Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

by Mark Zwonitzer

  Mother of Mine

  When her daughter asked her, Sara couldn’t say no. Janette was making musical programs at A.P.’s old store, and she wanted her mother to perform at a special event in August of 1975: the “First A.P. Carter Memorial Day Festival and Crafts Show.” “Good Music, Good Food” was how Janette was billing the show, and she wanted Sara and Maybelle to headline. It had been eight years since Sara and Maybelle performed onstage together, and nine since they’d recorded their reunion album. Janette was shy to ask. She’d expected her mother to put up some resistance.

  Even Sara’s best friend in California would have bet against Sara’s coming out of retirement again, even for Janette. Gladys Greiner had been Sara’s friend for almost thirty years; she knew just how Sara felt about the music business. The two women had remained friends for so long precisely because Gladys never seemed to care much about Sara’s celebrity, and never tried to make Sara talk about her old life. When they first met at the Zenith store in Angel’s Camp, California, Gladys didn’t even recognize Sara Carter, star of record and radio. She was just a lady who staggered into the store one day, exhausted.

  “Can I help you?” Gladys said.

  “I want to sit in that chair that you’re sitting in,” Sara said. She was always direct.

  “What in the world happened to you?”

  “I have bad legs. I have to sit down every once’t in a while,” Sara told her. Apparently, she found the chair comfortable. “Would you mind, anytime I’m in town, if I come and sit in your chair?”

  “Of course not.”

  After that, Coy and Sara would drive to town once or twice a week. As maintenance man at the Calaveras County fairgrounds (home to Mark Twain’s jumping frog), Coy always had a little shopping to do and a lot of free time. So while he poked around in the stores and visited with friends, Sara put her feet up at Gladys’s desk and the two women would talk for hours. Of course, Sara never said much about herself, so it was a long time before Gladys understood her new friend had been one of the Original Carter Family. They’d talk about neighbors or friends or what Sara really wanted to talk about: her children and her grandchildren. Gladys’s new friend was so casual, it was hard to imagine she’d been a celebrity. Sara dressed for comfort: open-toed, sling-back sandals, light sweaters or sleeveless shirts, a scarf tied around her neck—even in the heat—and slacks, always. “Don’t you ever wear a dress?” Gladys finally asked her. “Not if I can help it,” Sara said.

  But there was formality to Sara also, a constant awareness of her appearance that belied ease. Every morning—before anybody saw her—she’d take time with her makeup, her manicure, her outfit. She was perfumed in her fragrance of choice, White Shoulders, and her permanent was recent. Her silver hair was colored to a rich and youthful auburn. Even in quiet repose, Sara had a bearing that set her beyond anybody Gladys had ever known. There were times when Sara simply intimidated people, made them think she didn’t like them. It was a long time before she’d let down in front of anybody, but then, all of a sudden, something would tickle her, and she’d burst into a long, satisfying release of laughter. And as the chuckles trailed off, she’d exclaim, “Oh, law,” sit back in her chair, and put her hands under her breasts and lift them, as if the event had so discombobulated them they needed to be reset to their proper position.

  But most of the time, Sara was hard to read. Her directness could be unsettling, even cutting. “She was—how can I say it?—the opposite of having a velvet glove,” says Gladys. “On the outside she had a work glove. And inside she was wearing a velvet glove, because she was so sweet. When she spoke to you, you didn’t know whether she was reprimanding you or not. And yet it wasn’t that at all, she was just saying what she felt and she loved you inside. And I know; she told me she loved me many, many times.”

  But even after Gladys understood how Sara felt about her, she knew to steer clear of certain topics. It was long after she’d first met Sara, and after she and her husband and Coy and Sara started making a little music together in the trailer, that Gladys Greiner finally asked her point-blank: “Sara, why don’t you ever want to talk about your past career?”

  “I was so tired of that career that I don’t even want to have to think about it,” Sara told her. “I’m living a different life now.”

