Sara & Maybelle Carter - Biography
Artist: Sara & Maybelle Carter
Date: August 24, 2010
The Carter Family remain first among firsts, the earliest, greatest and preeminent fountainhead of country music. A.P., Sara and Maybelle Carter didn’t invent country music, but they were its first undisputed superstars, carrying a haunting sound from generations of backwoods performances and shape-note hymn recitations intro the nascent realm of radio broadcasts and phonograph disks. Within the joyous, doleful, inventive and unique songs of the Carter Family, much of rural America recognized the voices of its own rich background and hardscrabble experience. While the Carter’s songs may have struck unprepared, urbanite ears as raw, coarse and foreign, in Appalachia and throughout the Deep South, they were received with jubilation, and an inchoate form of cultural vindication. After the Carter Family, rural music would transform the American soundscape, exerting primal, forceful influence on country and western music, bluegrass, gospel, pop, and even rock ‘n’ roll. While the group’s visionary founder A.P. Carter receives much of the credit and adulation as the original patriarch of country music, members Sara and Maybelle Carter were equally essential to the family’s transformative, evocative sound, and no hagiographic celebration of A.P. can exclude or diminish the commiserate contributions of Sara and Maybelle.
The Carters were a family, and a close-knit one, from the hills of Virginia. Alvin Pleasant Carter (1891-1960) married Sara Dougherty Carter (1898-1979) on June 18, 1915. Both came from musical households, and when A.P. and Sara started performing together as the Carter Family in 1927, they added Maybelle Carter (May 10, 1909 — October 23, 1978) to complete the trio; Maybelle was already family, being A.P.’s sister in law and Sara’s first cousin. All three shared rich vocal harmonies, while A.P. played guitar, and wrote much of the material (accumulated is a more accurate description, given the extent to which he traveled the country to discover extant songs in order to file and claim the copyrights); Sara handled most of the lead vocals with soaring, exquisite skill. Maybelle excelled at autoharp, banjo and vocals, and she provided the group with its most distinctive component: her unmistakable and vibrant guitar playing. Employing a unique style, Maybelle sounded the melodies on the bass strings with her thumb, while strumming the rhythm on the higher strings with her fingers. Her revolutionary technique caught on as the “Carter Scratch” and gained widespread popularity, leading to the flat-picking style that would become the signature of country music. Before Maybelle Carter, the guitar had been considered a rhythm instrument; after Maybelle Carter, guitarists started taking lead parts.
The Carter Family recorded their initial session in the summer of 1927, in Bristol, Tennessee. It was a speculative effort that succeeded: That fall, the Victor label issued the sides “Wandering Boy” and “Poor Orphan Child,” closely followed by “The Storms Are on the Ocean” backed with “Single Girl, Married Girl.” The latter disk was popular, enough to warrant a second recording session in New Jersey, in May of 1928. It was this brief, day-long recording that generated some of the most cherished anthems in the annals of country music, including “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Keep on the Sunny Side,” “Wildwood Flower,” “John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man” and “Anchored in Love.” A third session in early 1929 was equally productive, and by the end of 1930, the Carter Family had sold an unimaginable quarter-million records. For the next several years, they were hugely successful, although the marriage between A.P. and Sara failed in 1936. When the group disbanded in 1943, Sara left for California while A.P. retired to Virginia. Maybelle persevered, continuing with her own family and additional performers, first as the Carter Family, then as Mother Maybelle and the Carter Family Sisters, featuring her daughters Helen, Anita and June (June would marry Johnny Cash and have a successful career in her own right).
The Carter Family were wildly productive, recording over 600 sides between the late 1920s and the early 1940s. Many of their best tracks have been digitally re-mastered and compiled in the 5xCD collection, The Carter Family: 1927-1934 (JSP, 2002). However, the most comprehensive and definitive version of the group’s oeuvre was issued by Rounder Records. Spread over nine volumes, The Carter Family series (Rounder, 1993-1998) documents the entire span of 1927-1941, from the first recording session to the last, and is utterly indispensable. When A.P. passed in 1960, it was in relative obscurity, but Sara and Maybelle lived long enough to witness the folk revival of the early 1960s, which deified the Carter Family at a time when Nashville was eager to disassociate itself from its “hillbilly” roots. The folk scene was far more reverential, and in that context, Sara and Maybelle reunited in the mid-1960s to record Sara and Maybelle Carter (Bear Family, 1994). It’s a tremendous, poignant document. Both ladies are in their 60s, and their once flawless voices are raspy and hesitant with age, but a luminous passion emanates, and the guitar and autoharp peal with the vigor of youth. Sara and Maybelle were fortunate enough to see their profound influence radiate through subsequent generations of musicians, and the circle remains unbroken.
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