Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  In the years after the war, trade in Maces Springs could barely support Neal’s, much less A.P. Carter Grocery. But Pleasant was undeterred. What he liked most was that his store was a gathering place. Buddies such as Ernest Barker and Everett Parker and Clyde Gardner could come in and play checkers or have a visit, talk about the weather or the farming or what Preacher Tom had done lately. A.P. wasn’t big on talk, but these men shared a history together, so there wasn’t much talk required of him, though the storekeeper was much appreciated for his wry asides. One day the men heard a big new ambulance come screaming down the Valley road, splitting the silence of a perfectly quiet afternoon. Now, these were men who could remember the days when Doc Meade used to travel that road in a buggy, pitching himself forward off the seat, whipping his horse for speed. “It’s getting so you can’t afford to die,” A.P. had said, shaking his head. And they all chuckled.

  Pleasant was always good for a little entertainment, and the men got a kick out of aggravating him. They all knew he liked to go to bed early, so they might come into the store after dark and play checkers late into the night, see how late they could keep him up. But it hardly ever worked. When A.P. was of a mind, he simply retired to his loft bed above the store. “I’m a-goin’ to bed,” he’d say. “You all stay as late as you want.”

  * * *

  Twice a year, a check would arrive at Gladys’s house from Southern Music Publishing, and Flo would pedal her bicycle up the Valley road to the store to deliver the missive to her grandfather. Once, around 1950, Flo had presented an envelope to A.P., stood back while he opened it, and watched his face fall. “It was for ninety-six or ninety-eight dollars, less than a hundred anyway,” Flo remembers. He just stared at it and said quietly, “Well, that’s not too much anymore.” In fact, through the fifties there were no re-releases of the Original Carter Family songs, even in the new postwar LP format. So there were small royalties from the Canadian Bluebird label and some small change from Carter songs that other artists recorded. Whenever a check arrived, no matter how small, A.P. dutifully calculated the three-way split, sent a third to Maybelle, a third to Sara, and kept his own portion. He’d still go out and do an occasional radio show, but not often, and rarely would he travel beyond Bristol or Kingsport. Sometimes fans would straggle into Maces Springs, but not many.

  “I thought he was dead,” says Bill Clifton, who was a college freshman at the University of Virginia and a budding bluegrass guitarist in 1949. “I had checked with an RCA rep in my area to see why there weren’t any Carter Family LPs available. He said, ‘The old man died,’ so I presumed him dead. Then I was listening to Curly Lambert’s radio show in the autumn of 1949 and heard him say, ‘Don’t turn that dial. Everybody is in for a real big surprise. You’re not gonna believe who is here in the studio.’ ” Clifton stayed tuned, and after the break, Curly introduced his guest, “A.P. Carter, the man who started it all.”

  “He did ‘Storms Are on the Ocean,’ ” says Clifton, “and then Curly says, ‘Don’t you be putting that overcoat on to go out. We want you to do another number.’ ”

  The next spring, Bill drove 270 miles to Poor Valley to see if he could find the man who started it all. Off Highway 58 he followed an unfamiliar dirt road down to Maces Springs, where he saw a little store with a sign on it, A.P. CARTER GROCERY. It was a bright spring day, middle of business hours, so of course the store was closed. Two doors down, on the other side of the road, Clifton found a man out mowing his lawn and asked him where he might find A.P. Carter. Milan Millard pointed to the house, “He’s sitting on the couch right over there.” When Bill walked into the living room of the homeplace, he found A.P. Carter listening to the radio, and the two started talking about the music. “We just hit it off,” says Clifton. “He liked that the younger generation had an interest in the Carter Family–style music.”

  When he could get free of his studies, Clifton started spending time in Maces with his new friend, A.P. Carter. Even at sixty, A.P. was a vital force. They’d be at the homeplace, or sitting around the store, and all of a sudden the old man would say, “Let’s go up to the spring and get a drink of water.” Then he’d take off up into the foothills of Clinch Mountain, with his long-legged strides eating up chunks of real estate while Clifton, forty years his junior, panted and struggled to keep up. Sometimes Clifton and banjo player Johnny Clark would form a trio with A.P. and play on WKIN, Kingsport. “If we had been out playing late, we would come back and sleep in one of the two double beds in the store,” says Clifton. “We’d flop in one bed and he’d get in the other. And he didn’t always take off his shoes. Seems like we’d hardly get started sleeping, then five A.M., he’s up. ‘Let’s get up to the house and get breakfast.’ He always walked to Gladys’s house on the railroad tracks, never on the road.”

