But Anita would never forget the first time she heard them play; it was just like her mother promised: Here was music unlike any she’d heard, a spectacular mix of country and jazz. “When I heard Chester and Homer and Jethro start playing, my mouth dropped about ten miles,” Anita remembered, her voice rising with excitement a half century after the event. “There was no better group in the world. Jethro was such a great mandolin player, he just scared me. And they had Aitchee Burns, Jethro’s brother, playing with them, the best bass player I ever heard.” Anita intended to learn some things about playing a bass fiddle from “Dixie’s fastest slapper of the bass,” Aitchee. “We sat at their feet,” says June. “Especially Chester’s.”
Chet Atkins did not immediately cleave to the Carters; he did not, at that time, cleave to anyone very quickly. In 1948 he was a young husband and a new father, wondering if he would ever make enough money from his music to support a family. Chet was born in 1924 in a hollow near Luttrell, and grew up there and in Georgia, splitting time between the homes of his divorced parents. He was a slight, introverted, asthma-stricken boy in a poor and broken family. The family was also, thank heaven, musical. His father pushed Chet to play the violin, but the boy didn’t listen. “When I was eleven or twelve, I read in Daddy’s Etude magazines about Heifetz and Albert Spalding and all those guys who started when they were seven years old. I thought, ‘I’m too old to be a violinist.’ So I played the guitar.”
In the late ’30s, Chet built himself a radio out of mail-order parts (he listened to the Carters on XERA) and his first electric guitar. In 1939, at age fifteen, he got work at the station WRBL in Columbus, Georgia. Three years later, he was hired at WNOX as a fiddle player, for three dollars a night. “It wasn’t enough to live on, but I was in show business,” he says, “and I loved it.” Asthma kept Atkins out of the military, so he remained in Knoxville as part of the WNOX wartime parade of talented but oddball 4-Fs, which included Emory Martin, the one-armed banjo player, and Ray Meyer, who had no arms and played steel guitar with his feet. “We also had the Johnson Kids with us,” said Chet. “They were, like, nine and eleven. Blanchard would give the little one a nickel every time he’d break wind. That little bastard could just go on and on.”
One night, while driving home from an appearance, Lowell Blanchard heard Atkins playing guitar in the backseat. Atkins’s technique was his own variation of what is now known as “Travis picking.” He plucked the muted bass strings in a quick thumping rhythm with his thumb; his fingers played the melody, creating intricate and beguiling melodies above the rhythmic bass. That night, in the car, Blanchard named Atkins the WNOX staff guitarist. “I had to learn country tunes, old standards, pop tunes, and once in a while, a new pop tune,” said Chet. “And to learn new tunes, I had to learn new positions and how to play the melody and the rhythm at the same time.” But Atkins’s adventurous streak quickly got the better of him. His liberal use of jazz chords and themes struck his Knoxville audience as a little peculiar, and it wasn’t long before Blanchard was suggesting to Chet that he was ready for a more cosmopolitan market.
He went first to WLW in Cincinnati, then on to Nashville, Springfield, Denver. “I don’t think they cared too much for what I did,” Chet said of Cincinnatians. “I was there six months before they fired me. That’s the way it went. I got fired all over the country.” He finally circled back to Knoxville and, with Henry Haynes and Kenneth Burns (aka Homer and Jethro), began cooking up a home brew of jazz-infused country and country-infused jazz. When they took their show on the road in the late forties, Tennesseans still hadn’t caught up with Chet and his buddies. “Hell,” said Atkins, “we didn’t even make gas money a lot of the time. We just didn’t draw. I felt defeated.”
Chet may not have been cheered by the goings-on around WNOX, either. Even after the war, the station retained some of its 4-F cast and feel. A rare photograph taken inside the WNOX studio shows the entire cast guffawing, as Blanchard presides over a boxing match between three-and-a-half-foot comedian Robert “Little Robert” Van Winkel and “Hot Shot Elmer,” a half-wit character created by singer Bill Carlisle. In the middle of all the cornpone high jinks, the Carter girls’ eager and unwavering enthusiasm for Chet’s music began to win him over. But it was Eck Carter who really reeled him in.
