Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  ABC was hoping to mine a little of that Cash magic, but they didn’t want to make much of an investment. The network expected a run-of-the-mill “summer replacement” program: Flavor-of-the-month singers would sing their current hits, and mediocre comedians would do routine routines. The Johnny Cash Show would not raise the comedy bar much, but the music mattered to Johnny. From the beginning, Cash himself selected the performers, often to the dismay of ABC execs. According to Cash, ABC was not at all happy about making a showcase for leftist protest singers such as Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie. But Johnny held his ground. “I told ’em, it’s either my way or the highway,” he says. The first program featured Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and rowdy Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw. The show closed with a gospel number, in which Cash was backed by both the Carters and the Statler Brothers: “Daddy Sang Bass,” a Carl Perkins song, which broke from its melody in each chorus for a line of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” What began as a summer replacement became one of America’s top-rated weekly TV shows.

  The show also gave Cash another way to repay a debt; he meant to reintroduce Maybelle Carter to the entire nation. In the beginning, Maybelle faded into the background of the show. In fact, says Cash, “It seemed like that was all she wanted to do, sing backup with her daughters.” So Cash began featuring her on the show from time to time, teasing out of her the story of 1927, when she and A.P. and Sara made their way to Bristol and changed popular music forever. This must have caused some uneasy stirring in the country-music industry. The Country Music Hall of Fame had been established in 1961, with Jimmie Rodgers as its first inductee. Since that time, fifteen more inductees had been selected, including Uncle Dave Macon, Jim Reeves, and even promoter J. L. Frank, while the Carter Family was passed over. Finally, on October 14, 1970, the Original Carter Family was inducted. At the ceremony at the Ryman, Maybelle and Sara spoke briefly. Cash said a few words about A.P.: “I never knew Doc Carter, but I know his music. He discovered and wrote over three hundred songs which form the foundation for my music and yours.”

  With the TV show, and the honors, Maybelle was becoming positively expansive. She loved backing her son-in-law on humorous songs such as “Everybody Loves a Nut” and “Dirty Old Egg-Suckin’ Dog.” When some of the other cast members started calling her “Mother Mothballs,” she wore the moniker proudly. She even started making sly little asides. She and the Statler Brothers developed a ritual that followed every finale. “Great show, Maybelle,” one of the Statlers would say. “Coulda been,” she’d reply, “but June ruint it.”

  * * *

  The Cash show went off the air in 1971, but Maybelle still wasn’t ready to retire. When she got a call about joining a recording session with a group called The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, she told them she was pleased to be included. Maybelle might not have known much about the Dirt Band, but they knew all about her.

  Bill and John McEuen were young Southern Californians, fanatical fans of folk and bluegrass music. John, a guitar player and banjo picker, owned a cherished copy of Flatt & Scruggs’s 1961 album Songs of the Famous Carter Family. Earl Scruggs was his hero, and Maybelle, he knew, was Earl’s. One day in 1965, when the McEuens’ father mentioned that he needed a truckload of diesel equipment dropped off somewhere in the Midwest, John and Bill volunteered to make the run. “Unknown to Daddy,” says John, “the Grand Ole Opry was really our primary destination.”

  They arrived in Nashville on a rainy Saturday night and found the show sold out. They could just hear the tinkle of instruments and the rustle of applause inside the Ryman, and it was almost too much to bear. So they crept through the alley on the north side of the building, and John, a tall man, stood on his tiptoes to peer through a window and onto the stage. “We were just in time,” he remembers, “to hear Lester Flatt announce, ‘We’re gonna bring Mama Maybelle Carter out here to do the “Wildwood Flower.” ’ Seeing Maybelle walk out on that stage to do that song was one of the most powerful moments of my life. And I said to myself, someday I’m going to play with that woman.”

