Maybelle Carter
Maybelle Carter, born on May 10, 1909, in Nickelsville, Virginia, was a pivotal figure in the development of country music and a key member of the Carter Family, often regarded as the "first family" of the genre. Raised in a rural Appalachian community, she found solace in music and church, which were vital parts of life in the isolated region. In the 1920s, Maybelle joined her cousin Sara and her husband A. P. Carter to form a musical trio that would record during the historic Bristol Sessions, marking a seminal moment in country music history. Their songs often depicted the struggles and hardships of American life, resonating with listeners during difficult times like the Great Depression.
Following the family's initial success, Maybelle continued to perform, forming the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle after the group disbanded in the early 1940s. She played a significant role in popularizing the Carter Family's music, influencing numerous musicians across various genres with her innovative guitar style, known as the "Carter scratch." Her contributions were recognized with the induction of the Carter Family into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1970. Maybelle's legacy is profound, with her music still celebrated and performed today, illustrating her lasting impact on American music history. She passed away in 1978, leaving behind a rich heritage that continues to inspire artists around the world.
Maybelle Carter
Musician
- Born: May 10, 1909
- Birthplace: Midway, near Nickelsville, Virginia
- Died: October 23, 1978
- Place of death: Nashville, Tennessee
American country guitarist
As part of the musical Carter family, Carter helped create modern commercial country music, familial ties giving early country music its musical flavor as well as its stage presence.
Member of The Carter Family; the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle
The Life
Maybelle Addington was born on May 10, 1909, in Nickelsville, Virginia, in the small Appalachian community of Rich Valley in Scott County. Of the many valleys created by the five mountain ridges that ran through the county, the neighboring one, Poor Valley, more accurately described conditions there. Isolated and sparsely populated, with no more than twenty thousand residents, the county was home to farmers and coal miners. For these people, life was mostly a struggle. However, they took consolation in their faith, and the church was the most important community institution in both Poor Valley and Rich Valley. In church, people found another comfort, music. Gospel singing with the congregation on Sundays and fiddle music and square dances on Saturday were the main diversions from hard lives. What we know today as country music was born in this environment.
Although Maybelle and her cousin, Sara Dougherty, grew up within a quarter mile of each other in Rich Valley, they were not especially close as children. Their lives became entwined later, when they married brothers from Poor Valley, Ezra and Alvin Pleasant (A. P.) Carter.
The Music
A. P. Carter held a variety of jobs before he met and married Dougherty in 1915. It was a love of music and Sara’s beautiful alto voice that brought them together. In 1926 they were joined by Maybelle (around the time she married Ezra, or “Eck”), and they unsuccessfully played before a Brunswick Records talent scout. The following year, however, they recorded six sides for three hundred dollars—a significant sum when the average American wage was seven hundred dollars a year—for Victor executive Ralph Peer at an audition twenty-six miles away in Bristol, Tennessee (a day’s drive from Poor Valley, an especially trying summer journey for Maybelle, who was eight months pregnant).
The Bristol Sessions.The so-called Bristol sessions have often been called the starting point of country music, and Peer discovered a wealth of talent—including Jimmie Rodgers—during his ten-day stay. Peer was one of the first New York record executives to realize the commercial potential in Southern rural music. Besides finding good acts, he also was looking for material that could be copyrighted, and song collector A. P. Carter was happy to help.
A. P. Carter’s special genius was taking lyrics and melodies from old traditional mountain songs and “working them up” (as he called it) with Maybelle and Sara into something marketable. Several further recording sessions with Peer followed, with significant sales—more than seven hundred thousand records—until the stock market crash in 1929 threw the country into the Great Depression. This hurt sales and prevented the Carters from doing radio tours and from touring the vaudeville circuit. As Maybelle and Sara began to devote more attention to their children and families, the Carter Family got together mainly for recording records.
The Carter Style. The music the Carters were making—focusing on hard times, personal tragedies, and the rewards offered in heaven—was just the mix American listeners wanted to hear, especially as the Dust Bowl winds and drought punished the South and Midwest. In the early 1930’s, Sara lost patience with A. P. Carter’s temper and his sullen ways, and she fell in love with another man. She divorced A. P. Carter in 1936. Though estranged, the trio still performed professionally. Oddly, the divorce bound the group together more tightly (more work meant more royalties, which allowed A. P. Carter to pay off his settlement to Sara more quickly).
By 1938 the Carter Family was broadcasting on XERA, a five hundred-kilowatt radio station in Mexico across the border at Del Rio, Texas. These transmissions were so powerful, they could be heard all over North America. The two years the Carter Family performed on XERA increased their record sales and their audience significantly. The station closed when the United States and Mexico signed a broadcast agreement in 1941. Though they performed off and on as a group on a North Carolina radio show, the original Carter Family effectively was finished by 1943. A. P. Carter retired to a country store in Poor Valley, and Sara and her second husband moved to California.
