Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  Maybelle took up the Gibson and played. “And as luck would have it,” Scruggs said, “the producer had the mike open, and Maybelle played it in exactly the right tempo. So he just spliced it in, even though she didn’t know that they were gonna put it on the record. There was very little splicin’ done in those days, but it sounded fine.”

  To promote Songs of the Famous Carter Family, Flatt & Scruggs took Maybelle out on some local dates, small gatherings and shopping-center openings. “People swarmed around her like she was Elvis Presley,” Scruggs remembered. Her own gigs were still rather sparse, and not all that lucrative, considering how far she had to travel to get to them. Not long after the Flatt & Scruggs recording, she released a little album of traditional songs called Mother Maybelle Carter on the tiny Briar label, and Carter Family songs began appearing on folk anthologies.

  * * *

  By the beginning of 1963, the folk revival was booming. Bob Dylan had recorded his first album, with a few traditional songs. He even did the Blind Lemon Jefferson song that A.P. had worked over, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” Joan Baez, queen of the folk genre, had recorded “Wildwood Flower,” “Little Darlin’ Pal of Mine,” and other songs plucked from obscurity by the Carters, but no composer’s credit was given (the songs were listed on the album as “traditional”). ABC even had a weekly variety show featuring folk musicians—Hootenanny.

  Maybelle hadn’t been part of the new movement; it was not like her to get out front professionally. As famed producer and musician Jack Clement recalls, “If you wanted to cut across—that is, try something new—she’d go with you. But she wouldn’t initiate it.” Even as a bit player, Maybelle had grown comfortable in the commercial glamour of the Opry and its road shows. The folk scene, by comparison, felt like small potatoes. She’d played some of the festivals and clubs, but it wasn’t until the spring of 1963 that she truly cut across, this time with the encouragement of a group called The New Lost City Ramblers. They were young enough to be her sons: Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Tracy Schwarz. Seeger was the half brother of left-wing folksinger Pete Seeger; their father was a distinguished musicologist; Mike’s mother was a classically trained modernist composer. Mike had grown up with old-timey and bluegrass music in the house. Family time was gathering friends and neighbors in their Washington, D.C., apartment, singing Carter songs such as “Worried Man Blues” or “East Virginia Blues.” In 1961 Seeger had wanted Maybelle to guest on an anthology of autoharp music, but her agent nixed the deal. “All we could offer was fifty bucks,” says Seeger. “That’s like $250 today; it still wasn’t much, and her agent wouldn’t even take her the offer.” It was typical of the mixed signals flowing between the idealistic folk revivalists, who served the music with missionary zeal, and the country-music industry, for whom business was business.

  Finally, in the spring of 1963, after a year of talking and planning, the New Lost City Ramblers were able to arrange a suitable business venture for Maybelle: a monthlong tour beginning at the Ash Grove in Hollywood. The club was a West Coast mecca for young folkies, the sort of place devotees would go even if they’d never heard of the headliner. Beyond the Ramblers’ love of Carter Family music, and their excitement about meeting Maybelle for the first time, Seeger and his band mates saw the engagement as an opportunity to bridge the unnatural chasm between the folk revival and country. A local country deejay named Hugh Cherry even asked the band to come on his show and promote Maybelle’s appearance. “It was a new situation, country people coming to the Ash Grove,” says John Cohen. “It was exciting.” And then Maybelle got stuck on the East Coast, when she and the Carter Sisters were booked at the last minute on ABC’s national Hootenanny. The Ramblers were certainly happy for her, but it was hardly fair. They were two days into the engagement when they got the word: Maybelle Carter was on her way to L.A. She was taking the red-eye, flying through the night so that she’d be there in time for the third night.

  When Seeger, Cohen, and Schwarz met her at LAX, the three musicians could barely contain themselves. Maybelle seemed oblivious to the historic possibilities of the Ash Grove dates. “For her,” Seeger remembers, “it was just another gig.” That was what struck them about Maybelle first: an ease, a calm, a nonchalance that bordered on a total lack of ego. They walked her over to baggage claim, where both Seeger and Cohen were horrified to see her guitar—“that beautiful, rare old Gibson”—come tumbling down the conveyor belt, in a plastic case, bumping against the American Touristers. “It was clear right away how down-home she was,” Cohen says. “There was no star business about her.”

