’s a picture that captured Pleasant Carter at the end of his long climb to recognition; even without an appearance in Life, his celebrity was never greater. But A.P. Carter must have found the attainment of this lofty height akin to gaining the balding peak of Clinch Mountain. Once on top, there was very little to sustain a man. The only way off was down.

  By the end of the 1941–1942 season in Texas, the Carter Family transcriptions were still winging out of the San Antonio studio to the X-stations along the border, but the Mexican government had shuttered Brinkley’s XERA. How long could the others last, now that the Mexicans had made their peace with the United States government? Harry O’Neill decided he was going to get out while the getting was good. For the next winter, he bought time for Consolidated Royal Chemical Corporation, newly christened Consolidated Drug Trade Products, on station WBT, a fifty-thousand-watt shouter in Charlotte, North Carolina. Then he asked the Carters to be part of the new program. A.P. was in without question, but Sara had a decision to make.

  By 1942 Sara and Coy had made their home in California. Sara had made real money in Texas, and she and Coy went in with Charlie and Mary to buy a house and a ten-acre cherry orchard in Stockton. That spring, Sara wrapped herself in the life of normalcy she had craved: cooking, cleaning, keeping a house. Even when Charlie and Coy were out working the orchard, she had Mary’s company. The two women shared a quiet bond; they could work all day together in that house without the need of talk. Sara missed her home in Virginia and her children, but so did Mary, and what good was talking about it?

  Sara was in love with the quiet of her life, with the ease, with the sameness of one day to another. And her celebrity was never a big hassle. She was known by name, and by voice, but not by face. So she could move through the shops and stores of downtown Stockton in complete anonymity. “Sara shunned any celebrity,” says her niece Barbara Powell, who lived a mile down the road in Stockton. “She didn’t enjoy it. She didn’t want the publicity. She never boasted or tried to impress anyone. Some people like the limelight. Some don’t.”

  Even Coy, who loved the glow of his wife’s fame, learned to keep his lips buttoned about Sara’s career. He could tease her mercilessly, pinch and coo and baby-talk, but he knew never to push her to perform, even when it was just family. In a way, the yin and yang of the relationship made it easier for Sara. Coy was naturally social, quick to draw attention to himself and away from Sara. “Her outlook was more pessimistic than optimistic,” remembers Barbara Powell. “Not real positive. That was all the time I knew her. Coy was a jokester. I don’t recall her ever telling a joke. She’d just sit in comfortable and enjoy the patter and conversation. She never came out as the life of a party. And it kind of perturbed her if you made her the center of attention and asked her to play. And I never heard her listen to anybody on the radio. She never talked about [the music]. I think it was something she did to make money.”

  For so long, making music had meant making money for Sara, and the Charlotte radio show was more of the same. It also meant another separation from Coy. By the fall of 1942, the war production machine had swallowed up most of the country and Coy with it. Coy was working on a Ships for Victory crew at the port in Stockton. Even Charlie Bayes, at sixty-four, got hired on as a shipyard guard. The pay was too good for Coy to walk away. He was going to keep making the money while it lasted, and so was Sara. That fall, she got on a train and headed east for Charlotte. But she told herself that this was the last contract; she was going to take the money and run.

  * * *

  Maybelle and the girls were committed to Charlotte, because Eck was committed to their future out in the wide world. The Valley could drive Ezra crazy. “We come in from Bristol one time,” Helen Carter remembered, “and Grandma Carter came across the hill, and she hollered, ‘Whoa, Ezra! Ezra!’ And Daddy said, ‘What is it, Ma?’ And she said, ‘I just needed a little kindling and I come over and got me a little.’ She’d burned up his curly maple, his redwood, and all this beautiful stuff he’d collected. He couldn’t open his mouth.”

  What was worse, Eck was now watching his parents fail. Mollie had recently come over to Eck’s house and grabbed Helen. “She said, ‘Helen, I want to walk this mountain one time before I die,’ ” Helen remembered. “Said, ‘Will you go with me? I’m sixty-seven years old. If I don’t go soon, I won’t go.’ My cousin Juanita and I went with her. And of course we’d run way ahead and wait for her—and she would come and she’d take
two steps up and fall back one. That’s how the poor thing went up the mountain. But she made it all the way across that mountain down into Copper Creek where some folks she knew lived, and we spent time with them.”

  Pa Carter died first. Arthritis had crippled him and left him in pain he couldn’t pray away. For a while near the end, Bob still got out on the circuit. He’d call out to Mollie, “I’m a-goin’,” grab his cane, shoo his scrawny little shorthaired dog off his lap, and the two of them, Pa Carter and Hairpin, would go walking down the Valley road. But Pa Carter didn’t stay gone long anymore. The visitor wasn’t much up to visiting. For two long years, he just sat in his chair and stewed. Sometimes Mollie would sit at his feet with a bowl of hot water, dip a towel, and wring it over his swollen knees. That soothed the pain some, but never enough. Bob had always been high-strung and strong-willed, but after so long being housebound and hurting, he was becoming ill-tempered. “He was always yelling for Ma Carter to do this and do that,” remembers his daughter-in-law Theda Carter. “And he needed it right now. One day he was yelling and carrying on and needed something, and Ma Carter was too slow and he got all worked up. And Ma Carter was crying. ‘Childish’ is what she called him. She said, ‘I don’t ever want to get like Bob if I live to be that old.’ ” Bob died in 1941, at age seventy-five, in the cabin Eck had built for him. Not long after, Mollie started to lose weight—and she didn’t have much to give away. Sylvia was having a hard time nursing her ailing mother, and the family was talking about sending Fern to stay with her in the little cabin.