By the time they got to Knoxville, Eck “Pop” Carter was Maybelle and the girls’ full-time manager, arranging their out-of-town engagements, for which services he took his fifth of the money. He also helped out with the driving, but in this capacity he still required close supervision. “Now, Daddy,” Maybelle would admonish as he climbed behind the wheel, “don’t drive too fast.” Within five minutes, he would be doing a hundred miles an hour while his daughters squealed at him from the backseat to please, please slow down. “Okay, okay,” he’d grump, “since you don’t really want to get there.” Then he’d putter along at a crawl for a while, before gradually picking up the pace. Even after he finally gained a comfortable cruising speed, he still needed watching, because he sometimes dozed off in the driver’s seat. “Somebody’d holler ‘Daaaddddeeee!’ and he’d wake up,” recalled guitarist Ray Edenton, who often filled in for Anita when she was in school. “They told me they had to do it all the time.”
But Eck meant to earn his keep, and he took his role as manager seriously. And by himself, he came up with a brilliant idea. First he ran it past Maybelle, then their daughters. When all approved, he approached Atkins: How would Chet like to join the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle? They’d split the money evenly. He’d get a sixth just like the rest.
There are countless reasons why this experiment might have failed. Atkins’s complex style of playing might have clashed with Maybelle’s. He might have been overwhelmed by June’s vivaciousness, sending him further into his shell. Even simple logistics were daunting; the addition of Chet meant six people crammed into a single Frasier automobile, along with the instruments, Chet’s amplifier, and a brand-new, top-of-the-line RCA public-address system.
Maybe that’s why they decided to leave Eck behind on the first road trip, assuring an inauspicious start to the partnership. It was raining hard, and somewhere on the road out of Knoxville, the Frasier began to limp. As the only male, Atkins was obliged to get out of the car and examine the tires; he found one punctured. “Flatter’n hell,” he muttered, “and a car full of women.” The women giggled at Chet’s sudden, surprising volubility. Not entirely sure how to change a tire, Chet knelt in the mud and went to work. Periodically, a car would drive by and drench him, setting off a new round of ejaculatory curses—which, in turn, sent the Carter girls into new fits of giggles. For the rest of his life, he would refer to this as “the night I taught those girls how to cuss.”
The road got smoother, fast, and the Carters soon found out that in Chet Atkins they’d got much more than a talented sideman. Though the Carter girls were already playing pop tunes, and had even injected a few jazzy numbers into their act on special occasions, it had never come as naturally to them as it did to Atkins. Songs they had sung all their lives were suddenly made fresh, as Chet’s guitar painted them with unexpected flourish: to the mournful country ballad “In the Pines,” he added stinging blues licks; for boot-stompers like “Stay a Little Longer,” he played swing; and to his repertoire of solos, he added an instrumental version of “My Clinch Mountain Home” that was so fast and complicated, A.P. himself would scarcely have recognized it. What’s more, a virtuoso such as Atkins makes everyone around him play better, and Helen’s accordion, in particular, improved dramatically. She had always played melodies well enough, but now she developed a chugga-chugga rhythm to go along with Atkins’s thumping thumb; and she, too, learned to swing out.
For the first time in his life, Atkins was making decent money, and his confidence increased day by day. The taciturn Chester was a perfect foil for June, who had buried Aunt Polly but had birthed a newer, sleeker, less cornpone hillbilly chatterbox, “Little Junie Carter.” One of Little Junie
’s main missions was to get the clench-jawed guitar player to talk onstage. “I’d swing on the curtain way out over the audience, just so Chester would tell me to stop it,” she later wrote. “Sometimes as he was playing his guitar, I’d run my nose up and down the frets—adding to or taking away from whatever he was playing at the time. He had a vibrato on his guitar that looked like a gear shift, and I’d throw him into high or low, whether he felt like it or not.” When he finally did begin to talk onstage, there emerged an appealing “aw, shucks” young man that country people seemed to like. It had never occurred to Chet that anybody would like him. And for once he looked almost happy.