  Six years later, at the age of twenty-five, John McEuen was a star and Bill was his manager. Their Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a conglomeration of folk musicians adept at rock, blues, and country, had already scored a huge hit with “Mr. Bojangles.” In June of 1971, John cornered Earl Scruggs in a hotel room in Boulder, Colorado. Scruggs had previously complimented McEuen’s banjo playing, and this gave McEuen the courage to ask him to record with the Dirt Band. When Scruggs agreed without hesitation, Bill McEuen suggested expanding the project. “Let’s do something really special,” he said. They asked guitarist Doc Watson to record, and he, too, agreed. It wasn’t easy to persuade Liberty Records that there was anything commercial in the idea. “I don’t see what you boys see,” a company executive told the McEuens, “but I’ll put up the money, because you seem to believe in it.” Besides, it was only twenty-two thousand dollars, a small price to pay to keep the artists happy.

  Scruggs recruited some other country heavyweights for the session: Merle Travis, Jimmy Martin, and even the hyperconservative Roy Acuff agreed to participate, but only after making Scruggs promise to play lead guitar for him. Bill Monroe was the lone musician to decline. And, of course, the McEuens specifically asked for Maybelle Carter. Maybelle betrayed not a hint of excitement at rehearsals, which lasted only a couple of hours. “We didn’t want to wear her out,” says John McEuen. At sixty-two, she seemed like a very old woman to the Dirt Band. A few days later, when she arrived at Woodland Studio B to record, the McEuens’ adrenaline was running high. They were bordering on stage fright. The term generation gap was still in use in those days, and all the musicians seemed aware of it. Acuff remarked on it to reporter Jack Hurst: “You’re supposed to know a man by the character of his face, but if you have got your face all covered up with [hair], well . . .” He admitted that the Dirt Band seemed like “very nice young boys,” though he couldn’t help adding, “To be honest with you, I couldn’t tell whether they were young boys or old men . . . but they certainly knew what they were doing.”

  The problem wasn’t really generational. The problem was that Acuff was acting like a jerk. In fact, there was no such tension when Maybelle took her seat. All the musicians, young and old, treated her with the respect due a beloved grandparent. John McEuen was fascinated by the idiosyncrasies in her style—the way she tuned her guitar low and added unusual notes to simple chords, usually by playing an open string.

  “Maybelle,” he asked her, “are you gonna stay tuned like that for all the songs we do?”

  “Well, I may do ‘Wildwood Flower’ on the autoharp,” she said demurely, then added, “if you all don’t mind?”

  McEuen bit his tongue. “I wanted to say, ‘What the f— do you mean, ‘If we all don’t mind?’ To me it was exactly like Jimi Hendrix saying, ‘I’d like to play “Foxey Lady” in E with a flatted thirteenth, if you all don’t mind.’ I was thinking, ‘Just line us up and tell us how to do it!’ She was a person who’d created this tremendous art and had accomplished so much. But now I saw she was also just a sweet, gentle lady who, instead of making pies or quilts, made music.”

  Maybelle played “Keep on the Sunny Side,” “Wildwood Flower,” and “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes.” It was while recording this last tune that she showed her only hint of dissatisfaction. Fiddler Vasser Clements, a musician who liked jazzy improvisation, was a little too free on his solo, and Maybelle smiled at him sweetly: “Vasser, how about if you just play the melody and quit that foolin’ around?”

  “She was joshing him a little,” says McEuen, “but she meant it, too.”

  The sessions marked the first time Maybelle was successfully recorded with the accompaniment of a large band. And the recordings still serve as a fresh introduction to the Carters’ music, more accessible to the modern ear than the harsher recordings of the 1920s and 1930s. In all, the Dirt Band and their guests recorded nearly forty songs, from the fiddle tune “Soldier’s Joy” to Hank
Williams’s “Honky Tonkin’ ” to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” For the session finale, the Dirt Band chose “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” hoping to make the point that young musicians like themselves—even if they did have long hair—were able to carry on the folk-music tradition and pass it down in turn.

