My Uncle's Guitar, my Mother's Mandolin, and my Aunt's Violin. A family musical legacy ignited by The Carter Family.
Country music is three chords and the truth – Harlan Howard.
“You’d think in 93 years of recorded country music, they could play a song more than 20 years old!” I ranted.
CJ smiled, she had heard it before - my rant on today’s country music radio.
My rant is more poignant than usual. Today is the 93rd anniversary of the day the earth literally swung on its axis. Country music was born August 1, 1927. Music, not just country music, would never be the same.
On the evening of August 1, 1927, AP & Sara Carter and Sara’s cousin, Maybelle Carter climbed the fire escape into the loft of an old warehouse in Bristol, TN. Although they wore their finest clothes, they were ashamed of their country clothes and did not want to walk among the street crowd below.
Ralph Peer of Victor records had set-up a makeshift recording studio and was offering to pay $50 if he made a record of your song. Sara did not believe it, “Aw, pshaw. Ain’t nobody gonna pay that much money to hear us sing.”
Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg in Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music describe what happened next:
So they climbed up on the wooden stage, drew in close to one another. Then Maybelle led in, bare-fingered, on Eck’s [Maybelle’s husband] little Stella guitar, and Sara’s voice chased right after it:
My heart is sad and I’m in sorrow,
For the only one I love.
And suddenly, out of nowhere, A.P.’s quavering bass was registering right alongside Sara’s contralto.
When shall I see him?
Oh, no never ’til I meet him in heaven above.
“Bury me beneath the Weeping Willow” was the 1st of 4 songs The Carter Family recorded that evening. They recorded 2 more the next morning. They left Bristol for home in Mace Springs, VA with an additional $300. Maybelle was beside herself - Zwonitzer and Hirshberg:
“When we made the record and played it back, I thought it couldn’t be,” Maybelle once said. “I just couldn’t believe it, this being so unreal, you standing there and singing and they’d turn around and play it back to you.”
The timing was perfect, radio and phonograph fueled the spread of music throughout the country. The Carter family led the charge. Zwonitzer and Hirshberg write:
In the 1930s, radio was still a miracle. Electricity hadn’t yet reached the country’s remotest parts, but radio could wriggle its way into places not yet plugged in to the current of modern America. A single battery-powered radio set could pluck sounds out of the ether, just like magic; it provided unimaginable news from unimagined places, jokes of surpassing hilarity, and music that made listeners dance, cry, or just plain sigh.
93 years later the internet is the new radio. And The Carter Family is still playing in the ether.
Second Helping
The Carter Family legacy is summed up best by Rosanne Cash:
The Carter Family were elemental. It's like the atom. It was the beginning of the building blocks for the rest of us. Those songs, they were captured rather than written. The were in the hills like rock formations.
So, in 1927, those first Bristol recordings, these songs that were part of the collective unconscious were gathered together, documented forever, with these plaintive voices and these elemental guitars. The bedrock was formed for the rest of us.
- From Country Music: An Illustrated History. Based on the firm series by Ken Burns.
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music - Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg
Bury me Beneath The Weeping Willow - The Carter Family
Country Music: An Illustrated History - Dayton Duncan & Ken Burns. Based on the film series.
The Matriarch – Taste the Food on Maybelle Carter
