Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  Death in a little cabin in Poor Valley was not what Eck had in mind for himself. And the truth was, it was hard to watch his mother slide. Ma Carter had understood his talents and his drive, and she’d nurtured them both. Sometimes there were even whispers of resentment among the other brothers, for while Eck had been allowed to go on to high school, they were stuck to the land. Eck didn’t listen to that kind of talk. He was busy with the next generation, trying to push them to something better. When they got the radio offer from Charlotte, Eck bought a new accordion for Helen, a tenor guitar for June, and for Anita, the big bass fiddle.

  When the Carters moved to Charlotte that fall, there wasn’t a house or apartment to be rented, so A.P., Sara, Ezra, Maybelle, and the girls moved into the Roosevelt Hotel. Their radio show aired live, every morning as the farmers got up and got going, from 5:15 to 6:15. Monday through Saturday, the Carters wakened before dawn, fixed hot biscuits and gravy in the little kitchenette, and made their way to the station. “Anita never woke up at all,” June wrote in Among My Klediments. “She hugged the bedpost while I put on her jeans. I steered her through the streets to the station and up the elevator into the studio.” Steering Anita was a lot harder now that she had the bass fiddle. It was a lumbering five feet tall, a half foot higher than Anita’s own self, and she had to stand on a chair just to play it. But she could play it. And she could sing.

  In San Antonio, living above the girls at the boardinghouse, there had been a woman who taught opera, and every day she and her students would run the scales. Anita would sit at her window a floor below and sing along. “They’d sing as high as they could and when they’d stop, I could always go a little bit higher,” Anita remembered. “She came and asked Mama if I could take lessons, and Mama said, ‘I don’t think so.’ Mother didn’t want us to sound like that.” Mercifully, Eck was not in town when the offer came.

  While they worked at WBT, Helen spent her mornings covering June’s tracks. (For all the hours of performing, June’s singing was not measurably improved.) After the morning show was over, Helen and June would take the Piedmont and Northern railroad out to Paw Creek High School. Helen had graduated from Hiltons High School the previous spring, just a few months before her sixteenth birthday, but she had nothing else to do all day long, so she went back to school. Like Eck, she loved books, and she had one advantage over her father. “Eck was pretty good in books,” says Joe Carter. “He got into the mail-clerk business, and you have to be pretty smart to pass that test. But Eck’s mind was no good for memorizing stuff. When he went into the Masons, he like to never learned his catechisms.” Helen had a memory like that of Mandy Groves or Pa Carter or Eck’s twin sister, Virgie. “She was our songbook, a walking songbook,” said Anita. “Helen remembered everything. Daddy was always so proud of her mind. He always just looked at me and said, ‘Shut up and sing.’ I think he thought that was all I had going for me.”

  Helen and June were also getting older, old enough to sing a love song and know what it meant, old enough for girlish excitement over the handsome soldiers in their dress uniforms or their spit-shined paratrooper boots, and old enough to catch the boys’ attention, too. Ezra even grunted ambivalent assents to a few young men who asked if they could take his daughters out on a date; but Eck agreed only when Helen and June double-dated, so that they could watch out for each other. That they could do. Four years of music work—the travel, the odd hours, the odd people, the teasing at school, the pressure to live up to the Carter name—had bound the girls in ways most sisters were not. The family was the one steadfast constant in the dizzying whirl of stage life. Even Anita, who was least interested in the life of an entertainer, could appreciate this blessing. “One thing we heard a lot wherever we were living was ‘Time to go to work!’ ” Anita Carter once said. “But to me, that meant family time.”

  In March of 1943, when the Charlotte radio contract expired, the Original Carter Family disbanded for good. There was no big announcement, no valedictory radio show, no final good-bye. Sara simply headed west for California, leaving behind her old life forever. A.P. went back to Poor Valley, moving into the homeplace with Gladys and her family. For the rest of his life, he would try, fitfully, to reconstitute his musical family, but never with much success. His own once-driving ambition would pale by comparison to that of his younger, and always competitive, brother. Eck, Maybelle, and the girls headed back to Maces Springs in March of 1943, but Eck wasn’t willing to let them sit there with Poor Valley dust gathering on their shoes. “When the children got up to where they could entertain, Eck wanted them to be out there, and he didn’t really care if Sara and A.P. was there,” says Stella Bayes. “When they got old enough and they could be on their own, Ezra wanted it that way.” Sitting on the porch of Mollie’s cabin one day, Eck turned to his mother and said, “Those girls will work if they have to go to South America.”