  “That was just the right style for me,” Maybelle told Helen after Will the Circle Be Unbroken hit the stores. The guest stars’ names were listed on the album cover, with “Mother Maybelle Carter” at the top of the bill. It was a triple album, which meant that it was expensive, and sold a little slowly at first. But great reviews and word of mouth gradually convinced people to risk their money. Many who did so had never bought a country record in their lives; Bruce Springsteen was one, and he later told the Dirt Band’s Jeff Hanna that the album was one of his favorites. Newspapers and magazines everywhere began referring to Maybelle Carter as a legend and an icon. “She was just awestruck by that,” laughed Chet Atkins. “She’d get out clippings and show me. ‘Isn’t that amazing? . . . How can that be?’ ”

  “Two years past the Circle album, the Dirt Band ends up on shows with who else but Doc Watson,” says John McEuen. “I mean, one week we play with Aerosmith and Johnny Winter, and the next day we’re doing a show with Maybelle Carter. Because here’s ‘Bojangles’ on the radio, but the Circle album’s effects are starting to sink in. The festivals are starting to pick up, and here we are with Maybelle and standing onstage with her during a sound check, and she says, ‘It’s really good to see you, John. Boy, it’s just wonderful how that album’s being accepted.’ ”

  Not long after, McEuen showed up at Maybelle’s house in Nashville with a memento he wanted her to have. The Circle album had been certified gold, May 23, 1973. “I do remember going to Nashville and going out to her house and giving it to her, and saying, ‘I hope you have a place for this.’ She goes, ‘That’s the first time I ever got one of those.’ Because her music hadn’t been tracked. The gold-record thing didn’t exist at the zenith of her career.”

  Soon after the release of Circle, offers poured in, mostly from colleges and summer festivals. So Maybelle hit the road with a newly constituted Carter Family: Helen, Anita, and a flotilla of grandchildren, beginning with Carlene Carter, Danny Jones, and Lorrie Davis. Later, the group would be joined, at intervals, by David and Kevin Jones and Rosie Nix. On these shows, Maybelle was the headliner.

  One of her first concerts after the Circle album’s release was in Morgantown, West Virginia, where the Carters opened for the Dirt Band. Carlene was sixteen and nervous; she was to perform “Country Roads” on the piano, first time ever. “There were ten thousand kids sitting in the audience,” she says, “and I realize they’re smoking pot! Marijuana was just wafting up onto the stage. And my grandma walked onstage in her little dress with her guitar. The audience stood up, applauding, and they would not stop applauding. That’s when it dawned on me, wow, my grandma’s really big!”

  At one festival, Anita was walking through the crowd with her daughter Lorrie and heard some longhairs say, “Oh, here come two chicks.” Anita just kept walking, but she heard another say, “Shut up, you fool, those are Maybelle’s girls.”

  “At all these festivals the audiences were mostly young people, half-stoned out of their heads,” Helen said. “As we made our way through the crowds, we could hear them saying, ‘Look, look, it’s Mother Maybelle!’ and they’d make a path for her.” Anyone who failed to show proper respect was brought up short. At another festival in Warrenton, Virginia, John McEuen happened to see Maybelle standing by herself in the summer heat. He immediately stomped up to the promoter: “See that woman? She’s responsible for a huge percentage of the music that brought people to this show. You’ve got her standing in a foot and a half of garbage, in the hot sun, with no water. Think you can fix that?” A moment later, Maybelle was standing under an umbrella, sipping a cool drink.

  Thus was Maybelle Carter treated for the remainder of her life, though she never fully adjusted to it. In 1973 the updated Carter Family received an award for “Favorite Country Group,” and according to Anita, her mother, who had been passed over for this sort of thing for more than twenty years, almost “fell out of bed.” The following year, she received the Tex Ritter Award at Nashville’s Fan Fair, and the year after, an award from the Smithsonian.

  When she recorded her last great work, a double album of instrumentals for Columbia titled Mother Maybelle Carter, she was once again backed by a collection of elite Nashville session musicians, including drummer Buddy Harman, who had played on Living Legend. But this time, producer Larry Butler ordered the musicians to take their cues from Maybelle. (One only has to compare her free and lively performance of “Black Mountain Rag” on Mother Maybelle Carter with her careful, plodding performance of the same tune on Living Legend to appreciate the benefit of letting Mama Maybelle have her way.) In intervals between the songs, she can be heard chatting comfortably with the musicians and telling the familiar stories about recording in Bristol and backing up Jimmie Rodgers. But why, some wondered, did she play autoharp on every single song? She was, after all, widely advertised as a master of the guitar.

