Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  * * *

  The Carter sisters had always taken strength from one another. Onstage, sometimes, when Anita was bone-tired and maybe even a little sick of the road, she’d look over at Helen behind her accordion, or at June in her flat hat and comic pantaloons, and they’d smile at her and nod, and she felt at home, stronger, able to go on. But even before they’d been at Knoxville a year, there were signs that the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle were no longer a single, or single-minded, unit. The fault lines were not yet visible, but in the hurtling enclosed cocoon of the Frasier, each of the girls was beginning to form her own separate idea about what she wanted next.

  June was an entertainer for life; she was happiest in front of an audience, and she knew she was good. So did the A&R man at RCA, Steve Sholes. Sholes was a shrewd judge of artists, at least in terms of their commercial potential. He would later gamble his own career by paying Sun Records what was then a preposterous sum—thirty-five thousand dollars, plus back royalties—to sign Elvis Presley. Sholes was a stickler for charisma; his artists had to have it. When he found somebody who had it, he grabbed him or her. So in early 1949, not long after the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle recorded a single for him, Sholes presented June with a solo contract and asked her to come to New York to record “Plain Old Country Girl” and some comic numbers with Homer and Jethro.

  With Eck as chaperone, June took the train to New York for her first sessions outside the family. “Plain Old Country Girl” was a piece of cake; she could sing that material in her sleep. But Homer and Jethro had something a little more challenging in mind: a parody of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The original, written by Frank Loesser, was a romantic duet featured in the Esther Williams aquatics film Neptune’s Daughter. It had won the Academy Award for best song and had already been recorded by three famed duos: Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark; Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer; Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan. The version Homer and Jethro cooked up was decidedly less reverent or romantic.

  In the hillbilly version, June pays a visit to Homer and Jethro, who ply her with drinks and Eddy Arnold records. June tries to escape the house (“Pappy’ll get the shotgun down!” she warns), but she’s enjoying the moonshine (“maybe just a half jug more”) and the men are telling her it’s too cold to leave the house. Homer and Jethro liken her lips to bicycle pedals, moving in closer as Atkins’s guitar swirls and Burns’s mandolin trills.

  Only after this over-the-top, and potentially embarrassing, version was recorded did it occur to Steve Sholes that Frank Loesser might find the parody offensive. Sholes had no interest in blindsiding one of the most popular songwriters in America, so he nervously sent Loesser a test pressing, along with a polite letter, asking his permission to release the cut. Loesser, it turned out, had a sense of humor and asked only that the label read, “with apologies to Frank Loesser.” The single was released in August of 1949 and began to climb both the country and the pop charts, rising to number nine and number twenty-two, respectively. That fall, news came that the Latin Quarter, one of New York City’s toniest nightclubs, was anxious to have Homer and Jethro and June Carter for an extended engagement. June balked. Leaving the family for a few days to make a record was one thing, but leaving the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle for a long period was something else entirely. She knew she held the act together, and she wasn’t going to risk its dissolution.

  Neither of her sisters was as single-minded or as ambitious as June. Anita’s one great ambition, as the fall of 1949 neared, was to convince her father to let her go back to Hiltons for her final year of high school. This would be her last chance to live like a normal teenage girl, chattering with her girlfriends, wading in the Holston River on hot days, and maybe even going to the prom. She told her father she could still work some of the weekend shows and it was only for a single school year. Finally he relented, and Anita moved in with her uncle Bug and aunt Florida to have a regular senior year. Helen was in a dicier position. There was a man she loved, someone who had been pursuing her for more than two years. Glenn Jones was handsome and dashing, a pilot with his own plane. He was also possessed of remarkable energy and enduring patience. But his patience was running out.

  Glenn had met Helen in Richmond, not long after the war, and he was immediately, hopelessly, in love. “She wasn’t loud,” he says. “She didn’t smoke, didn’t drink. She wasn’t wild like a lot of girls back then. Mother Maybelle kept a pretty tight rein on them. They were all good girls, like the girls I grew up with in the country.” On the second date, he took Helen up in the plane, and even gave June (and her resonant voice) a ride. “June used to be up for almost anything,” Glenn says. “I took her for what we call a ‘buzz job’ on my sister’s house in the country. My sister swore she could hear June screamin’.”