  The way June told it later, in the spring and summer of 1943 she had time to play basketball, drive across the mountain for a singing school, go with Fern to Breakneck Place, drive a logging truck, plow, sow, cut and shock fifty-four acres of wheat, and be saved, having “seen the tongues of fire as on the day of Pentecost” at a prayer meeting in Uncle Fland Bays’s home. Maybelle provided a less evocative picture of that time, and one more in line with Eck’s impatience. “We left Charlotte in March of 1943,” she told Ed Kahn. “From there, me and the girls went to Richmond to work. [The Original Carter Family] disbanded in March and we went to work the first of June.”

  Maybelle did have one particularly vivid memory of that spring: the tryout at the radio station WRNL. “Helen, June, and Anita and I rode the bus from Bristol to Richmond for that audition,” Maybelle told her friend Dixie Deen Hall in an interview in 1966. “We got there at two in the evening and we had to catch a bus back at six so that the girls would be home in time for school the following day.”

  “WRNL,” Anita once said, “that was where we started. We went up and auditioned, and the manager of the station had this man in there with him who later became the announcer on our show, and he said, ‘Hire them. They’re corny as hell!’ It was so bad. These little voices, you know. Corny as hell. And that’s when we sang:

  We’re the Carter Sisters from the mountains

  And we’re here to sing your favorite songs

  We hope you’ll listen in this morning

  As we greet you with our songs

  For three years, “The Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle” played WRNL, a dinky five-thousand-watt, strictly local station, recording shows for morning and afternoon, six days a week. In those days, the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle were best described as a “novelty act.” None of the girls had their mother’s instrumental chops. Eck hadn’t helped matters when he saddled Helen with the forty-pound accordion and Anita with the big doghouse bass fiddle. In the beginning, in fact, Helen was befuddled by the accordion. She had to learn to play the basses with her right hand and the melody with her left. “This thing is just absolutely backwards to the piano,” she’d complain. Still, under her father’s insistent gaze, Helen kept at the awkward, heavy instrument. And it went a lot easier for her after a date the Carters played in Louisville, where she got some advice from the more studied eye of Pee Wee King. “Hey,” he asked Helen, “did you know you’ve got that on upside down?”

  On the radio show, fortunately, The Virginia Boys, Doc and Carl, were there to carry some of the load. Doc Addington, Maybelle’s younger brother, and their cousin Carl McConnell had worked at the X-stations in Texas, and on the road with Maybelle and the girls. Having them to fill up airtime on the twice-a-day half-hour radio program took some of the pressure off the girls. Doc and Carl were able musicians, with an eye toward the jazzier musical tastes of the day. “Yes, indeed,” the announcer would chime in, “Doc and Carl go to work first thing this morning with ‘You’ve Two-Timed Me One Time Too Often.’ ”

  June was gradually taking over as the marketing whiz. She could do the h
ard sell for any sponsor: “It’s no job at all to talk about the wonderful summer clothes in Thalheimer’s basement . . . a complete line of cotton peasant skirts in sizes twenty-four to thirty, and priced reasonably in their basement tradition at just $2.98. . . . There are floral spuns with full skirt in blue-with-white floral, and pink background with white floral. And there are three rows of thin rickrack trim at the bottom of the skirt, which is finished off with an attractive ruffle.”

  June was a born salesperson. She liked to be heard and had the instrument for it. One night at the dinner table, she proudly told the family that one of her teachers had praised the carrying qualities of her voice. “She said my voice had ‘residence,’ ” June announced. “Resonance, June. Resonance,” said Eck. “If your brain were in a bird, it would fly backwards.” But sponsors such as The Southern Planter magazine were pleased to have June Carter’s “resident” voice.

  “Look, there’s a towheaded farm boy posing with two beautiful sheep,” she’d say to the WRNL announcer.

  “That is a terrific cover, Junie, but it’s the inside of this famous farm journal that means so much to our listeners.”

  “How very right you are, Ken. Tradition means very much to this great paper, but that doesn’t keep it from being up to the minute on current farm needs and trends.”