  It wasn’t always easy for Sara to escape the past. From the time she walked away from the music business, people had been straggling up to the trailer where Coy and Sara lived, wanting to talk to her. In 1948 a young writer working on a story about Highway 49 happened upon the Bayeses at a motor court they were running at the time in Altaville, California. Sara invited the young man and his wife to breakfast the next morning. Still, he wouldn’t even have known who Sara was, except that there was another woman at breakfast who was driving everyone crazy, making a big to-do about her daughter, the opera singer, who had just made a record. Sara, put off by the woman’s big mouth, finally piped up. “I’ve made some records,” she said.

  “How many records have you made?” the woman said, a bit too condescendingly for Sara’s liking.

  Apparently hoping to awe the woman into silence, Sara silently toted up her recordings and her transcriptions, and said, for effect, “About six hundred.”

  This did silence the woman, but opened up a whole new line of questioning from the writer, who eventually came back with a recorder to get her on tape. After that, visitors would sometimes show up with wire recorders or reel-to-reel tape recorders and ask her to tell them about the old days: about the first recordings in Bristol, about where the Carters got all their songs, about how she learned to play, about Mr. Peer. One man wanted to take color photographs of her quilts and crocheting. Often as not, visitors finally got around to asking her to sing. Sometimes she would relent, especially if Coy was there to help with the persuading. (Coy was always eager to see how the latest recording gadgets worked.) But sometimes she simply refused. “I don’t feel in the mood,” she’d say. She meant to be gentle about it, but in her deep, smoky voice, things didn’t always come out as soft as she intended.

  The visitors she liked the best were the professionals she thought could help her. When the New Lost City Ramblers came to record her in the early sixties, Sara sang “Railroading on the Great Divide,” a tune she’d written herself. “Boys, I’d really like for you to use that song,” she told them when she was done. Royalties were always welcome. The new folkies could say what they wanted about the innocence and naivete of the recording pioneers who came out of the sticks, but Sara Carter had always understood that this was a business. She made a point to copyright every song she wrote. And she stayed in constant contact with Ralph Peer’s company, whose annual payouts to Sara were climbing toward $10,000 a year. Gladys Greiner typed a stream of correspondence from Sara to Southern Music Publishing, Inc., but these were hardly love letters. Sara could do the math. If her third of the royalties was that high, Southern was minting money. “We made Peer millions,” she told the New Lost City Ramblers, with more than a pinch of bitterness.

  Many of the people who made their way to Sara were the sort of lonely hearts who had always been deeply affected by Carter Family music. For these pilgrims, an actual visit with Sara was like entry into some hallowed chamber. Those who had gained an audience had a way of finding one another, writing letters back and forth, describing their visits with Sara, the songs she’d played for them (“The Wabash Cannonball,” with a new verse!), the stories she’d revealed (Jimmie Rodgers took dope in the arm and was a heavy drinker), the records she’d requested (“We Shall Rise”), the gifts she might like. Correspondence often took the form of not-so-subtle one-upmanship. “I’m going to send [Sara] a Christmas present from now on,” wrote a Canadian fan and record collector named Keith, in 1959. “I think that someone should show Sara how much the people appreciate her wonderful music.” The next year Keith reported that he had sent Sara a bottle of French perfume for her birthday. What with the loot, Sara tolerated these minimal i
ntrusions without great distress. She never let her fans go away hungry, even if all she could offer was corn bread and beans.

  Historians and folklorists, though, had a tough go with Sara; academics were generally left to their own devices. Back in 1961, one desperate folklorist was forced to send two of Sara’s cousins into Uncle Mil and Aunt Nick’s house to see if there was anything of note. When they emerged, they wrote to him at his college: “The old house . . . is now vacant with the exception of hay in the living room and an old trunk in one of the bedrooms. The trunk was unlocked so we rummaged. We found some of Sara’s correspondence with her record manager, also some with an attorney in regard to her divorce. These were dated from 1933 to 1936. We also found a bundle of ballads tied up with a piece of cloth. These were various handwritings and on all sorts of paper. I presume that various people had sent these to her. Since they were unsigned, there is no background to any of them. In the lot we found an early picture of Sara, and a cousin, Madge Addington, now deceased, a sister to Maybelle. Sara in that picture had a banjo.” Well, if somebody wanted to go rummaging through her long-forgotten trunks, go ahead, but Sara wasn’t going to let anybody drag her back to that time. When Barbara Powell would try to quiz her aunt Sara about her family, the older woman never had much to say, except that she didn’t really remember her own mother. “She didn’t have a sentimental bone in her body,” says Barbara. “She sold her spinning wheel, which had been in her family for generations, to Stella’s second husband, Louie. She said, ‘Louie, I need forty dollars. Will you give me forty dollars for it?’ ”