  Glenn’s biggest problem was Pop, though the younger man told himself it was nothing personal, that Eck’s manner was meant to discourage any of his daughters’ potential suitors. “If you went to the house,” says Glenn, “he wouldn’t talk to you. He’d just ignore you. Naturally, I tried to warm him up, because I knew it was important. Eventually, he’d answer me in grunts and yeses or nos, but he made it clear that he didn’t want any conversation.”

  Despite the silent treatment, Glenn didn’t give up. When the family moved from Richmond back to Maces Springs for the summer of 1948, he cheerfully drove 350 miles to see Helen. Eck didn’t scare him. At the time, Glenn was appearing in air shows in his new flip-wing Stearman airplane, performing spins, rolls, and other gut-bucking stunts. For his finale, he would swoop down to within eighteen inches of the ground to grab a handkerchief with his wingtip. “Looking back, I’d say it was a little knuckle-headed,” he admitted years later. “But I was young and invincible, you know?” He was also a man whose vision of the future shimmered before him, and it always included Helen Carter. So even when the family moved farther away, to Knoxville, Glenn refused to give up.

  But in the fall of 1949, in Glenn’s cold war with Eck, the advantage took a definite turn toward the elder: The Carters got an offer from KWTO in Springfield, Missouri. Chet Atkins had worked at the station and, despite having been fired, had admiration for KWTO producer E. E. “Si” Siman. The family held an excited conference, noting the proximity to cities such as Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago. It was a step up, a step the family couldn’t afford not to take. The lone dissenter was Anita, who was enjoying her standing at Hiltons High School. At sixteen, she had blossomed into a spectacular beauty, polite, ladylike, and wildly popular. To the Scott County crowd, she was a wealthy, glamorous figure. They were pleased and flattered that she seemed genuinely interested in their own lives. And then . . . she was gone. “All of a sudden we were moving to Missouri,” Anita said. “I begged my daddy to let me stay, but he said, ‘No, it’s too important.’ ” Not only did Anita leave Hiltons High School, but she gave up school altogether. “I couldn’t do all the work and go to school,” she sighed, nearly fifty years after the fact. “My education had to come from different directions. Moving to Springfield was the right thing to do. But I wish I had finished.” Glenn Jones, though not invited to the family conference, also dissented, sure that Pop Carter had orchestrated the entire affair, “moving Helen farther away, hoping to break us up,” he says. “But he couldn’t get her far enough.”

  * * *

  In Springfield, Atkins installed his wife, Leona, and his daughter, Merle, in a modest rented cottage on Pacific Avenue, while the Carters moved into an elegant, three-story brick home on East Walnut Street. Then Eck traded the Frasier for a big, hulking Lincoln. “They spent money like there was no tomorrow,” says Atkins. “Cars, clothes, anything they wanted.” Each day, the Carters piloted the sleek new car down the sleepy streets of Springfield, Missouri, to KWTO (“Keep Watching the Ozarks”). The station itself was located in a onetime mortuary. (“All of the singing jingles were done in the embalming room,” said Atkins, “because of its echo-chamber effect.”) But by 1949 the la
rge stone house held two separate studios running full-time, from which more than 150 live programs were broadcast each week. Performers were required to submit song lists twenty-four hours before their appearances to prevent repetition by other acts. KWTO was as country as country could be, with a schedule full of hillbilly music, agricultural and livestock reports, re-creations of St. Louis Cardinals baseball games—folks still had fond memories of farm boys Dizzy and Daffy Dean and their Gashouse Gang teammates—and even a farm-town soap opera, The Little Crossroads Store. But the down-home hayseed programming belied a solid, stainless-steel business plan drawn up by Si Siman. Siman and his partners had founded an operation called RadiOzark, a syndicate that recorded KWTO’s best talent and aggressively sold it to station managers across the nation.