  “It certainly doesn’t, Junie. There’s proof in the June issue of The Southern Planter, which carries on page six an all-important story on pasturage for poultry, written by Dr. Juhl, a world authority on poultry. . . .”

  “I’m sure all our listeners will want to read it for themselves . . .”

  “. . . but right now it’s music as Mother Maybelle sings ‘So Long, Darling.’ ”

  Though she was one of the best-loved performers in country music, Maybelle was most comfortable providing guitar backing for the girls. She’d get out front for a solo or two in each show, making sure to play the numbers her audience requested most: old Carter Family favorites, or the newer sentimental songs of wartime departures and returns. The girls also made a nod to tradition, always including a “hymn for the day.” But meanwhile, they were always itching to move out beyond the old Carter Family stylings. Sometimes the girls could coax their announcer to work up piano arrangements of pop songs. “We sang ‘Shoofly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy,’ ” Anita said. “Makes your eyes light up and your stomach say howdy.”

  Despite the jazzy new sounds, the radio shows still brought teasing at their new schools. “We’re the Korny Karter Sisters from the mountains,” their friends would mock, although it never seemed mean-spirited. In Richmond, June was attending John Marshall High School, Anita a local grade school, and their new classmates were not the sort whose families encouraged music from the hollows. In fact, the Richmond public education was just the training Eck wanted for his girls. “A Richmond girl learns to cut a French-style green bean,” June once wrote. “She learns to change the light, fluffy priscilla curtains from the heavy drapes in winter, to replace the straw mats with wool rugs, and to put on the linen slipcovers in the springtime.” June went to a riding academy, sang in her school’s girl’s chorus and glee club, and acted as honored sponsor to the school’s proud Cadet Corp. She managed to make herself part of the in crowd at John Marshall High, a crowd that was always welcome in Maybelle’s home, no matter what they did. “They had this gang called the ‘Hoodlums,’ ” Maybelle once told her friend Dixie Hall. “I know one night they came in and I had some eggs ready to fry. Well, one of them picked up an egg and threw it, and then eggs started flying all over the kitchen! Those youngsters were always up to some mischief. When I’d go to school to pick June up, they’d all climb on my car and weight it to the ground.” Even while she was running with these sophisticated city teenagers, June was hamming it up onstage as one of the most backward characters in country comedy, her own invention, “Aunt Polly Carter.” Her Aunt Polly had a flat hat, pointed shoes, lacy pantaloonlike undergarments, and the same broad, unrefined sense of humor with which June had first invested her creation.

  Aunt Polly was never invited to the radio show, but she was a big part of the Carters’ traveling show. Their professional schedule wasn’t confined to the radio-show recordings, or WRNL’s wartime favorite Canteen Woogie. And their travel wasn’t confined to Richmond’s USO Parking Lot Canteen or McGuire General Hospital, where wounded country-boy soldiers were treated to a free show. Eck had taken an early retirement from the railroad, and he was booking dates nearby. Country acts on five-thousand-watt stations didn’t get much in the way of salary in those days, but the radio shows were great for advertising upcoming concerts. As with so many other groups, the Carters’ best source of income was gate receipts from personal appearances. So they worked the area, traveling constantly, performing for live audiences in the towns within range of their station’s signal. The WRNL announcer kept folks apprised of the Carters’ frantic schedule: “Very quickly, where the Carter Sisters and Doc and Carl can be seen in person: on Thursday, the thirtieth, at Reading, Pennsylvania, and Friday at Victoria Community House sponsored by Circle Number Five of the Victorian Methodist Church. And on Sunday, June the second, at Marius, Virginia, the Astor Theater. There will be three shows, five, seven, and nine P.M., that’s on Sunday the second of June.”

  The Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle played courthouses, schoolhouses, movie houses, the top of concession stands at drive-in movie theaters, even when wartime travel got difficult. Maybelle had a ’41 Packard, the newest model available after the automobile maker quit turning out new cars and moved into war production. It was a big, commodious car, could handle the entire traveling troupe and the instruments . . . until Eck sold it. Eck was gung-ho about the war effort, leasing all the farmland he owned in Poor Valley for government wheat production. When Eck decided his patriotic operation needed a third truck, he traded in Maybelle’s Packard. For a while, she had a ’41 Cadillac. That car guzzled gas like it had a hole in the tank, and with wartime rationing in force, the Carters often had to beg or borrow gas stamps from friends and neighbors just so they could make dates. But the Caddy was big, sturdy, powerful, and roomy, which was good, because there were nights when Doc and Carl piled in with the girls, along with Maybelle’s guitar, and Carl’s and Helen’s, and Doc’s banjo and Helen’s accordion and Anita’s stand-up bass fiddle and June’s autoharp and her guitar and maybe her room-and-board board for a trip to some town in North Carolina or West Virginia or Pennsylvania. The girls loved to play Newport News best. Between shows they’d have a chance to go to the beach, which was the closest thing they got to a day off.