  Still, Sara Carter took pride in what she’d been, and if somebody was going to make sufficient fuss about the Original Carter Family, she’d make an appearance. She had played alongside Maybelle at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967. Standing in the wings, Coy was so happy that he put his arm around Mike Seeger and the two men watched in silent awe. She’d recorded the Historic Reunion album with Maybelle. She’d loaned her autoharp for display at the Country Music Hall of Fame, and even traveled to Nashville in 1970 for induction into the Hall. In August of 1971 she’d come back to State Street in Bristol for the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the first recordings of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. In public that day, Sara was nonchalant: “None of us had any idea what would result from that day in 1927 in Bristol.” In private she was a bit more jaundiced: “Well, I expect this is the last thing they’ll ever do for the Carter Family.” Onstage, she was the same as always. When her world-famous nephew-in-law, Johnny Cash, brought her up to sing at a benefit in Gate City (right where she’d performed with Uncle Fland’s choir at singing conventions), she gave no quarter. Johnny and his musicians led into a song and Sara stopped them in their tracks: “You’ve got to lower that pitch,” she told them. “I can’t reach up there anymore.”

  By the seventies, a lifetime of smoking had drastically deepened Sara’s voice. The smoking was also a constant threat to her health. A trip across the length of the trailer left Sara weary and panting. It drove Coy crazy that she wouldn’t quit smoking, and there were times he’d go right at her. “I’m going to divorce you if you don’t stop smoking!” he’d tell her. “I can’t live with you, seeing you dying bit by bit.” He even enlisted Gladys Greiner to talk to Sara. It took some doing, but Gladys screwed up her courage and went at her friend head-on: “It’s not fair to your children and it’s not fair to Coy. He is tearing himself to pieces, trying to get you to stop smoking.”

  “You can talk, Gladys, ’til Doomsday, and I’m still gonna keep on smoking,” Sara said. “In the hospital they always tell me I can’t smoke; I smoke just the same. I can’t give it up. I don’t know why I can’t, but I can’t give it up.”

  By 1975, when Janette asked her mother about the festival, Gladys Greiner didn’t think Sara was up to performing. “She didn’t like to do anything or go anywhere at that stage of the game,” Gladys says. “She wasn’t really feeling well at any time. I think she had arthritis, but she couldn’t breathe good, either.” But Sara could not say no to Janette. So preparations began.

  One day that spring, Sara found out the man who ran the fairgrounds was on his way to Stockton: “So, you’re taking us with you,” she told him, “me and Gladys.” The man almost fell over. Sara never even cracked a smile, but Gladys could see her eyes sparkle. So the man drove them to Stockton, and Sara asked to be let out at the corner of Main and San Joaquin, in the downtown shopping area. “When do we pick you up again?” asked the driver.

  “Well, I’d like you to be back here in about two hours,” she said. Now, Gladys knew Sara was after a dress for Janette’s festival. And as anybody who ever shopped with Sara knew, two hours probably wasn’t going to be enough time, even for just one dress. The problem with Sara was never indecision; she always knew exactly what she wanted. The problem was finding it. Her friends and nieces might take her shopping all day, to every shoe store in town, until she found the right open-toed, flat-soled, sling-back sandals. Gladys knew she might be in for a long day, but as she says, “You didn’t say no to Sara. You did what she said.” Gladys was in luck that day. In the first store, they found a high-necked dress, pink, with a filmy see-through chiffon coverlet.

