EDITOR'S NOTE: This story originally appeared in our September/October 1988 issue. It is being presented again here as part of our 30th Anniversary celebration.
The birth of country music took place back in the 1920s, in a little valley in the Southwest Virginia Mountains. Today, a descendant of the original Carter family is dedicating her life to keeping that seminal sound alive, and not letting it get, as she calls it, "Nashvillized."
The original Carters in 1938.
From left: Sara, Maybelle and A.P. Carter.
Log cabins wrapped in Virginia creeper vines sag on the riverbank. In little hillside cemeteries. dewberry briars crawl through the stones. In the shadow of Clinch Mountain, wildwood flowers bloom.
The spirits of a hundred old Appalachian ballads linger here in Poor Valley-homeplace of the Carter Family and the birthplace, many say, of country music.
From this corner of Southwest Virginia in the heart of the Blue Ridge came Alvin Pleasant
“A.P.” Carter and his wife. Sara, who along with A.Ps sister-in-law, Maybelle, formed the legendary Carter family.
With their mournful, lonesome harmonies, the Carters set the musical course for what would lead to America's country music phenomenon now centered in Nashville, Tennessee.
The members of the famous trio are gone, but now another Carter is keeping the family's musical tradition, and memory, alive in Poor Valley.
“Just before he died, my daddy told me, ‘Janette. I'd like to see my music carried on,’" says Janette Carter, daughter of A.P. and Sara. “’If I've got a child who can do it, you are the one.’
"And I told him, 'Daddy. I'll do it!’”
Today, Janette Carter is indeed carrying on her father's music. From a barnlike building next to A.P.’s old grocery store in rural Maces Springs, she stages weekly Saturday night country music shows. Janette allows only old-time string bands and bluegrass groups to perform at her little opry. No amplified electrical guitars are allowed to "Nashvillize" the Carter Family legacy.
"The shows are doing real well,” says Janette, who emcees the programs and usually starts things off by singing an old Carter Family song or two.
“The audiences get down low in the winter, and it’s hard to make it sometimes, but I still go on.”
The roots of these shows go back to 1927 when a talent scout for the Victor Talking Machine Company discovered the original Carters. The scout had set up a makeshift recording studio in a Bristol, Tennessee storefront and placed ads in the local paper urging musicians to come in and audition. Among the anxious singers and musicians who showed up on the same August day were the Carters and a frail, out-of-work railroad brakeman up from North Carolina-Jimmie Rodgers.
So August 1, 1927 became a red-letter day in the history of country music.
Through records and personal appearances, the Carter Family developed the close-harmony sound that became the pattern for country music groups which followed. Their songs of love, and frustrated love, appealed to the ears and hearts of rural Americans. From the trio’s repertoire of sacred, folk and mountain ballads sprang the “hillbilly” songs of the 1930s, which later evolved into so-called country-and-western music.
“When you talk about the Carter Family, you’re talking about the roots of country music,” insists 60-year-old Janette. “Of course, I’m prejudiced-but the experts say the same thing.”
The Carters recorded more than 300 songs during their years together, most of them composed or "collected" by A.P. Among the Carter Family classics are "Wabash Cannonball," "Lonesome Valley,” “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” "Keep on the Sunny Side" and the best-known tune from their songbag, the classic "Wildwood Flower.”
Oh he taught me to love him
and called me his flow'r
That was blooming to cheer him
through life's dreary hour
Oh I'm longing to see him
through life's dark hour
He's gone and neglected
this pale wildwood flow'r.
Janette Carter began her weekly shows 14 years ago after converting her father's abandoned roadside grocery store into a small music hall.
"At first I thought I would tum the store into an auction house,” she says, "but then one day the idea of having music shows came to me out of the blue.
"My daddy had that idea once, you know. He put a little park out in back of the store and had a few shows, but it fell through. He was in poor health and was not able to keep it going. And the timing wasn't right. You know, music comes and goes, and at that time it was going down…I mean, his kind of music was going down.”
In 1974 Janette hauled out the stacks of dried-up tobacco stalks, fertilizer sacks and corn cobs, shoved the old store counters and racks against the wall and brought in some church pews. With help from her brother: Joe, and her sister, Gladys, she painted the weathered gray building bright white and planted a sign out front: "Janette Carter Old-Time Music Every Sat. Nite.”
Inside she posted a pledge: "I promise shows will be presented in a quiet, orderly atmosphere. I will in no way tolerate or allow drinking, cursing or disturbances.” On every Saturday night since, Janette has been the mistress of ceremonies, performer (she sings and plays the autoharp) and disciplinarian. When there's a violation of any of the posted rules, she takes to the stage to admonish the audience like a strict mother dealing with a bad boy.
"Now I'm not a gonna put up with any drinking,” she lectures the crowd before each show. "My daddy never allowed anyone drinking at his shows and he never told dirty jokes. I feel it would be an insult to my daddy if I did.”
