Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music [Hardcover]

Mark Zwonitzer (Author), Charles Hirshberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2, 2002

"Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?" is the first major biography of the Carter Family, the musical pioneers who almost single-handedly established the sounds and traditions that grew into modern folk, country, and bluegrass music -- a style celebrated in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

A.P. Carter was a restless man, seemingly in a constant state of motion. On one of his travels across the sparsely settled mountains and valleys that surrounded his home in southern Virginia, he met and married a young girl named Sara Dougherty. Orphaned as a child, Sara was remote by nature but seemed to find release in singing the typically melancholy ballads that were a part of her home tradition.

For fun, A.P., Sara, and her cousin Maybelle (who married A.P.'s brother "Eck" Carter) would play and sing the hymns and ballads known in their Poor Valley community, occasionally adding songs A.P. had collected during his travels. Then, in 1927, they traveled to Bristol, Tennessee, to audition for a New York record executive who was hunting "hillbilly" talent and offering an amazing fifty dollars per song for any he recorded. These Bristol recording sessions would become generally accepted as the "Big Bang" of country music, producing two of its first stars: Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.

By the early 1930s, the Carter Family was the most bankable country music group in America, with total sales of more than a million records. By the late '30s, they were appearing regularly on high-power radio station XERA, which broadcast from coast to coast. A whole generation of country people could gather around the radio and hear the sound of music that came straight from their world. Johnny Cash inArkansas, Waylon Jennings in Texas, Chet Atkins in Georgia, and Tom T. Hall in Kentucky all listened to the Carter Family. It was their formal schooling, Country Music 101.

Inside the Carter Family, however, things were hardly perfect. Though nobody outside the family knew it, Sara had left her difficult and quixotic husband in 1933. In 1936 she won a divorce. Even throughout the long and painful breakup, the Carters kept performing together, singing an ever-widening range of new songs they wrote or old songs they remade: songs of love, of betrayal, and of the death of fondest hopes. And they kept at it even after Sara married A.P.'s cousin Coy Bays in 1939. After fulfilling a final radio contract in 1943, Sara and Coy moved to California to settle near his family. The original Carter Family never performed or recorded together again.

With Sara gone, A.P. retreated home, opened a general store, and lived out the next two decades in obscurity, the odd man out in a new and reconfigured Carter musical clan. Meanwhile, Maybelle and her daughters (Helen, June, and Anita) went out and got themselves new radio contracts, working in Richmond, Virginia; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Springfield, Missouri, before ascending to country music's ultimate stage, Nashville's Grand Ole Opry. Nearly fifty years in the business won Maybelle the title "Mother of Country Music" and the adoration of generations of guitar players and just plain listeners.

The story of the Carter Family is a bittersweet saga of love and fulfillment, sadness and loss. "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?" is more than just a biography of a family; it is also a journey into another time, almost another world. But their storyresonates today and lives on in the timeless music they created.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Carter Family, Virginia mountain musicians who composed, performed and recorded hundreds of folk songs beginning in 1927, finally get their due in documentary filmmaker Zwonitzer's comprehensive biography. To say that the Carters, who inspired such legends as Chet Atkins, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, had a profound impact on popular American music is an understatement. Zwonitzer follows the Carter family's history from the 1891 birth of A.P. Carter, the musical founder, up through the late 1970s, offering background on the social, economic and technological developments that spawned American folk, country and rock music. The Carter family got its official start when A.P. dragged his wife, Sara, and his pregnant sister-in-law Maybelle to Bristol, Tenn., to sing for a record company scout. The Carters' performance with A.P. singing bass, Sara and Maybelle singing harmony, and Maybelle on guitar earned them a recording contract and a legendary career that spanned three generations. Family and friends reminisce about the forbidden love affair that broke up the Original Carters; Hank Williams's attempt to shoot June Carter; how June and Maybelle Carter sustained June's husband, Johnny Cash, through his drug addiction; and other colorful episodes from the Carters' lives. Zwonitzer writes with flair, weaving anecdotes into a compelling study that will intrigue historians and music lovers alike.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

With an eye for biographical detail and just the right helping of the vernacular, documentary filmmaker Zwonitzer and Hirshberg, the author of biographies of Elvis Presley and the Beatles, tell the historically important and fascinating story of the Carter family and their music. From the original 1927 recordings of A.P., Sara, and Maybelle Carter, through the 1940s and 1950s tours of "Mother" Maybelle and her daughters, to the marriage of June Carter and Johnny Cash, the history of this family of country musicians and their legacy unfolds through well-written prose. Highlights of the book include a chapter on the importance of the Original Carter Family's broadcasts on the titanic Mexico/U.S. border radio station XERA and the authors' material on the roots of some of the songs found, reworked, and newly composed by A.P. Carter songs that link modern country music to the traditional folk music of the 19th century. This is not, however, a thorough study of the individual songs themselves. Through the many anecdotes and quotations, garnered from interviews with surviving family members and from study of previously published material, the Carters and their associates come across as real people perhaps the book's greatest contribution. Highly recommended for all public libraries and for academic libraries with a focus on American vernacular music. James E. Perone, Mount Union Coll., Alliance, OH
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1ST edition (July 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684857634
• ISBN-13: 978-0684857633
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #695,583 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book By Which Others Will Be Measured, September 30, 2002

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music (Hardcover)

There is not a dull page in this 397 page account of The Carter Family. The writers manage to strike a happy medium between a scholarly treatise and a popular biography, something I find very appealing. In addition to being a biography of the Carters, the book also is a history of country music in the first half of the Twentieth Century roughly and a statement on rural Southern sociology of the time as well.

