Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  For the next three years, the Carters remained comfortably ensconced as country stars and road warriors—even with all three of the sisters married. Helen and June survived pregnancies, which were thought to be fatal to a woman’s career. Adding Bowman had fixed that. Becky had been brought in to substitute for Helen, but when Helen was ready to rejoin her sisters, Eck suggested that Becky stay on so that she could sit in for whichever of the three Carter girls needed a night off.

  It was a life of long, fast car rides, open-air theaters (or the occasional cotton field), hours of ironing clothes, hoping their wind-blown hair could be fixed in time for the show. Sometimes a husband would tag along for the ride. Nobody let Eck drive anymore, so he’d recline in the backseat singing—“Let Old Mother Maybelle have her way!”—while the rest of the crew tried to settle in around Anita’s big bass fiddle. “You hear [musicians today] talk about the road and how terrible it is, and they’re traveling in these big air-conditioned buses with bathrooms and beds and all the comforts of home,” says Becky Bowman. “I feel like they have not trouped until, as Anita said, they’ve trouped with a bass fiddle beating ’em on the side of the head.” For Maybelle, who was generally in the driver’s seat, the life was pure joy, and she never lacked for strength or energy.

  “I believe she so loved the business and the road and getting out and doing what she was born to do,” says Becky Bowman. “She just drew from another source. One night Mother Maybelle was driving this great big huge Lincoln. And I’m driving the second car, Don and Anita’s Mercury. I was going eighty miles an hour. And it’s raining. And the blacktop is slick. And Mother Maybelle is leaving me back home in Indiana. I told Anita and Don, ‘I’m not gonna try to keep up with her.’

  “We left Mississippi one night. We were so tired, all of us. Anita and I and the bass fiddle climbed in the station wagon, and before our heads barely laid on that floor, Mother Maybelle was driving into the driveway in Nashville. I don’t know how fast she was going. She had a lead foot. She drove like that all the time.”

  The performances themselves were easy, because they came naturally. Professional problems were hardly serious. At one show, for instance, somewhere in Pennsylvania, they were playing an outdoor venue that was built to resemble a front porch. (“It was coal country,” Bowman remembers, “and there was coal dust on everything.”) June had worked up a comedy routine in which, during one of her cackly, over-the-top country numbers, she would dance so exuberantly that she would kick one of her slippers into the audience. The coal porch must have been slippery that night, or June’s aim was just bad. She flung the shoe sideways and it smacked her mother in the face, leaving a large black smudge on Maybelle’s cheek. June and Becky were seized with giggles, and Anita laughed so hard she had to lean on her bass to keep from falling over. Maybelle played on, as if nothing had happened. “Never missed a note,” Helen used to say. “But afterwards she got ahold of June, turned her upside down, and paddled her bottom. I’ll tell you, June’s pantaloons were a-flyin’.”

  Maybelle still had the girls out front, playing to the ever younger postwar crowds, but she made a point to play the best-remembered songs she’d done with Sara and A.P. “Mother Maybelle’s idea was three-cornered harmony,” says Becky. “You didn’t put a lot of fancy variations in it. She used to say a ‘plow-handle A.’ And a ‘three-cornered D.’ She wanted things kept in the natural. But when I went to be a part of that program, I played clarinet. So June incorporated that into the act. I played clarinet and she would dance. That was fine with Mother Maybelle, but when it came to her music, she wanted it kept her way.”

  Pop wasn’t spending much time on the road anymore. There was so much to do around home, like for instance spending the cash his family made. (Carl Smith was turning out to be just the sort of fellow he’d wanted for his favorite daughter: smart, successful, a moneymaking machine.) No one ever accused Ezra Carter of being a greedy man, but he was cursed with a tremendously active mind. And he fed it without stint. He began acquiring books, particularly on religious subjects, at a prodigious rate. He had always had a thing for farm equipment and had to have the latest and best. But now, with America’s great industrial engine cranking away, stores were awash in new gizmos. Appliances, tools, and toys—Eck wanted them all. The only thing that seemed to please him more than a new gadget was two new gadgets. He rarely bought one of anything. When he grew bored with a purchase, which never seemed to take long, he’d abandon it without a thought. When he lost interest in a beautiful, expensive new Alice Chalmers bulldozer, he traded it to a neighbor for an old John Deere tractor worth half as much.

