Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?

The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

By Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (July 2002) Hardcover, ISBN: 0-684-85763-4; 432
pages Price: $25.00
Review by Michael CalaMay 7, 2002

This book is a masterpiece of stylish storytelling. According to the introduction, Mark

Zwonitzer has crafted the writing while Charles Hirschberg has contributed impeccable
research. The author’s writing style, pacing and attention to detail are exceptional. Even when
indirectly quoting his subjects, he reproduces their speech patterns and regionalisms perfectly.

Written ostensibly as a musical-group biography, this book is also an excellent primer on the
development of indigenous American music during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Especially after the inventions of radio and recordings, the authors paint the new world of riches
and opportunities available to country artists and the record companies who recorded them for
the first time anywhere.

We meet the original Carter Family – Alvin Pleasant Delaney Carter (called “A.P.,”
professionally; just “Pleasant” by friends and family), his wife Sara Doherty Carter, and her
cousin Maybelle “Mother Maybelle” Addington Carter, the future mother-in-law of country
singer Johnny Cash -- some time before A.P. convinces the women to travel south with him to
Bristol, Tennessee, to audition for a talent scout and record producer named Ralph Peer.

Sara was nine months pregnant; the weather was sweltering, the car ride to Bristol was
abysmally hot and bumpy, and the “recording studio” poorly ventilated warehouse space.
Nevertheless, that all-day session, at which Jimmie Rodgers also recorded half a dozen sides,
would be claimed by history as the day American music changed forever.

Our subjects first appear in these pages as stoic young mountaineers pulling subsistence from
harsh land. Over nearly 500 riveting pages and 60 years later, the authors have taken us on a
thoroughly enjoyable journey through their lives and through a larger landscape of American
musical history. Along the way, we’re amused, saddened, surprised and even flabbergasted by
events taking place in the lives of these three talented country people.

We’re there when A.P. first courts a reluctant Sara; when his brother Ezra “Eck” Carter marries
Maybelle, and when the trio and their growing families adapt to bigger houses and higher living
standards as royalties begin flooding in.

We also accompany the trio to XERA Radio, a super-amplified pirate American station
broadcasting from Mexico, its signal so strong that the Carters could be heard clear to Canada.
The enterprise was run by a quack surgeon named John Romulus Brinkley who offered the
grateful trio radio and recording work during the leanest years of the Depression.

Over their recording careers, the trio undergoes profound change. After 25 years, Sara and A.P.
divorce, though they continue to record with Maybelle for several more years. Sara marries Coy
Bayes, A.P.’s cousin with whom she’d had an affair years earlier, while still married to Pleasant,
and retires to California and trailer-park anonymity.

A.P., a talented musician and song collector, had a short attention span and often retreated into
gloomy silences – sometimes for days. His daughters insist, however, that despite his
eccentricities he always loved Sara deeply and wanted to continue their marriage and perform
music as a family. He never regained success after the trio disbanded, though he tried numerous
times as a solo act.

One moving story concerns A.P. much later in life, long years after he’d departed the limelight.
Outside a concert he’s attending in a small southern town, he insists to a young admirer that he
must use the musician’s entrance and won’t take no for an answer. Standing in the pouring rain
for 10 minutes, the water-logged pair finally succeeds in obtaining entry through the
“musicianer’s” entrance. A.P.’s young friend reported for posterity that “Pleasant was right
pleased at that, I’ll tell you!”

Dying before their time from a variety of chronic diseases, the Original Carter Family left a
legacy that every few years attracts a new and devoted group of listeners. Anyone reading this
book will understand why after getting to know these three stalwart and talented mountain
people. MC