After the Breakup. Maybelle and her daughters Helen, June, and Anita then went on to form the group the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle, and they played for three years, from 1943 to 1946, at radio station WRNL in Richmond, Virginia. For the rest of the 1940’s, they played on various barn dance radio shows throughout the South. June was a natural salesperson, and she was committed to becoming a professional musician as well as a comedian. In 1950 Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, along with fledging guitar giant Chet Atkins, went to the Grand Ole Opry, the mecca of country-music venues. Television appearances throughout the early 1950’s followed, including a tour with Elvis Presley in 1955 (during which Anita and Presley had a brief flirtation). Meanwhile, from 1952 to 1956, A. P. Carter and his ex-wife Sara and their children performed and recorded locally with little fanfare. When A. P. Carter died in 1960, the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle took back the Carter Family name.
With the rise of rock and roll and sanitized Nashville-produced popular country music, interest by the public in older traditional and hillbilly sounds waned. However, with the folk music revival in the 1960’s, Maybelle was in great demand once again as a solo performer on the college and festival circuit. There was a renewed interest in Carter Family materials, and artists as diverse as Presley and the Kingston Trio covered their songs. Maybelle reunited with Sara to perform at the famous Newport Folk Festival in 1967 (and a few more times before Sara died in 1979). In 1968 June married Johnny Cash, and they became stars of their television show in the 1970’s. Mother Maybelle and daughters Helen and Anita appeared on many of these weekly shows. Before her death in 1978, Maybelle went on to do some important recordings, especially on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s seminal album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken (a title based on a Carter song).
Musical Legacy
The Carter Family is the “first family” of country music, and Mother Maybelle is the matriarch. While the original trio broke up in the early days of World War II, Maybelle kept alive the traditions and songs for nearly another four decades. The original Carter Family recorded 287 sides (all are still available), and half of them are part of the modern country-music canon. In 2004 a tribute compact disc titled The Unbroken Circle: The Musical Heritage of the Carter Family was released. The contributors included the most noted country and crossover artists, including Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Sheryl Crow, Shawn Colvin, and John Prine.
Maybelle never learned to read music, but her way of playing the guitar—often called a Carter run or a Carter scratch—changed the way country musicians approached the instrument. A largely self-taught guitar virtuoso, Maybelle picked parts of the melody line while strumming chords. This distinctive way of blending melody on the bass strings with harmony on the treble strings while forming a partial chord has affected three generations of players, from country to rock. The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards, Atkins, and Doc Watson are just a few of the many guitarists who have publicly acknowledged their musical debt to Mother Maybelle.
The Carter Family was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1970, the first group so honored. However, the Carter Family’s influence was not bound by country music. Many songs, such as “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” painted a portrait of a United States mired in an economic depression and poised at the bring of war. Most of the music from the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2001) were songs that A. P. Carter gathered, arranged, and played with Maybelle and Sara. The dozens of family acts and groups of relatives that perform at country and bluegrass venues can trace that heritage to the Carter Family. In the last years of her life, Maybelle was recognized as the mother of country music.
Principal Recordings
albums:Mother Maybelle Carter, 1951; Queen of the Autoharp, 1964; Living Legend, 1965; An Historic Reunion: Sara and Maybelle, the Original Carters, 1967 (with Sara Carter and Joe Carter); Will the Circle Be Unbroken, 1972 (with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band); Wildwood Pickin’, 1997.
Bibliography
Bufwack, Mary. “Carter Sisters.” In The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. A general article on the group Maybelle formed with her daughters in 1943.
Carr, Patrick. The Illustrated History of Country Music. New York: Random House, 1995. An accessible thematic overview of the development of the country-music genre, with hundreds of photographs from the magazine’s archives. Provides a good description of the growth and development of country music during the Great Depression, when the Carter Family was just beginning.
Dorman, Katie. “Something Old, Something New: The Carter Family’s Bristol Sessions Recordings.” In The Bristol Sessions: Writings About the Big Bang of Country Music, edited by Charles Wolfe and Ted Olson. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2005. A definitive account of what went right and wrong for the Carter Family at the birth of country music in 1927.
McCloud, Barry. “Carter Family (a.k.a. the Carter Sisters)” and “Mother Maybelle Carter.” In Definitive Country: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Country Music and Its Performers, edited by Barry McCloud. New York: Perigee, 1995. Succinct but informative articles on Maybelle’s life and on her career after the original Carter Family trio broke up.
Malone, Bill. Country Music USA. Rev. 2d ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. An excellent single-volume history of the genre through the 1970’s. Good material on the commercialization of hillbilly music.
Stambler, Irwin, and Grelun Landon. “Carter, Mother Maybelle.” In The Encyclopedia of Folk, Country, and Western Music. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. An article devoted only to Maybelle, a rarity among the standard country-music encyclopedias.
Zwonitzer, Mark, and Charles Hirshberg. Will You Miss Me When I Am Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. The first biography of the Carter Family and their musical influence. Largely based on oral histories and on recollections of relatives and friends, the book has no bibliography or source notes.