“I was spending more time in that Frasier than I was in bed,” Atkins later wrote in his memoir, Country Gentleman. “But I loved every minute of it.” On Saturday night, nearing midnight, after WNOX’s Tennessee Barn Dance was behind them, the group would load the Frasier and hit the road, bound for somewhere as far-flung as the Pennsylvania fairgrounds. In the wee hours of the morning, they would stop at a sleepy relative’s house in Poor Valley for breakfast, then continue on, as Chet put it, “like a bunch of zombies.”
Right from the start, “The Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle, Chet Atkins and His Famous Guitar” was a dynamic, and self-contained, road-show act. They’d even worked out a more efficient division of labor. Now everybody had assigned tasks: Maybelle tuned the instruments and Helen worked the door, while June and Chet set up the stage. Atkins, who loved tinkering with electronics, would try to adjust the controls on their new RCA sound system, but June would bark at him to keep his “blamed fingers” to himself. “I knew just where to put the little knobs,” she’d say later. The sound system consisted of a single microphone and two large speakers, so even with a separate amplifier for Chet’s guitar, stagecraft required subtle balancing. Four instruments and five separate voices had to share a single mike. “You had to play loud enough to be heard but quiet enough to hear the other people,” says June. “It was complicated.” There was rarely a time for a proper sound check to ensure that everything would be in balance; at best, there was only Eck, wandering around the audience, giving them the sign that everything was coming through okay.
Though the new act was moving toward improvisation, the shows had the same basic contours. After the theme song, “The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia,” June would open the show with a toe-tapper such as “Goin’ to Sugar Hill” or a novelty tune such as Felice and Boudleaux Bryant’s “Plain Old Country Girl,” which suited Little Junie Carter right down to the ground.
Next came a sentimental pop number, followed by Mother Maybelle singing a Carter Family standard such as “Gold Watch and Chain” or “Little Moses.” If she sang one of the old duets, such as “Little Darlin’ Pal of Mine” or “Jealous-Hearted Me,” Helen would take Sara’s part. Then Chet would play a solo on the guitar, which might be anything from an old Carter Family tune to “Liebestraum.” Traveling and performing with the Carters had made Atkins much more aware of the audience; not just its size, but its prevailing tastes.
They’d be at a date in Pennsylvania, well outside of the WNOX range, and Chet would find himself in front of a crowd full of Yankees, and yet they seemed almost human, as though they had “the same problems and could identify with our songs just as quickly as the people who lived in the South,” Atkins remembered. “It was the first time I ever took stock of the people to whom we were playing and of what our music was saying to them.” The more he watched the audiences, the more able he was to read how he was going over. He was learning to change up, to go off the prescribed set, to shift his emphasis from country to jazz and back again—in short, to do whatever seemed to best suit the occasion.
After Chet’s guitar solo, Anita would take over the mike and sing a love song in her clear, spine-shivering soprano. At fifteen, Anita had been a professional performer for eleven years, and she knew how to read an audience, too. Sometimes when the crowd got edgy, she would let fly with a song nobody expected, such as “That’s How I Spell Ireland.” After that, anything might happen. If the audience favored bluegrass, Chet would break out his fiddle and Maybelle her banjo. If it was a more somber, Sunday crowd, they would lean heavily on hymns and sacred songs while Helen’s accordion sobbed like a church organ.
Maybelle, for her part, stuck to her knitting. She knew the foundation of the Carters’ appeal was still the old original tunes, and she made sure every set had some. For the rest, she receded quietly into the background, pushing her daughters out front and toward new songs. Maybelle would hear a pop tune she liked and say to Helen or Anita, “I bet you could sing that.” Sometimes, when one of the girls made a big success with a song, and the requests came again and again and again, until her daughter was simply sick of performing it, Maybelle would gently remind her, “Honey, you’ve got to give the people what they want.”