  Friends and family recall Maybelle sitting at a table with her checkbook out, looking at the various bills that Pop had rung up, shaking her head, saying, “I’m not paying this. . . . I am not paying this.” But she’d write check after check to cover her husband. More than one well-meaning relation took Pop aside and encouraged him to be conscious of how much things cost, so Pop adopted his own methods of justifying his purchases. They weren’t toys. They were investments! “When he went out to buy a socket wrench,” remembers his nephew Joe Carter, “he’d buy three, sayin’ they’ll be worth more money someday. Somewhere he run into a bucket of Wells Fargo belt buckles, and he bought a whole trunkload because he thought he’d found a real collector’s item. What he had was a bunch of damn brass. Then there was a time he went down and bought a whole bunch of pickaxes; another time, it was pictures of Indians.”

  “He had this routine that he would do,” recalls Eck’s son-in-law Don Davis. “He’d say, ‘Now, look. Here’s the deal on this: I’m looking at a tractor.’ Which he didn’t need, of course, he didn’t have a farm or nothin’. He just had a yard he wanted to plow up. ‘And here’s the deal; now, this is tentative.’ Well, that was the giveaway word right there. When he said that word, that meant he’d already bought it. ‘It’s tentative, and here’s the deal I can get on this thing. What do you think?’ So I learned to just go ahead and tell him, ‘Oh, did you get a deal on that!’ I knew it was too late to tell him otherwise. That made him happy. He’d say, ‘Well, great, I thought that’d be a good deal.’ ”

  Some of Pop’s purchases were meant to please his bride. He was constantly at work on home improvements, anxious for Maybelle to come off the road so that he could show what he’d done for her. One hot summer, he resolved to surprise her by buying and installing an air conditioner. He put it in their living room, which was a big, beautiful room with a cathedral ceiling and a large rock fireplace. But Pop was not fussy about appearances, so when he smashed a hole through the wall and installed the air conditioner, it was well off center. When Maybelle arrived home, Pop was all smiles. Maybelle looked at the air conditioner, and at Pop, and, according to Becky Bowman, just shook her head: Well, Daddy.

  “That was it,” swears Bowman. “That was the height of her anger. Another time, we all left to go on the road and came back a few days later. Maybelle says, ‘Eck, did you get the utilities paid?’ Well, he says, ‘I went up there to pay them, and they had these deep-sea fishing reels on sale.’ And he bought two of them. One for him and one for her. And there again: ‘Well, Daddy.’ ” Maybelle responded the same way when he drilled unsightly locks onto the drawers of a beautiful and expensive antique desk he’d bought, and when he smashed a hole in another wall to install a safe in the house. On that occasion, according to Anita, Maybelle’s response was a bit more caustic than usual: “I don’t know why Daddy thinks we need a safe. We don’t have nothin’ left to put in it.’ ”

  After nearly thirty years, her husband was predictable, but he was still a wonder to her. His obsession with rocks, for instance, could not be dimmed by time or age. “His greatest joy was digging all the rocks out of a yard,” says Don Davis. “I could always tell when he was fixin’ to trade. As soon as he got all the rocks dug up and dynamited out of the yard, he’d go on to a new place.”

  Through it all, Maybelle rarely complained, just as Pop did
n’t complain when his wife brought an entire square-dance team from Springfield, Missouri, to the house for dinner. And if he got the feeling he was headed for the doghouse, Eck would whip up a meal for Maybelle and the girls. “His biscuits were to die for,” says Bowman. “You’d have to put your foot on ’em or they’d float away. He’d bake ’em on Monday and you could eat them a week later. They’d still be good. You’d take Mother Maybelle’s tomato gravy on one of Pop’s biscuits.”