  The Ramblers weren’t just excited, they were nervous. Maybelle’s first Ash Grove appearance was that evening, and since the Ramblers had never played with her before, they were anxious to run through some numbers. So they raced from the airport to Seeger’s apartment, got her settled in with her guitar, and started rehearsing songs. First an hour, then two, and Maybelle didn’t say a word. Finally, she mentioned, almost in passing, that she hadn’t really slept on the plane the night before: “I’m a bit tired,” she said.

  “I suddenly realized how inconsiderate we were being,” says Seeger, “but she hadn’t given us any sign until then. She was a trouper, and she took great pride in being a trouper.”

  The Ash Grove was a boxy storefront building in a commercial neighborhood on Melrose. Inside, the space was still pretty raw, a concrete floor, open ceiling rafters with lights hung over the stage. The room held no terror for Maybelle, and neither did the crowds. One night, a fan showed up in the dressing room with a stack of Carter Family 78s for her to sign. She signed them all, without complaint. The room was full every night, two hundred people or better. On Friday nights, there would be the young kids on their first dates; Saturdays were the more settled couples, marrieds, and live-ins. Weekdays and Sundays, the audience was packed with professional musicians and true aficionados. No matter the crowd, Maybelle made her music but had little to say. In thirty-five years of performing, Maybelle had rarely been a headlining solo act. She simply wasn’t used to talking from the stage.

  “It quickly became clear to me that she wasn’t used to being alone,” says Seeger.

  “I will never forget standing up there onstage at the Ash Grove, in front of some two hundred people, and watching Maybelle,” says Cohen. “The way she moved her hands in simple little elegant, graceful gestures, making this incredible sound come out of that Gibson. It reminded me of the way my grandmother used to crochet—she used the same skilled, graceful movements, repeated over and over. Everything about Maybelle was unpretentious and matter-of-fact.”

  From the Ash Grove, the tour went on to Tucson. Maybelle and the Ramblers loaded up a 1962 Studebaker Lark station wagon and started off on the dusty drive. By then, the guys thought Maybelle just wanted to be one of the boys. “We rigged up a platform in the back where she could sleep, because we had to drive all night,” says Cohen. But Maybelle insisted on taking her turn at the wheel—and drove like a teamster. They did their best to draw her out, and she did her best to oblige. “We’d ask her about the old Carter Family schoolhouse gigs,” says Seeger, “and she’d tell us, ‘Well, A.P. would tell a story about where the song came from and then we’d sing and he’d tell a little bit more. Then maybe I’d put the riser on my guitar nut so I could play Hawaiian. And then we’d eat an apple.’ ” She even told them about one of A.P.’s innumerable flats, in which he was continually dusted by passing cars as he tried to change the tire. Every car went by, she told them, he’d yell: “Son of a bitch!”

  “I think she felt she was being quite risqué with us boys,” Seeger says, chuckling. At some point, she let it slip about her job nursing elderly patients. “I just couldn’t conceive of how this could be,” says Cohen. “She played the Opry. I’d assumed she was respected in Nashville. So why did she have to do this? I couldn’t imagine it.”

  Perhaps the most important legacy of the tour, however, was that the Ramblers and others realized the i
mportance of preserving Maybelle’s style and her rich repertoire. Not just onstage but sitting around the dressing room, warming up before a show, or even fooling around after, Maybelle was always playing. “She played tunes we’d never heard before,” says Seeger, “ ‘Red River Blues’ and ‘Liberty Dance.’ Tracy Schwarz worked out how she played ‘Victory Rag’ and wrote it down.”

  It wasn’t just the songs but the skill. Over time, Seeger came to appreciate a part of Maybelle she kept well beneath the surface. It was pride. She liked being the best—or the most distinctive—musician in the room. “I was wide-eyed,” says Seeger. “She did B-flat [a difficult, hard-to-reach chord] so easily, so effortlessly. She liked to show off in her own quiet way.”