  The other thing that struck Bill was the old man’s generosity. He had three tenant houses on the farm in Little Valley, and the renters were supposed to pay him half the earnings from their tobacco crops. Janette was sure they were stealing from him, but A.P. never fussed. In fact, those tenants would come to the store every week and run up charges they’d never pay off. A.P. never seemed to get bothered by that, either. When longtime fans came around asking for records or song sheets, he’d get them something. If he didn’t have anything handy at the store, he’d go to Gladys’s and check the cabinet of the old stand-up Victrola—the one the Peers had given him—to see if there were any 78s left in there. “He gave away anything,” Clifton says. “And he gave away everything. If you could pay for it, he might wait until you offered. If you didn’t, he’d just give it away for nothing. He’d be driving down the road around Mendota and see somebody walking, so he’d stop the car and say, ‘Wanna ride, boy?’ ”

  Sometimes Gladys and Milan’s house was like a hotel. As a little girl, Flo was constantly being asked to wake up and give over her bed to somebody her grandfather brought home. They’d come for a night, or a week, or longer. The worst A.P. ever visited on them was a broke-down cowboy performer and trick-roper named Jimmy Riddle. “Jimmy Riddle lived with us the whole summer, and the only work he did was help Mom carry one tub of wash water up from the cellar,” says Flo. “He’d chase down us kids and lasso us, or he’d knock a piece of paper out of our hands with a bullwhip. He was always knocking cigarettes out of somebody’s mouth with his bullwhip.”

  A.P. didn’t mind. Besides, Jimmy was an entertainer like he was, and that meant something. Even into the fifties, ten years after the Original Carter Family had broken apart, A.P. stubbornly guarded his sense of himself as a viable musician and a man of import. Those days, he got up every day and put on a necktie. A niece remembers seeing him on his tractor, plowing, with his tie on. “He was handsome,” says his sister-in-law Theda Carter. “He walked straight and kept his head held high.” Once in a while at revivals, in the middle of a hymn, out of nowhere, Pleasant Carter’s voice would rise trembling above the entire gathering and take over a song. People would turn and watch.

  Even when he wasn’t making much music, A.P. always kept up with the entertainment business, listening daily to WKIN, Kingsport. One day, after hearing that the gospel harmony group out of Texas, the Chuck Wagon Gang, was to play a school in Kingsport, he asked Bill Clifton to drive him over to the show. A.P. thought he might be related to the Gang. They had the same last name, and he’d had a great-uncle move out of Scott County and go to Texas. A.P. figured they were cousins, somehow.

  When Bill and A.P. got over to Kingsport that night, it was storming, so there they stood at the front entrance of the school, an unlikely pair. Clifton, a short and stocky twenty-four-year-old marine with his head shaved like a cue ball, and Pleasant, at sixty-three, still pushing six-two, rail thin, in an overcoat and a felt hat. Clifton tried to hurry the old man through the front door, with the rest of the crowd, but A.P. Carter wasn’t going with the rest of the crowd.

  “No,” he said, “musicianers always go in the back.”

  The two
men walked all the way around to the back of the auditorium, and Pleasant started tapping gingerly on the door, to no avail. He tapped again. Nothing. Nobody came. Clifton tugged at his sleeve, but A.P. Carter was not going through that front door. “Musicianers always go in the back,” he repeated. Besides, he told Clifton, the promoter, Wally Fowler, would know him. And so he kept tapping on the stage door while the rain poured down, and his felt hat drooped around his ears. Clifton was completely soaked and agitating to go back around front. But Pleasant stood his ground. “They’ll see us directly,” he said. “Wally Fowler will let us in.”

  It was more than ten minutes before one of the musicians came to the door: “Can I help you, old-timer?”

  “I want to see the head man,” said A.P.

  “Who should I tell him wants to see him?”

  “You can tell him A.P. Carter. I reckon you’ve heared of the Original Carter Family.” Clifton watched the guy’s eyes grow big as saucers. And A.P. Carter walked proudly through the back door, like musicianers do.