After nearly a quarter century, pleasing the audience remained Maybelle’s single focus. She never acted as if the effort deserved special reward; the way she saw it, it was her privilege to be given the chance to perform. But that effort was also physically demanding, requiring as many as five shows on a Sunday. At the end of a weekend full of shows, they’d all pile into the Frasier and run it like fury back to Knoxville to be ready for Monday’s Midday Merry-Go-Round. And while that car raced through the dark highways toward “home,” postperformance adrenaline often got the better of exhaustion. Who could sleep? New harmonies were discovered in the backseat of that Frasier, new songs learned. “We rehearsed so much that I could just look at Helen and Anita and know what notes they would sing,” says June, “even though Helen sometimes sang above me, sometimes below me. People would send sheet music to the station, songs that nobody had ever heard before, and we sang them just like sacred-harp singing—you just took off, and everybody found a part.” Sometimes in that car, new songs were written. Once when the big Frasier lurched, the giggling sisters decided it was high time to fit the word lurch into a song. “The Kneeling Drunkard’s Prayer” (“I went down to the old country church, / and saw the drunkard stagger and lurch”), in fact, would be the first single the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle recorded for RCA, in 1949. It didn’t take long for Chet Atkins to discover that a carful of women has its advantages, especially when things finally got quiet. “I’d lay my head in one of ’em’s lap and try to go to sleep,” he said. “It wasn’t all bad, I tell you.”
By the time the car reached Knoxville, there was never much time before the five musicians had to get back to their regular day job at the radio station. The grinding schedule, and Eck’s watchful eye, cut into the girls’ social life. Sometimes they’d be invited to sing at fraternity houses at the University of Tennessee, where the college-age Carter sisters would stand around the piano, playing requests for the moon-faced boys in their blazers and ties. On rare occasions, they’d even go on dates with fraternity boys or football players, but this was as close to college life as June and her sisters would get. Maybelle, meanwhile, made friends with a WNOX singer named Bonnie Lou Moore. The two women shared the same professional and motherly concerns, would chat between shows or talk on the phone, but as June says, “There was no time for real friendship. We were so tied up in music—we were never not making music—and if we weren’t, if Mother had any sense, she got into bed and went to sleep. We all did.”
The Carters did have a smallish family reunion in Knoxville in 1948, when A.P. accepted a spot on the WNOX program. As far as the girls could see, their uncle Doc hadn’t changed much. Some evenings, the entire family would gather at a diner across the street from WNOX. One night, as A.P. crossed Gay Street toward Regis’ Restaurant, a pigeon relieved itself on his hat. “Damn-it,” he said, pointing to his hat. “That pigeon took a shit on my head.” Just then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a lady passing. Instantly ashamed at his off-color language, A.P. tried to phum-pher out an apology. “No, he didn’t, lady,” he called after her. “No, he didn’t.” By the time he got to th
e table where the girls were waiting, the absurdity of his apology had struck him as funny, and as he sat down at the table, his shoulders were bouncing up and down, and hiccups of laughter were catching in his throat. “We all got to laughin’,” said Helen, “and he laughed so hard that instead of cleaning up the mess, he got it stuck on his hat. And he ate his whole meal like that—with [pigeon droppings] sitting on his head.”
In the WNOX studio, where there was tremendous curiosity about him, none of the musicians ever saw that informal, relaxed side of A.P. Carter. “A reserved, diginified sort of fellow” was how Chet Atkins described him, “a strange old duck. He’d stroll around all the time, wouldn’t sit still.”
“I heard of him all my life,” says Ray Edenton. “I remembered him from the old records, and I’d always wondered why he’d wait so long to come in and sing.” To Edenton, A.P. Carter just wasn’t like the other musicians making their living at the Gay Street studio; it had been seven years since A.P. Carter had recorded, and five since he’d had a regular radio job, but he still had a following. All he seemed to want to do was make music and sell his new pamphlet, Bible Questions and Answers. “We were making thirty-five dollars a week from the station, but he said he didn’t want no money,” says Edenton, “just let him sell books. And I said, ‘Man, that old man’s gonna starve to death.’ I didn’t know what a following he had. He’d get up and do a couple of songs, then he’d sing bass with the Carter girls. And man, the mail! They brought it in by the basketload. Boy, he sold those books. They loved him, those country people.” But A.P. didn’t last long in Knoxville; he was anxious to get home to Maces Springs, where he had some ideas about building and presiding over his own summer stage.
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? Page 30