  That same year, the Ramblers took Maybelle to the Newport Folk Festival, where she was treated with an admixture of respect and awe. Both her autoharp style and her guitar techniques were presented at “workshops” by younger musicians who helped her explain, essentially, why her music was complex and interesting, despite involving very few chords. It was almost funny, the way these young people got so nervous around her. Trying to explain to an audience who Maybelle was and what she had done, A.P.’s old friend Bill Clifton had introduced her as “Maybelle Guitar.” But Clifton quickly recovered. “I could call her that very easily, I think. . . . Maybelle Carter’s guitar style has probably been the most unique, inventive method of guitar playing—flat-pick style as well as the finger-roll style—that has come out of the twenties, thirties, forties, in fact, to date.” At the workshop she played the Carter scratch on “Weeping Willow Tree” and what she called “the ole thumb and finger style” on “Cannonball Blues.” (“A lot of people use two or three fingers,” she said, laughing, “but I’ve never been able to do that.”) Using a flat pick, she brought a touch of boogie to “Coal Miner’s Blues.”

  The autoharp workshop, in which she was assisted by Mike Seeger, was a little more intimate. She played a tune for which she’d never had a name—“the first tune that I ever heard on the autoharp, I guess, forty years ago.” And then she explained how she came to play melodies on an instrument intended solely for accompaniment. “I just started messin’ around with it, and I thought: ‘I know there oughtta be a way to get a tune out of it.’ So . . . it was when ‘The San Antonio Rose’ first came out [and] that was the first one that I learned to play.”

  By the time she walked out on the main stage for her evening concert, the fresh-faced young crowd gave her a rousing ovation. The applause and cheering for her performance of “Worried Man Blues” was so enthusiastic and so sustained that even the unflappable Maybelle Carter was visibly moved. “This is one of the greatest thrills of my life,” she told the crowd. When she announced that “Wildwood Flower” would be her last tune, there was an audible grumbling in the audience. As Maybelle picked, the enthusiasm swelled, and her playing seemed to feed from it. When the audience demanded an encore, the taciturn Maybelle tried to communicate her deep pleasure: “You’re real wonderful people, I’ll tell ya” was all she could say.

  In her fifth decade onstage, Maybelle Carter had never looked at the performer-audience equation in any but one way: It was her job to entertain. The audience owed her nothing. “I never saw her give a bad performance,” says Becky Bowman, who played with Maybelle throughout the fifties. “There was something she was giving. I saw a group of people, an audience in Florida, in the offbeat cotton field. They were poor. And I saw people come to that show—I can’t remember now what they charged—but they could have used that money to buy a loaf of bread. But your physical food and spiritual food are different. This was something that was like medicine to them. They came and they left there with a feeling of joy. I saw those people spend money to see a show. It wasn’t bread that fed them. But they left feeling fed.”

  Maybelle left the Newport Folk Festival with her own sense of renewal. This wasn’t about the Carter Family or her daughters or the Grand Ole Opry. This was about her, personally. After thirty-five years of blending in, of being the ultimate group musician, of mothering, of pushing others forward, Maybelle Carter was beginning to find her way toward her own spotlight. At later festivals, Mike Seeger started to see that maybe Maybelle liked being out front. She’d worked out a little stage patter; she’d even tell a story or two. But by the time that blossoming had begun, the Carter Family had been invaded by a man who would change everything for Maybelle and the others. For better, for worse, and forever.

  * * *

  John R. “Johnny” Cash left a wide wake wherever he went. Jimmy Dean once complained to Johnny that he was ruining Jimmy’s tours: Jimmy and his band kept getting turned away from hotels Johnny had trashed. “I’m amused by him as a pet coon,” Merle Travis once said. “I’m impressed with him like a snake behind glass. He’s that unique to me. . . . Even though he’s a kaleidoscope of a thousand different ideas, he’s a straight line. There ain’t no twilight and there ain’t no dusk to Johnny Cash. He’s like a sunny day, or he’s completely dark.”