  “He always considered himself a professional,” says Clifton. “And he always wanted to get back into music more.” The continuing success of the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle kept him wondering what might have been if his own family had stayed together.

  * * *

  Pride and desire made him susceptible to certain questionable pitches. Clifford Spurlock, a fast-talking minister and businessman out of Kentucky, filled A.P. full of big ideas about what he could do for him. Spurlock would make new recordings, he said, and press them at his plant in Manchester, Kentucky, “one of the most complete and modern little manufacturing plants in the country.” His Acme Records was going to get the Carter Family disks back into the Sears catalog, and sell them at revivals. “Spurlock was a jack-leg preacher and he had my dad hamstrung,” says Joe Carter, “painting big beautiful pictures about what he was going to do. I said, ‘Daddy, you better watch this guy.’ And Daddy said, ‘No, he’s a good Christian man, a preacher.’ I said, ‘See if I ain’t telling you right.’ ”

  But A.P. was so excited that Joe had to go along. Besides, it meant reuniting the family. When Spurlock set up studio time in Bristol for the first new recordings early in 1952, Joe signed on, and Janette, and best of all, Sara agreed. Despite the distance, Sara did what she could to stay in her children’s life. Christmastime, she’d send packages and letters. Every spring she and Coy would load up the camper and make their way across the country to spend a few months in Virginia. Most of the time, they stayed in Bristol. When Sara went to Maces Springs to visit, Coy stayed away, out of respect for A.P.

  For A.P., Sara’s returns were like the springtime bloom. “A.P. never stopped loving Sara,” Theda Carter says. “He would hear that Sara was coming back into the Valley, and he couldn’t be still. He’d fidget and he’d get up and walk back and forth, back and forth along the tracks, happy and a-laughin’.”

  The Spurlock manufacturing plant may not have been all it was cracked up to be, because the records that came out of the 1952 Bristol sessions were a technical mess. Still, A.P. was thrilled to have his family together, on record, for the first time ever. They’d done some old songs and some new, including a song Sara had written out west, “Railroading on the Great Divide.” The next spring, A.P. decided to bring professional music to Clinch Mountain. So he carved a path from his general store up into the mountain, made a bandstand, and started booking acts. The night it opened, A.P.’s friend Bill Clifton played.

  From the stage that night, Clifton looked out and saw a throng of people. A.P. was charging a dollar a head, but there was no box office, no fence, no usher. There was just A.P., in his glory, floating amiably through the crowd, collecting what money he might. “He ended up with about two hundred dollars with a crowd of a thousand,” says Clifton. “But he never cared. He just wanted the music out there. If I would have said I was hoping for more money, he would have come up with another hundred dollars. He would have collected it, or paid it out of his own pocket.”

  * * *

  He was funny about money; he didn’t much care if he had it or not, but he couldn’t stand to be in arrears. “Pleasant still had some land, and he’d fool around with it, but he didn’t make nothing,” says Clyde Gardner. “He told me one time he wanted me to plow something for him up in the Little Valley, give me fifteen dollars. I said, ‘I don’t know if I’ve got time to do that or not.’ He said, ‘I’m going to give you this money. If you can do the job, you can. If you can’t, you can give it back to me sometime. But if I don’t give it to you now, I may not have it before you get to work.’

  “Another time he wanted me to take a calf to Kingsport for him. He said, ‘I don’t owe but fifty dollars, and I want to take that calf and sell it and pay that off. And I won’t owe nothing.’ He bought a lot of land, but that fifty dollars was all he owed, he told me.”

  His only weakness was for land. If he did get a little windfall, Pleasant invested in more. By 1957 he had the 125-acre farm in Little Valley, a second 125-acre property nearby, some small acreage around his grocery store and summer stage, and another three acres just off Highway 58 a few miles west of Hiltons. “A.P. never had money but he had land,” says Theda. “Anytime he got money he’d want to buy more land.” Theda and her husband, A.P.’s youngest brother, Grant, had bought Eck and Maybelle’s homeplace, and they owned it free and clear of any mortgage, so A.P. would sometimes ask Grant to cosign a note to buy more land. Like any young wife, Theda fretted over it, but Grant always said, “Doc’s good for it. Don’t worry.”