  The few days a year when the Carters weren’t on the road, life could be leisurely—in an unconventional sort of way. They’d rise at 4:30 in the morning and head for the WSM studios, traveling the still-dark Nashville streets, stopping at the same restaurant each day for a cinnamon roll and coffee to go. At the studio, they’d knock off two live fifteen-minute shows for the early-morning farm crowd. If they had a lot of road dates coming up, they would have to spend a day recording a week’s, or even two weeks’, worth of shows. “If you made a mistake, you had to start over,” says Bowman. “You couldn’t erase it. That meant, for every week, ten fifteen-minute programs, plus a thirty-minute Sunday-morning gospel. And you had to think ahead. Because you were recording on Monday, but you had to speak as if it were Wednesday or another day. You had to watch what you were doing. For two weeks, it would be ten times thirty. That’s a lot of pressure. That’s six hours counting the Sunday-morning gospel.”

  Sometimes the early-morning hours—or the grind of the long recording sessions—got the better of them. One marathon morning in the studio, they were down to the last song on the side: Mother Maybelle singing the maudlin “Weeping Willow Tree.” While Maybelle sang, Anita made the rounds, whispering her new chorus into the ears of the others. Why do you weep, dear Willy? Why do your britches hang low? Could it be you have a secret? Becky was trying hard to stick to her accordion part, but she couldn’t stop laughing . . . and then Anita lost it. Even Maybelle started to giggle, while the engineers tried in vain to calm them down. “We were so tired,” says Becky, “blotto.”

  But when the morning sessions were done, and no road trip or local engagement loomed on the schedule, the day was theirs—and they usually spent it at the house Carl Smith had bought for June. “June had a lady who helped keep up the house, and her name was Evelyn,” says Becky. “We would get back to the house and June would be the first one in. And as we came in the door, she would be handing out the dust cloth, the broom, the mop, the sweeper—to everybody. Even with Evelyn there, we still did that. And we’d get everything done and usually we’d go swimming, in ‘the green plunge.’ That’s what they called them in the South. Not pools.”

  It was a happy moment in time, with comforts and ease, money and celebrity. But things in Nashville, and in popular music, were changing. Maybelle and her girls saw it happen. Early in 1955, the Carters were invited to join a package tour, headlined by Hank Snow and booked by a colorful promoter named Colonel Tom Parker. Other artists on the tour included the Louvin Brothers and country comic Whitey Ford, better known as “the Duke of Paducah.” Anita heard a rumor that Bill “Rock Around the Clock” Haley might be added to the bill, and she liked the idea. But the mystery guest turned out to be an up-and-coming singer named Elvis Presley.

  Of course, in early 1955, not so many people knew who—or what—Elvis Presley was. Sam Phillips, the Sun Records impresario who would make stars of Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins, as well as Elvis, was hawking Presley records to any deejay who could be induced to play them. It wasn’t an easy sell. Radio hadn’t yet made up its mind about the well-mannered, spectacularly handsome twenty-year-old who, six months earlier, had released his first single, with his versions of a blues song by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (“That’s All Right, Mama”) on one side and a bluegrass song by Bill Monroe (“Blue Moon of Kentucky”) on the other. The record, of course, was neither blues nor bluegrass—much too wild for most country radio stations, and way too cornpone for R&B outlets. In October of 1954, Elvis had achieved a lifelong dream of playing at the Opry, where Phillips had avoided Monroe, worried that the father of bluegrass might be so appalled by Elvis’s version of “Blue Moon” that he’d want to “break my jaw.” But the audience, like Monroe himself, responded to the Elvis phenomenon with polite indifference. Away from the Ryman, Elvis found crowds who did respond to his wild-hipped stagecraft, and Colonel Parker—a man with genius but no discernible conscience—had signed him.

  The Elvis whom the Carters met was nothing like the puffy, drug-addled caricature most of America remembers from his later years. “He was as good as gold, not at all messed up, and treated us all like ladies,” said Helen. “He called his own mama every night.” Even before he joined the package tour, Elvis knew all about the Carter Family in general, and Maybelle in particular. When he first met Maybelle, Elvis called her “ma’am,” but soon after, he took to calling her “Mama” as everyone else did. And Maybelle brought him into the fold just as she had all the other young kids she’d toured with. Elvis was a special case, however, and on that 1955 tour, he required extra mothering. With all his gyrating onstage acrobatics, the new teen idol was constantly popping the buttons off his shirts and trousers. So Maybelle would remove buttons from her daughters’ clothes and sew them onto Presley’s. “We worked many a show with safety pins in our skirts,” said Helen.