Janette organized shows in the converted store for two years, until the audiences became so large they spilled out into the yard. Even having two shows each Saturday night did not solve the problem, so in 1976 she had a rustic barn built next door and called it the "Carter fold.”
Homemade signs still spelled out Janette's house rules: "Drinking, profanity or disorder I will in no way tolerate or allow.”
Janette received financial help with her music bam from Johnny Cash, who is married to Maybelle's daughter. June. Cash paid off the Carter fold debt with his part of the gate receipts from a memorable 1977 concert - the 50th anniversary of the Carter family's historic first recording in Bristol.
Through' the years. Johnny and June Carter Cash have made several appearances at the fold, sometimes arriving for the Saturday night shows unannounced.
At the Golden Anniversary Carter festival, Sara and Maybelle were joined on stage by second generation Carters for a medley of A.P.’s songs, including the Carter family classic, "Will the Circle be Unbroken?"
It was the last time the haunting harmonies of Sara and Maybelle were heard. Maybelle died in 1978: Sara died the following year.
Janette Carter is hard fast in her ways (some say stubborn). She won't give in to brother Joe's requests to book popular Nashville groups for the Saturday night Carter fold shows. Janette's prohibition against electric guitars continues.
“The music here in the valley is different from the Nashville music,” she explains. "And I'm not going to have Nashville in my shows!"
She did make that one exception.
“Johnny Cash called me and said he would like to bring his band and play in the Golden Anniversary Carter family festival in 1977. I told him I just couldn't allow his band, but I would let him come and sing. He said he'd think about it, and I never did hear from him for a long time.
"A few days before the festival he called and said he just had to be part of the show because the Carter family meant so much to him, and he said he wanted to bring his band. I told him I had already booked my Friday and Saturday shows, and if he wanted to be in the festival he would have to come on Thursday night. And he said that would be all right.”
Janette's feelings for the Nashville branch of the Carter family (her Aunt Maybelle's daughters) and her in-law, the famous Man in Black, are-well-mixed. There's even a hint of jealousy in Janette's voice when she talks about her cousins.
"Most people don't know about my mama and daddy,” she says. “They only know about the Nashville bunch.
"I was down in the Fold cleaning one day and a lady from Texas pulled up and asked if she could come in. I told her who I was and she acted surprised. ‘You're a Carter? Why, I thought you was hired help.’
"Seems like everybody thinks the Carters are millionaires,” Janette says. “They expect to come here to the valley and see us all with Cadillacs and fine homes. And as you can see, we're not all rich,” she adds, fastening a safety pin holding her blouse closed.
"I wish I had half the clothes June has thrown away.”
Today. A.P.’s little store is the Carter Family Museum, open Saturdays for two hours before the music shows begin. Admission is 50 cents. Janette lets the handicapped and the "old people in the valley" into the museum, and the music shows, for free.
“This store was left to me by my daddy, A.P. Carter,” reads a hand-lettered sign on the front door: "It is to be a place to preserve the music, history, and achievements of the original Carter Family.”
Janette's museum is crammed full of Carter Family photographs and memorabilia, including old 78 rpm records, A.P.’s watch, suspenders, trousers, framed driver's license and Bible-opened to the book of Job. Also on display are Aunt Maybelle's shoes and handkerchief, and Sara's guitar and sidesaddle.
Between greetings to visitors entering the museum one recent Saturday. Janette talked about herself and her parents. "My daddy was a nervous man ... always starting something and never finishing it. He always had too many things going at the same time. He was a nervous man, my daddy was. He was always walking up and down the railroad tracks, and up and down the railroad tracks.
"My daddy had a nerve problem which caused his hands to shake. His mother claimed he was marked by lightning because just before he was born, lightning struck a tree nearby where she was picking apples.
"His hands shook his entire life. It's a wonder he was able to play the guitar the way he did.”
When she was six years old. Janette recalls she first performed with her famous parents and Aunt Maybelle-"as a little Indian dancer with feathers in my hair.” When she turned 15 Janette joined the Carter family for radio shows in Texas, playing the autoharp.
Janette's parents were divorced in 1933, but they continued to perform and record together until the group disbanded on the eve of World War II. Maybelle, however, took her daughters and started anew as Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters. They followed their music's shifting center of gravity toward Nashville and onto the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, where they became the new Carter family. In the 1960s, after June married Johnny Cash, they became part of the Cash road show.
When the original Carter family broke up. A.P. returned to farming in Poor Valley, operated a grist mill, built homes and, in 1945, put up the small roadside grocery store on the road through the valley. In 1956, more than a decade after the original Carter family split up, Janette and her brother Joe teamed up with their father and mother (who remarried and was living in California) for a second stab at commercial music making. But A.P.s health began to deteriorate, and he died in 1960.
"My daddy was a lonely man his last years here in the valley,” says Janette. "He never remarried, and he never did love anyone else but my mama. He died thinking he was a failure. He died before he had a chance to see what he had done for music.”