  Also by 1957, A.P. and his family had put out another round of songs for Spurlock’s Acme Records. A.P. had even given away three dozen old song folios for Spurlock to sell. Spurlock was pushing the new Carter records through a few rabid fans, turning them into retail outlets around the world. “Now that we are giving a lot of time to promoting the Carter Family and other mountain music, thought I would try to get in touch with you again,” Spurlock wrote to an avid Carter collector in March of 1958. “Before long we will have a new EP record with three songs to the side, both 78 and 45. We have Carters on different stations and they were on WCKY some time ago for a hitch. Of course a lot of our selling is still by mail and we have not sought big distributors. Do you still want to handle them in your part? If so, the singles are only 45 cents each, the multiple plays 60 cents to you. They should sell for 98 cents and 1.25. We still sell the 78s and 45s at 89 cents through the mail, but you should get more. The Carter Family Scrap Book put out not long ago is going good. You may have it for 60 cents each if you can use some and they retail at 1 dollar. Soon our whole works will be in Manchester where we are setting up beautiful new master studios and the pressing plant will be moved from Knoxville soon as a new building is ready for it. Thanks, and may the Lord bless you. P.S.: Freeman, Acme Records is just one affiliate of several different businesses now. We are also in the perfume manufacturing business, wood manufacturing, and electronic sales.”

  On paper, the operation looked great, under the bold letterhead:

  Acme International Distributors

  New York—Winnipeg—London—Cremorne

  Home Office Greenville, Tennessee, U.S.A.

  “Dear Friends,” went one Spurlock mailing, “I wish to take this opportunity to thank all of you in the United States, Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand and in other countries, who have purchased or promoted our records and other items from time to time. Without you, our business could not have grown from an obscure, struggling firm to a world-wide organization. We are grateful to our Heavenly Master for His benediction as we have labored to preserve the worthwhile music of the past and present, and to keep our motto, ‘Principle before Profit.’ ”

  Where the Carters were concerned, the Acme motto was in full flower. While Spurlock was spectacularly low on principle, he showed absolutely no profit. The Carters never got a single royalty check from the preacher.

  But by the late fifties, a n
ew importance was beginning to attach itself to A.P. Carter and his music. In its way, it was as unsettling as the realization that Spurlock had taken him for a ride. About that time, earnest young college men started coming around, asking all kinds of strange questions. They wanted to know where he got this song or that, which lines he wrote, which he didn’t, picking apart a song in a way he’d never even conceived. As far as A.P. was concerned, no matter where its parts came from, a song was all of a piece. What good could come in unraveling it? When letters came in asking him to parse the provenance of a particular song, he left them unanswered.

  But there were other visitors whose feeling for the music was deep, and of the moment still, and when those people came to his doorstep, A.P. couldn’t do enough for them. One summer day, Ed Romaniuk and his sister Elsie, two young kids from the Canadian coal camps who had copied out the Carter Family songs while listening to them on XERA, drove up to A.P.’s store in Maces Springs. They’d driven all the way from Alberta just to see the great man himself. They weren’t disappointed. “A.P. is quite a remarkable man, very humble,” Ed Romaniuk wrote to a friend. “We spent our time at his little store, but he is not keeping it running. The house was locked as Gladys was away with the keys. A.P. told us how they began recording and how he composed some of his songs. He asked us to sing for him so we got out our guitars and sang ‘Gathering Flowers From the Hillside.’ He remarked that we sounded just like they did and that he was mighty proud of us. Then A.P. told us . . . [when he] decided that he was going into the recording business, many people laughed at him. Others declared he was losing his mind. Then when Sara, Maybelle and A.P. recorded ‘Little Darling Pal of Mine’ people lined up by the blocks to buy it. It sold 2 and a half million copies. . . . A.P. told us of personal appearances they made and that they played at dances. He mentioned how Sara and Maybelle would be sleeping in the backseat of the car while he drove in the early hours of the morning after being up all night. It was a hard life, he said, but when a man’s got music in his bones, he’s got to get it out. A.P. told us that he would be recording again soon. He also showed us pictures, his contracts, lists of songs—350 of them.” The following Christmas, A.P. sent a card to the Romaniuks. After years of writing cards and letters to him, it was the first they’d ever received from him. It was also the last.