  Not long after arriving in Springfield, the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle, Chet Atkins and His Famous Guitar was a featured attraction of RadiOzark’s syndicated programs. The group recorded about forty separate fifteen-minute shows, in a process not dissimilar to the border-radio sessions. Magnetic tape was still a novelty, so the shows were transcribed on acetate disks. If somebody made a mistake, there was only one way to fix it: start the whole show over again. Sometimes it was Helen’s nervous laughter or Anita’s giggling that ruined a take, or sometimes Atkins simply called a halt to the proceedings. Where his playing was concerned, Chet was a perfectionist. Maybelle never complained, even when it took an hour to record a single fifteen-minute show. She was always happy for the chance to get it right.

  The transcriptions, more than two hundred songs total, show a remarkable range of influences and abilities. The sisters’ harmonies were tighter than ever and, at their best, reminiscent of the best of the Andrews Sisters. June did comic songs such as “Keep Them Cold, Icy Fingers Off of Me,” “I Swear I’ll Never Wear a Pair of Shoes,” and “The Bald-Headed End of a Broom.” Chet was already playing the songs he would be known for in later years, including “Dizzy Strings,” “Canned Heat,” and “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.” He even picked up his fiddle for vigorous renditions of “Whistlin’ Rufus,” “Dill Pickles Rag,” and “Turkey in the Straw.” His singing on sentimental numbers was nearly morose, but his shy charm came through on comic numbers such as “You Made Toothpicks of the Timber of My Heart” and “My Little Pup with the Patent-Leather Nose and the Wiggily-Waggily Tail.” Anita’s version of the Hank Williams hit “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight” was heart-stopping, while her jazzy south-of-the-border torch song “Don Juan” (“There’s a fella down in Mexico who’s a señorita’s dream, / As a buckaroo, he’s a floparoo, but as a lover he’s supreme”) was pop-hit material. On bluegrass numbers, Maybelle even broke out her five-string banjo.

  Moreover, the Carters were becoming a commercial success. Atkins was finally making real money, and the group’s KWTO sponsor, Red Star Flour, was thrilled. June’s long apprenticeship had paid off; on the radio or at a road show, she knew how to make a sale, and with panache. In the middle of a road show, Little Junie Carter would pluck from the audience a six- or seven-year-old girl and try to marry her off to Chet. Of course, June would admit to the little girl, Chester wasn’t much to look at; was, in fact, ugly as fifteen miles of bad road. But still, he needed a wife, and since the girl was already seven years old and not yet married, she couldn’t afford to be choosy. Problem was, June would say, Chester didn’t know how to do anything except play the guitar, so they’d never have any money.

  “He’ll probably put you to work playing the bass,” June would say, pointing to Anita. “You’ll have to carry a big ole bass fiddle around, like that one there. Let’s put it on your back and see if you can carry it. . . . No? . . . You don’t think you can? Well, you really won’t have any money, then. You sure will have to get Red Star Flour [June always pronounced it ‘flar’] and use it for a lotta things. You know, you can use it on your face for powder; in fact, girl, you could use some on your face right now. If Chester still don’t like you the way you look, you can mix up some of that flar with water in a little mug, and you’ve got a great beauty mask, but you’ve gotta be sure it’s Red Star Flour—the other kind don’t work.”

  Pretty soon, the Red Star sales team was inserting coupons in bags of flour that could be presented for a discount to any Carter Sisters show. Helen, who was still working the door at shows, was made even more nervous by these gnarly fraction-laden transactions. “We didn’t have calculators back then,” she said. “The people were entitled to double their coupon value at the door, so they might come in with thirty-eight cents’ worth of coupons and want five adults and six children, and I had to do the math in my head. Can you imagine?” As the coupons piled up, and Helen’s sums became increasingly complicated, the Carters realized they must be selling an awful lot of Red Star Flour.

  Then, into the middle of this smooth, gliding success, came Glenn Jones, to see Helen—and he presented her with something that amounted to an ultimatum. He wanted Helen to marry him, but he was done chasing. He’d come all the way to Missouri to see her, he said, but he was drawing the line there. “If [Pop] takes you to California,” he told her, “I can’t go.” Helen’s response was surprising, and one he never expected. She hated flying, she said, and she was afraid to marry a pilot. When he told her, without a second’s hesitation, that he’d give up flying for good, Glenn had won his bride. Flying was the one thing in the world he loved most, Helen knew—besides, evidently, her. So Glenn and Helen agreed on one thing: Neither would force the other to give up the things they loved best. “She knew I would have liked her to have gone back to Richmond with me,” Jones says, “but she wanted to keep working with the family. So she told me she’d like to try, and if it ever got to be a problem, she would quit and go back with me wherever I went. I thought it would work, because I knew I was going to do everything I could to make it work.”

