Country Country : On the Tennessee line, ‘old-timey’ echoes of Carter Family tunes

Ridin’ on that midnight train,

Lord, my head’s ahangin’ low.

These awful blues will follow me

Wherever I may go.

--”Ridin’ That Midnight Train”

*

When the Inheritance Bluegrass Band sailed into this Stanley Brothers classic to open their Saturday night show at the Carter Fold, the broad concrete slab in front of the stage was empty.

But as the fiddle heated up, and band members’ fingers flew over banjo, mandolin, guitar and bass, the initiators among the audience sidled onto the floor and began to clog: tapa-tapatapety-tap. With the ice broken, others followed, a rich potpourri of ages and of costumes, from come-as-you-are casual to very consciously country and western.

The leathery, lined faces of many of the dancers spoke of hard outdoor lives, as surely as the graceful proficiency of their steps spoke of years of clogging. Dancing alone, one lanky, handsome man in his 30s tapped away with a smoothness and loose syncopation that might have made a Broadway dancer envious. A pretty young girl of 9 or 10--all dressed up, with white, fringed cowboy boots and a sunny smile--clogged proficiently and with gusto.

The bluegrass music charged on, and now the crisp metallic slap and clatter of clogging taps was another instrument, as infectiously rhythmic as the driving banjo. The floor was full, a sea of pumping arms and intricately speeding feet. Many dancers clogged solo, but all seemed communally transported by the traditional mountain music--both back in time and out the travail of daily living.

This vital panorama stood in sharp contrast to the music hall as I had first seen it, somnolent and empty at midday.

“Well, you boys come and have a look around, why don’t you?” a gray-haired woman had suggested, busily sweeping out soda cans and other debris from this large hall that sprawls on a grassy hillside in Maces Springs, Va. Hanging on the building’s barn-like wooden siding is a sign, a black disc painted to look like a record, that reads “Carter Family Fold--Honoring A.P., Sara and Maybelle.”

This woman with the broom looked familiar, I thought, as a friend and I entered the dark, close coolness of the building. Inside, I saw that the choicest seats, front and center, had been salvaged from old school buses.

This “Fold” nestles comfortably in the Poor Valley, not far from Bristol, on the Tennessee border, a town rich in associations for any aficionado of “old-timey” country music. Next to the Fold is a modest clapboard building--the A.P. Carter store, built in 1945 and now the Carter Family Museum, a Virginia Historic Landmark.

On my first visit here three years ago, a bright July afternoon, the rural scene was sunbaked and still. Only the occasional car hummed by on the country road that threaded the valley, an unassuming thoroughfare now designated the A.P. Carter Memorial Highway.

We were just passing through, but stopped anyway. It finally dawned on me that the woman with the broom was Janette Carter, daughter of A.P. and Sara, founder and director of the Carter Family Memorial Music Center, and a fine traditional musician and composer in her own right.

She unlocked the door and led us into A.P.’s store, dim and almost eerily alive with the history of the Carters, and told us stories about her aunt Maybelle, Sara and A.P., the Original Carter Family music group; about the next generation, siblings and cousins of hers; and then about the generation after that, the intricate family tree of country music’s greatest family.

“My daddy was a carpenter by trade,” Janette said. “He also farmed, ran a sawmill, was a fruit tree salesman. He did things other than his music. I guess he had to.” Yet the Carter Family was among the first great commercial successes in country music.

*

A.P. was by all accounts an eccentric, a lonely man who wandered the countryside collecting traditional songs, which he’d then rearrange and sing with his wife, Sara, and, later, his sister-in-law Maybelle.

All his life he suffered from a tremor. “Grandma claimed that he was marked,” Janette has written in “Living With Memories,” a charming memoir. “Before he was born lightning struck a tree where she was gathering apples, and the fire ran all on the ground and scared her; so Daddy was born nervous.”

In August 1927, A.P. dragged Sara and Maybelle to a makeshift recording studio in a warehouse in Bristol, Tenn., in answer to an open-audition call from Ralph Peer of the Victor Talking Machine Co. The “Bristol Sessions,” as these recordings have come to be known, are generally considered the seminal event in commercial country music. (Two days after the Carter Family recorded, Jimmie Rogers, “the Singing Brakeman,” walked into Peer’s studio.)

During the 14 years the Original Carter Family performed together, they amassed a body of songs--mostly reworkings of traditional material, all copyrighted in A.P.’s name--that has had an unparalleled influence on country and folk musicians who followed the Carters.

A.P. was a driven genius, obsessed with gathering his songs. His marriage broke up even before the singing group. In the early 1940s, the Original Carter Family disbanded when Sara married Coy Bayes, A.P.’s cousin, and moved to California.

A.P. was heartbroken. His singing days were over.

“Daddy built the store after the breakup and ran it until his health got too poor,” Janette said. “When he died in 1960, he left it to me. For years it just sat here, goin’ downhill, unused. I let people store tobacco in it.”

Now it’s a storehouse of memories. In glass cases are clothes: golden dresses from Sara and Maybelle’s 50th anniversary performance; the outfits that Johnny Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, wore to perform at the White House in 1970; and perhaps most evocative of all, A.P.’s work clothes.

A.P.’s radio from 1935 is there, its veneer cracked and peeling, and Sara’s autoharp table of beautiful inlaid wood. One entire wall is covered with jackets from LPs cut by the various Carters.

*

A small flyer in the museum dating from the early days tells the story of the concerts’ genesis: “Janette Carter (daughter of A.P. and Sara) presents Good Old Time Music at the A.P. Carter Store. A good clean show for young and old to enjoy. No electric instruments and no drinking.” Those two prohibitions remain very much in force today.