  Like the Carters, Johnny Cash had come up from the country. He grew up mainly in Dyess, Arkansas, where he and his brothers and sisters helped his father tend to a twenty-acre patch planted with cotton for cash and vegetables for their own table. The farm was government land, a Depression-era handout really, and its meager bounty afforded the Cash family little more than subsistence. They worked constantly for what little they got; the day after they buried Johnny’s fourteen-year-old brother, Jack, who was killed in a farming accident, the family was back in the fields. Johnny graduated high school in Dyess, and joined the air force, which shipped him off to Germany. On his return to the States in 1954 he married his sweetheart, Vivian Liberto, of San Antonio, Texas, moved to Memphis, and made himself a recording star for Sam Phillips’s Sun Records. In 1956 his single “I Walk the Line” was a number one song, stayed on the Billboard charts for forty-three weeks, and earned $2 million. Between 1958 and 1960, he had twenty-five songs on the country-music charts.

  But when Johnny Cash first came into the Carters’ life in the early sixties, he seemed intent on throwing away both fame and fortune. He was popping vast quantities of painkillers, amphetamines, and downers, staying awake and wired for seventy-two hours straight, then sleeping for thirty. His drug habit had laid waste to his first marriage, and he rarely saw his four daughters. But even in the haze of drugs, Cash showed remarkable focus. He kept at writing songs, recording albums, and touring. The pills decimated his body, dropping his weight from 200 pounds to as little as 140, but he remained a man of thoroughgoing appetite. And he had decided that one thing he had to have . . . was June Carter.

  He’d grown up listening to the Carter Family 78s and tuning in to their show on border radio. The way Johnny told it later, he’d first seen June in 1950, during Dyess High’s senior-class trip to Nashville. The class went to the Opry, and Johnny sat gawking at the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle and at one Carter sister in particular. Five years later, he began playing at the Opry himself. At the time, both John and June were newlyweds. Still, he introduced himself to June with these words: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash, and I’m going to marry you someday.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, good,” June said. “I can’t wait.”

  He didn’t have much contact with her until December of 1961, at the Big D Jamboree in Dallas, Texas. Johnny’s manager, Saul Hollif, had booked June on the show. Onstage that night, June’s Huckleberry humor and wholesome sex appeal was a welcome counterpoint to Cash’s macho, sneering “man in black.” After the show that night, Johnny asked her to do some more shows. June said she didn’t know, that Saul would have to make her a good offer. But in principle, she said, she’d love to. Saul came through.

  In February of 1962, June Carter became a regular on the Cash road show and quickly convinced Cash and his manager to begin booking her mother and sisters, too. At the first date they all played together, in Des Moines, Iowa, June stopped
by his dressing room before the show to say hello, saw his shirt was a wrinkled mess, and told him to take it off so she could press some respectability into the sorry thing. Just then, Maybelle walked in.

  “What’s going on here?” Maybelle asked, arching her eyebrows.

  “Look at the shirt Johnny Cash thinks he’s gonna wear onstage tonight!” June shouted.

  Maybelle shook her head and clucked her tongue. “Get it off and let June iron it.”

  Johnny noted Maybelle’s pronunciation of iron—“arn”—just the way his own mother would say it. “Boy,” he grunted, “aren’t we getting prissy tonight.”

  But he relented, stripping off his shirt and covering his chest with his hands. As June ironed, Maybelle sat chatting about her grandchildren. “Before I knew it,” Johnny remembers, “I took my hands down from my chest. I felt better than I had in some time.”

  * * *

  For reasons that he couldn’t entirely explain at the time, Cash was more drawn to June than ever. June had recently married a former college football star named Edwin “Rip” Nix. But since they did so many shows together, June and Johnny saw a lot of each other. Johnny’s marriage remained in purgatory. Vivian Cash wanted her husband to come off the road and settle down. “It was hopeless for her because I just wasn’t going to do that,” he wrote in his autobiography, “and it was hopeless for me because she’d sworn that I’d never be free from our marriage. She was a devout Catholic; she said she’d die before she’d give me a divorce.”

  Johnny had moved his wife and daughters to California in 1959, but now, when he came off the road, he just didn’t bother going home. Instead, he started hanging around Nashville, nearer the country-music business, and nearer June Carter. June was careful not to invite Johnny around the house she shared with Nix, but she began bringing him to Maybelle and Eck’s house on Cude Lane.