  When Sara put it on, Gladys could see her friend was instantly, uncharacteristically, unsure of herself. “She said, ‘You like it? Does it look okay on me? Are you sure?’ ” Gladys remembers, and twenty years later, she tears up. “I said, ‘You are a lovely floating vision going by.’ And Sara said, ‘Hoooooo!’ ”

  * * *

  Janette barely got through the introduction at the first festival that day in August. “I tell you, you don’t know how proud I am of them. And I just hope I can keep from falling apart up here. . . . I tell you what I want you all to do: While they’re coming on the stage, I want you to give the best applause that ever was applauded to anybody. And I want you to meet the two prettiest, the two most wonderful women in the world, my mother and my aunt Maybelle. . . . I’m just so thrilled that they’re here. If they don’t sing a note, it’ll be all right with me. They don’t feel good. It’s hot. It really is. And we’re going to let ’em do just exactly what they want to do.”

  Even under the canopy of the outdoor stage, the sun was menacing. Men in the crowd shielded their balding heads with seed caps; teenage girls were stripped down to shorts and halter tops. It was too hot to smoke a cigarette. Somebody had to take Maybelle by the elbow and walk her up the few steps to the stage, which stood four feet above the gently sloping hillside. Wearing a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses, Maybelle stooped forward, leaning in to the stairs, unable to carry her autoharp. She was only sixty-seven years old, but the arthritis had stripped her of her natural confidence. Playing the guitar, even for friends and family in Poor Valley, was beyond her. If she could not be great, she would not try.

  Sara’s legs were weaker than ever, but she insisted on walking onto that stage without aid. As she made her way across, with a shy wave to the smallish crowd, a breeze gently fanned her gauzy coverlet. “You wanna stand up, Sara?” Maybelle asked. “You wanna sit down?”

  “I’ll sit.”

  “Well, you have to sing on mike, though, see,” Maybelle said, then she turned to the crowd. Her sunglasses were off now. It would have been rude to hide her eyes from the audience. “I don’t know, but we haven’t done this in a long time but we’re going to do what we can. They’s neither one of us got any business up here trying to sing.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Sara said from her chair, where she sat stiff-necked, with her chin raised ever so slightly. While the techies placed her mike, Sara raised her right hand to give an inquiring pat to her fresh permanent. She’d been to Kingsport that morning, where the family’s professional beautician, Theda Carter, had given her a new perm and color. It was Theda’s professional policy to do these separate treatments on separate days. Forty-eight hours was what she needed to do the job right. But Sara always wanted them done the same day, and Theda
knew enough not to argue.

  Sara and Maybelle actually did two shows that day, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. It wasn’t like the early days, when they’d get behind those kerosene lanterns on the old plank stages and go for hours. Now Joe and Helen—and even Helen’s son, Kevin—had to fill in the gaps while the ladies caught their breath. Through both shows, Maybelle kept making apologies for her playing (“My hands don’t work like they used to”) and their inability to play their old songs on request. (“We haven’t sang together in so long that we’ve just got a very few tunes that we kind of run over a little bit.”)

  Out beyond the audience, the two women could just see the now-quiet path where the trains used to roll through Maces Springs. “You know they got a chain on this track up here anymore,” Maybelle told the audience. “We used to ride the train up and down this railroad track many years ago . . . but we’re going to do a song about a train.” There was a long pause. “This is ‘Lonesome Pine Special.’ . . . Couldn’t think of the name.”

  Sara sang lead on the songs they’d run through earlier: “Lonesome Pine Special” and “Happiest Days of All.” But when she had a request to do “No More Goodbyes,” she shook her head. “I can’t sing it,” she said to Maybelle.

  “That one’s too hard to sing,” Maybelle told the crowd. “I tell you what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna do ‘Anchored in Love.’ How about that? Okay?”

  Again Sara took the lead, and she sang with all she had, pausing to steal a breath, or cutting short a phrase to save one. Through both shows, Sara did all she could. But she would not apologize for what she could not.

  From the stage that day, Sara and Maybelle were treated to a performance meant just for them. Janette had rounded up the grandchildren and great-grandchildren to make a dance for the two singers. At first, the oldest grandson demurred. “You can, honey, I know,” Janette said to her son, but Don Jett was nearing thirty-five and beyond doing what his mother told him to do. Then Sara leaned in to her microphone: “C’mon, Don, dance for your Mommy Jake,” she said. And he did.