“It started out as a memorial to my daddy,” Janette explained, speaking of the concerts. “Just before he died, he said to me, ‘I wish one of my children would carry on my work and, Janette, I think you’d be the one.’ I made a promise to him that I would.” But those were hard times for Janette, and it didn’t happen right away.

“When I started the programs back in 1974, all I had was this little empty building. I was 50 years old, cookin’ in a local school, divorced. I’d put my music aside to raise a family. It was awful hard.” It occurred to her that perhaps she could stage concerts in the old store. She did, and before long they outgrew that small space, and the Fold was conceived.

“Joe designed and built it,” Janette said, “but we had a lot of help from family, neighbors and musicians.” And Joe named the hall too. “A fold in the Bible is a gathering place,” he explained when I asked him.

Thrift was the watchword. If you look carefully at the round record-emulating sign outside the hall, you can see the ghost of a Texaco logo bumping up under the black-and-gold paint. The seating area is built on a hillside, with its natural rise providing good sight lines. The floor is packed earth, except for the concrete slab for clogging.

The Fold, which seats about 900, was completed in 1976 and has been filled with music ever since. It’s succeeded--but not without limitless hard work and dedication by Janette, with help from Joe and their sister Gladys--who took care of the business end of the enterprise up until her death a few years ago. Janette, now 74, acts as emcee and (with Joe) curtain-raising performer, auditions and books the acts, hires the sound man, has the flyers printed.

“I’m tryin’ to preserve the old-time culture--music and dance,” Janette said. “I’m very strict--I don’t have alcohol, drugs or disorder. I made a vow to God that I’d keep it right, and that if I couldn’t I’d quit. I haven’t stopped yet.”

*

When we first dropped by Maces Springs, with no time to stay for the concert, we vowed to return--and did, on an evening when Inheritance, a bluegrass band, was performing. While Joe sat watching the crowd flow into his music hall, I asked him about his own music. (“Joe’s a beautiful songwriter,” Janette had told me; having heard some of his songs, I agreed.)

“First I’ll get a melody in my mind,” he said. “Sometimes it’ll lie there for five years before the words come. I let the melody dominate the lyrics.”

“I’ve written maybe 30 songs,” he continued. “I may go two or three years and never write a thing. ‘Eyes of an Eagle’ took me about 12 years to write.”

“A few good songs come out of Nashville, but most are weak. Some call it country, some call it rock, I call it crock,” he said with a wry smile.

The other side of the Carter family has been much more comfortable with Nashville and the evolving country sound it has produced. After the breakup of the Original Carter Family, Mother Maybelle (as she became known to generations of country music fans) and her daughters June, Anita and Helen became fixtures on the Grand Old Opry. June married Johnny Cash. Carlene Carter, June’s daughter by an earlier marriage, is a well-known and successful singer.

Janette’s musical career has been far less brilliantly spotlighted. She gave up her music entirely to raise her family. Now, in addition to the songs she and Joe open with at each Saturday concert, Janette performs about half a dozen times a year away from the Fold. Her autoharp-backed vocals are hauntingly lovely and remarkably reminiscent of Sara’s singing and playing.

The Fold’s atmosphere was informal, a bit like a barn dance, with a concession stand selling soda, hot dogs and ice cream. About half the audience appeared to be local regulars, but others had come from as far away as Connecticut, Indiana and North Dakota.

A white-haired woman sitting nearby took off a clogging shoe to show us. “Get a pair that’s comfortable and will stay on securely,” she advised, “then get taps added at the shoe store.” I shook the shoe, and the taps jingled encouragingly. “We put beeswax on so they slide better.”

Eventually the evening began to wind down. The pretty little girl in the cowboy boots left early, with her grandfather. He brings her every Saturday, we learned from a neighborly couple sitting next to us. Her father died about a year ago.

Poor Valley, for all its green lushness, appears to be hard, demanding country, and the remote, rural life is not easy even today. Earlier we’d walked through the modest graveyard just down the road from the Fold to find Sara and A.P.’s markers--identical, elaborate, but not together. We were struck by the overabundance of tiny headstones that told of infant mortality or childhood death.

“When we come up here, we always like to end the show with this one,” the mandolin player said, and the group slipped into a composition inextricably linked to the Carter Family.

“I was standin’ by my window/On one cold and cloudy day,” he began. As the Inheritance vocalists swung into the chorus, many in the vast hall joined in this valedictory for a wonderful evening of music and dancing, and for much more as well.

Will the circle be unbroken

By and by, Lord, by and by?

There’s a better

Home awaitin’

In the sky, Lord, in the sky.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK: Carter Country

Getting there: The nearest airport to Maces Springs, Va., is Tri-City airport, about 30 miles away in Tennessee. Delta and USAir offer connecting service with round-trip fares beginning at $450. There are numerous motels in Bristol, which straddles the Virginia-Tennessee border, and also in Kingsport, Tenn. (both are about 20 miles from the Carter Fold).

Carter Family Fold: Country music concerts are held every Saturday night at 7:30; seating is unreserved, and admission costs $4 for adults, $1 for children ages 7-12. The museum opens at 6 p.m. The 23rd Annual Carter Family Memorial Music Festival will be held on Friday and Saturday, Aug. 1 and 2, with multiple performers each day. Adult admission, $10 a day, $18 for both; children $1 per day.

For more information: For a schedule of Saturday concerts or details on the festival, contact Janette Carter, P.O. Box 111, Hiltons, VA 24258, tel. (540) 386-9480.

--K.Z.