  For all the unfettered sexuality Elvis unleashed on that tour, when he was offstage he seemed to the Carters a little nervous, even scared. And he probably had reason. Elvis incited all sorts of passions. Once in Midland, Texas, a group of teenage boys watched as the girls in town made a damn parade to Elvis’s motel (his Caddy gave him away) and spent the day fawning poolside over the new star. So four local boys made a commando raid on Elvis’s motel that night, held Presley down, and shaved off one of his precious sideburns.

  In 1955 Elvis was not so far removed from Tupelo or Memphis, or the music he’d grown up on. Presley loved gospel music, and after most shows he’d sit down at the piano and harmonize with the Carter women. Their friendship grew closer, even as the tension was growing between Elvis and other members of the show. Hank Snow might have been headlining the tour, but Elvis was stealing every show. Audiences were getting younger and younger, more and more female. “When Elvis walked into the auditorium, [the crowds] wouldn’t have seen him before. They wouldn’t have known what he looked like, but they would be able to pick him out,” remembers Bowman. “He’d be walking with his band and they could pick him out; they knew that that had to be Elvis. When he would be onstage, we’d peek through the curtain and people would be going nuts. And not just young women, either. There were women in their thirties, forties, and older who would have taken him home in a New York second.”

  Hank Snow soon realized—with some bitterness—that there was no following Elvis Presley, who riled up audiences, wore them out, and then riled them up some more. The catchy rumba rhythm that Snow had always depended on to get ’em dancing—“Rumba Boogie” and “The Golden Rocket”—sounded quaint and tepid after Elvis had torn through “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” The moody Ira Louvin of the Louvin Brothers, whose harmonizing Elvis worshiped, flew into a jealous rage one night, assaulting Elvis and calling him a “white nigger” who played “nigger trash.”

  “It was such a shock to him to be hurt by people he’d looked up to so much,” said Anita. “He literally cried, and we sat there and cried with him.” Over the next year and a half, as Elvis became a superstar, he continued to ask Parker to book the Carters. That suited the colonel fine. He got a kick out of Eck, and Maybelle became good friends with his wife, Marie. “Colonel Tom trusted us around Elvis,” Anita said, “and Colonel Tom didn’t trust everyone.”

  In retrospect the match may seem unnatural, but it was precisely the lack of similarity that saved the Carters. “It was hard to go on in front of Elvis Presley and not get booed off the stage,” said Helen. “But we never did get booed off. You could tell at first the audience might be thinking, ‘What are all these
women doing out there?’ But we did very well.”

  On one occasion, both Elvis and Rod Brasfield arrived late for a concert, so the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle were forced to hold the crowd until such time as reinforcements might arrive. They played for what seemed like hours, running through just about every song they knew. Becky Bowman pulled out her clarinet and tootled on that for a while, just to change things up. When Helen suggested they play a song called “Ricochet Romance,” Anita began to panic a bit. They were reaching the far end of their repertoire. “It’s a wonder they don’t throw us off,” she whispered to Helen. But just as the Carters launched into “Ricochet Romance,” Elvis arrived backstage. When the song ended, Anita dashed to the edge of the stage.

  “We’ll do one more,” she told Elvis as she gasped for breath, “and then we’ll introduce you.”

  Elvis batted his eyelids like a lazy turtle. “I wanna watch y’all work for a while,” he yawned.

  Anita balled up her fists and explained the situation as quickly and calmly as she could.

  “Well, I’ve got to get my clothes changed,” he said.

  He did so leisurely, wandered back to the wings, and sat down in a chair. Again, Anita conferred with him, and he smiled and repeated that he wanted to “hear you sing a couple.” Now Anita knew she was being teased.

  After a few minutes, Elvis rose and signaled his willingness to go on, and the Carters dragged themselves off. Not long into his set, Elvis busted a string on his guitar. Turning to the Carters, who still lingered offstage, he called for someone to “bring me Mama’s guitar.” Anita carried Maybelle’s guitar onstage and handed it to him. But something about Elvis’s sly grin provoked her. Elvis was sweating hard from his busy work onstage, so she ran her finger down his cheek; she licked her finger. Then, suddenly, she pretended to gag and rushed offstage with her hands over her mouth. Elvis’s drummer, D. J. Fontana, laughed until he dropped his sticks.