  Glenn Jones also knew Pop Carter wouldn’t like it, and he wasn’t surprised at Eck’s response when Glenn delivered the news. “I was wondering if you had any objections,” he said to Eck.

  “Would it make any difference if I did?”

  “Not really, sir,” Jones said. “But I wanted to show you the courtesy of asking.”

  Eck grunted something. Maybe it was consent, maybe it was surrender, Glenn couldn’t tell.

  Glenn was more surprised by Maybelle’s reaction to the news. By the time Glenn got to her, Eck had already dropped the bombshell. Maybelle gave no hint of approval to Glenn, let alone any sign of joy. “She didn’t say anything one way or another,” remembers Jones. “Just matter-of-factly said that Pop had told her what we were planning.”

  “Glenn was okay,” says June. “It was the fact that we were losing our sister. When Helen got to be pregnant, we knew she would go away and live with him.”

  Once they decided, Glenn and Helen wasted no time. They scheduled the wedding for a few weeks later, in a preacher’s house not far from the Carters’ home on Walnut Street. When the day arrived, Springfield was hit with a blizzard that shut off power to the entire city; the preacher never even removed his overcoat as he presided over the ceremony in a candlelit room. As Helen and Glenn took their vows, June began to sob. By the time the couple was pronounced man and wife, she was bawling. “It was as though I was cutting a sister out and handing her her life on a platter,” says June, “with blood dripping from my hands.” By the time the ceremony was over, Helen was weeping, too. Her honeymoon was short—just a week traveling through Tennessee and Virginia. She wasn’t about to stay away longer; she was anxious to get back to the family, to reassure them that her marriage didn’t mean the end of the group.

  Pop Carter, meanwhile, was not as broken up as the girls might have expected. He was sitting on a big piece of news. The Martha White Flour Company had evidently taken note of Red Star’s rising sales. The company wanted the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle as regulars on a segment they sponsored every Saturday night on WSM, in Nashville, Tennessee, at the Grand Ole Opry.<
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  Mother Maybelle at the Opry (Lorrie Davis Bennett)

  The Carters with Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, and stewardess on a flight to New York (Lorrie Davis Bennett)

  Mama Maybelle

  Country performers rarely hesitated before accepting an offer from the Grand Ole Opry; a call from the Opry was like a call from the major leagues. Nobody turned it down. But Eck rejected the Opry’s first overture in 1949 without even consulting his family, because the offer had come with a remarkable caveat: Chet Atkins wasn’t welcome. To Pop, the reasons seemed confused—and confusing. There were already too many guitarists hanging around the Opry, he was told, so new ones could come in only under special circumstances. They had to be sponsored by another member of the musicians’ union, and in any case, Atkins was not the “sort” of guitar player in demand there. As the explanation wound on, Eck began to get a whiff of the unmistakable scent of bullshit. The simple fact was, Nashville session musicians didn’t want Chet Atkins taking work away from them. The whole thing was underhanded, unfair, and, since Chet was by now a member of the family, offensive to the Carters. So Eck told the Opry thanks just the same, but no deal.

  Opry management did not seem to take Eck’s refusal very seriously, because a few weeks later the offer was sweetened with a little extra cash and repeated with the same no-Atkins proviso. Again, Eck refused. A month later, another call; and still Eck refused. For six months or so, the offers would continue until finally Opry management began to understand that Pop was immovable. Discussions were apparently held with the union, and a sponsor was found for Atkins: Don Davis, who played steel guitar for Opry star George Morgan (both of whom had become close friends to the Carters while playing in Springfield). Opry management decided that the rules might be bent for Atkins after all, if the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle were worth the trouble. They were invited for a test performance—an audition, really, though no one called it that—to see if Opry audiences would take to them.