  Truth was, arthritis was taking its toll. Not only did it make guitar playing a painful chore, but it increased the possibility of errors, which Maybelle could never abide. It is not known how long she may have been suffering; her daughters learned of it only when it became too much for Maybelle to bear. One afternoon, before a show, she sat them down and told them that, henceforth, Helen would play the guitar part on “Wildwood Flower.” Her pain must have been considerable, because she rarely let that sort of thing interfere with what she did. Around the same time, says Rosie Nix, “I remember her having three molars pulled out one afternoon and going onstage that night, singing with a mouthful of cotton.”

  Nothing was going to stop Maybelle from getting out there now. She was most pleased that a third generation was taking up the family business, which, of course, increased “family time.” Owing greatly to Maybelle’s long efforts, the Carter Family’s legacy was now an established fact and would carry on indefinitely. What’s more, her own success—and that of her fabulously wealthy son-in-law—put most of her financial worries to rest. Eck may have been a spendthrift for a family with an ordinary income, but in a rich one, his fascination with gadgets, antique books, and farming and fishing equipment could be easily absorbed. He treated himself to everything now, including one of the first available microwave ovens. Anxious to try it out, he immediately invited the Carter Family Fan Club president, Peggy Marsheck, to lunch. In the kitchen, he held aloft a frozen chicken, promising her it would be ready in three minutes. “He didn’t realize you have to thaw the food first,” says Peggy, “so we had to eat something else.”

  Maybelle, meanwhile, who had always enjoyed a low-stakes game of bingo or cards, began to indulge her taste for gambling more freely. Her bets remained modest, but she started frequenting the dog tracks and, whenever her itinerary brought her near Nevada, the slot machines. On one such trip, Carlene recalls waking at four in the morning, with her grandmother standing over her. She wanted Carlene to go down to the casino with her.

  “Grandma! It’s four.”

  “Come on, honey, I’m lonely. It’s all right, you’ll be with me. I’ve got a bunch of quarters. Now, you come on.”

  They played until dawn.

  Life with the younger generation loosened her up considerably, made her more and more like that game young mother hosting teenage parties back in Maces Springs. She still insisted on wearing a girdle onstage, every performance, but it had become difficult for her to get into it, so she made donning it a community event. She’d pull it up as far as she could on her own, then shout to any available daughters or granddaughters, “Hoist me up!”

  “There’d be three of us,” remembers Rosie. “We’d grab hold of that girdle and pull, and she’d jump up and down. Then, always, she’d start to get tickled and she’d laugh
and she’d laugh.” In return for the hard work on the girdle, Maybelle would try her hand at off-color jokes. “Problem was, Grandma could never tell any joke that had the word shit in it,” says Carlene. “She could never finish because she’d get to laughing so hard. I’d say, ‘Grandma, tell us the parrot joke.’ And she’d try to tell it, but she’d just start giggling so hard. . . . I don’t think I ever heard the end of that joke.”

  In the cars or in the hotel rooms, Maybelle let the grandchildren tune the radio to the stations they wanted to hear, and got to be quite fond of a particular gospel song they were playing in those days: “One Toe Over the Line.” She was anxious to learn it, she said. When her grandkids explained that the song was actually called “One Toke Over the Line,” she had no idea what that meant. When they explained it, she wouldn’t stop laughing.

  As she had in Eck’s Essex or A.P.’s Chevrolet or the big wartime Packard or the smooth, big-finned fifties Cadillac, Maybelle was still hurtling from gig to gig behind the steering wheel of a car. The band traveled in two cars now—Maybelle’s black Cadillac and Helen’s black Lincoln—and each had a trailer full of luggage and instruments. “We’d drive forty hours to play thirty minutes,” says Carlene, “and Grandma drove fast, hoo-boy!” One night, a Virginia state trooper pulled over both speeding cars and gruffly demanded of David Jones, who was driving the Lincoln, what in hell he thought he was doing. The young man sheepishly pointed to the big Cadillac, which moments before had been barreling down the Virginia highway ahead of him: “Just trying to keep up with Grandma.”

  Sara Carter Bayes (Carter Family Museum)

  Sara and her daughter Gladys (Carter Family Museum)