  Then, as Helen remembered, disaster struck: “Mama goes downtown and a blamed streetcar backed over her, just squashed our Cadillac.” After that, it was everybody piled into Eck’s ’39 Packard roadster, which was designed more for a couple of buddies heading to the golf course than for a traveling troupe of musicians. Eck, Doc, and Maybelle took up the front seat; Anita and the instruments got the little cubby behind them. Carl, Helen, and June were stuck in the open-air rumble seat. “We had to tie skirts over our heads so our hair didn’t fly away completely,” said Helen.

  When it was just Eck and Maybelle and the girls on the road, Maybelle usually took the wheel and ran the car like a demon through the hills. She could drive all night, through fog and foul weather, without complaint—and without incident. When Eck slid into the driver’s seat, things seemed a little less secure, which the girls would do their best to forget. Holding tight in the backseat, they’d run through tried-and-true numbers such as “Engine 143” and “Old Joe Clark” or try out new numbers such as “Shoofly Pie” or “My Darling’s Home at Last,” or the Gene Autry songs that Helen loved. Anita had barely reached double digits and was full of twisting energy, so she had trouble in the long confinements of highway travel. Her amusement was pinching and clawing at her sisters, starting fights in the backseat. Helen and June were left to defend themselves as best they could. On one trip, Maybelle, from be
hind the steering wheel, begged her husband, “Eck, would you talk to Anita?” Eck whipped around in his seat. “Hello, Anita,” he said sweetly, and turned back around.

  The Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle were a self-contained road show. Once they hit a town, they’d hook up their own public-address system, tune their instruments, take the tickets, and press their handmade clothes with a heated lightbulb. In the middle of wartime, somebody had given Maybelle a parachute, and she made silk dresses with black velvet ribbons for all three girls. “Mama ironed the fire out of everything,” June says. “We never went onstage with a wrinkle or uncurled hair. And even though Mama might not have slept for two days, we always looked like we just stepped out of a bandbox.” Keeping up appearances was a chore, especially when they’d play movie houses between pictures, sitting in the back of the audience until the movie neared conclusion, then stealing off to the basement dressing room (often under the stage next to the coal bin) and then clambering up a ladder onto the stage. There were times the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle would do five shows in a day, fix their own flat tires, and rehearse on the road in the Cadillac or one of the Packards. And sometimes on those long drives, the old Carter Family songs would come on their car radio, and they’d all quiet down, bone-tired and aching, and just listen.

  Even after her beautiful new Packard got sold out from under her, and her Cadillac got run over by the streetcar, no trip was too daunting for Maybelle. One time, she and the girls had to take a bus all the way to Kansas City to play a show. “And we had my bass fiddle on this bus!” Anita Carter said. “Can you imagine that?” When the fellow passengers saw the instruments and insisted on a performance, the Carters gave an impromptu middle-of-the-night show. Maybelle would have thought it rude to decline, especially with so many servicemen on board.

  Maybelle approached life on the road with the same equanimity with which she faced life with her enervating husband; she was unflappable. Sometimes she and the girls would stay at boardinghouses, and sometimes they’d flop with relatives. If they had a date close enough, they’d stay with Maybelle’s brother Bug and his family in Hiltons, in the basement under the Addington General Store. “That was a lot of people. They’d sleep anywhere, on the couch, on the floor,” says Bug’s daughter, Suzy. “They’d be too tired to not sleep.” Maybelle and the girls rolled into Bug’s house late one night and presented two-year-old Suzy Addington with a white dress trimmed in blue. “Maybelle had crocheted every bit of it herself,” Suzy says. “And she must have been dead tired, but she would always do my hair. I don’t remember much, but I do remember Maybelle made a point to wash out her undergarments every night no matter where she was.”