The book is full of information that I suspect is told for the first time as well as trivia many of us knew but had forgotten: For example, there was a time when soft drinks were called "dopes" in East Tennessee. I had forgotten that and that my aunt wore Blue Waltz perfume. (There is a funny account of Maybelle's breaking a bottle of this dreadful perfume she was using as a slide for her guitar in a recording session.) I laughed out loud to learn that Helen Carter, who could learn to play any instrument almost immediately, was having trouble with her first accordian. It took Pee Wee King's telling her she was playing the instrument upside down to get her on the right track. The Original Carter Family was the first group to let the women lead as opposed to being backup singers. The less than admirable Ralph Peer of the recording industry coined the term "hillbilly" for the kind of music Carters and other country Southerners played in the early part of the 20th Century. There is a good account of A. P.'s collecting mountain songs all over the South. That contribution alone would make him a giant in folk/country music. Finally we learn a great deal about both generations of this great family, from A. P., Sarah and Maybelle to "Mama" Maybelle and her daughters. I was pleased to learn, for example, that Maybelle was as good and kind a person as she always seemed to be. (She even sat with sick people for part-time employment at one point in her later life when country music was in an eclipse.) There is a poignant contrast between what apparently was the long and happy marriage of Maybelle and A. P. Carter's brother Eck and A. P. and Sarah's marriage that ended in divorce. Certainly there is nothing more heart wrenching than Sarah's dedicating a song over the radio (apparently in the presence of A. P.) to the man she married after her divorce. The song was "I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes." Coy Bays, the intended recipient, heard the song all the way in California and came to Texas for his woman. In the many years that A. P. lived alone thereafter, he never stopped loving Sara. She was preceded in death by him. Both of them are buried, however, only two rows from each other (even though Sara died in California and had been divorced from A. P. for many years) in Mount Vernon Cemetery in Maces Springs, Virginia with identical tombstones. Above their names and dates in beautiful pink marble are perfectly round 78 records and the words "Keep on the Sunny Side."

This is a really fine book. Even folks not interested much in this sort of music should find it fascinating. It is the one by which later biographies of the Carters will be judged.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Clinch Mountain and beyond, July 30, 2002

By 

Jerome Clark (Canby, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music (Hardcover)

To all but a few of us -- that "few" being those who knew them personally -- A.P., Sara, and Maybelle Carter have always been little more than stoic, unsmiling, unreadable faces on the covers of Carter Family reissues. Mark Zwonitzer, assisted by Charles Hirshberg, manages to put breath and life into these three giants of country and folk music. Though they were ordinary people, they possessed an extraordinary gift, and it took them far from the shadow of their native home in Clinch Mountain, Virginia, and into the ears and hearts of people all over the world -- yet without ever revealing very much of anything about themselves.

In a number of ways, this is a sad story. Alvin Pleasant Carter emerges as something of a tragic figure. He is also by far the most interesting personality of the three, even if not possessed of the stunning musical talents of Sara and Maybelle. The book comes most to life, in my opinion, when A. P., without whom none of us would have heard of the Carter Family, is at its center.

As a purely human story, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? -- the title comes from one of the family's most doleful songs -- will keep you reading far into the night. In focusing on the personal aspects, however, it foregoes the sort of deeper musical analysis some of us would like to have seen. It also lacks a discography, which one would have thought essential to a volume of this kind. Even so, this is a welcome, informative book which treats its subjects with an appealing warmth devoid of sentimental gloss.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Finally...The Story of the Carter Family, March 12, 2003

By 

A. Wolverton (Crofton, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music (Hardcover)

Zwonitzer's look at the First Family of Country Music, the Carter Family, is long overdue, but very much welcome. Finally the information and stories that fans have been waiting decades for come to life on the book's pages. And what stories they are...

I wish I could have been in Bristol when A.P., his wife Sara, and cousin Maybelle Carter made their first recording for Ralph Peer. It had to be one of those timeless moments in music history when someone realized that everything that had come before was about to change. Zwonitzer captures that moment and many others for the reader. The story of how the Carter Family was formed, thrived, soared, and then torn apart is a story that beats the heck out of any soap opera. It's a wonderful story, an inspiring story, and ultimately a heartbreaking story. The style of writing is familiar and comfortable, like an old uncle sitting on the front porch, telling you what it was like when the Carter Family was still around.

The best part of the book is the close examination of each of the three principal players in the Carter Family saga: The quiet, never-sitting-still A.P., leaving home for days on end, seeking out new songs for the group while further alienating his already distant wife Sara, the one person he could never forget. Maybelle, who loved performing almost as much as she loved her family. Her style of guitar playing is still studied and imitated by guitarists all over the world. And Sara - perhaps the most tragic figure of all...but I won't tell you the full story. (Otherwise you might not buy the book!)

'Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone' tells these stories so well that when it strays away from the three principal players, I grew less interested. It seemed much attention and far too many pages were devoted to too many minor characters. And so many other parts of the book were severely truncated: Where is all the information about Maybelle and Sara's reunion performances and recordings? How did they feel singing songs they hadn't performed together in over 20 years? What about the origins of some of the songs? In one portion of the book, Zwonitzer tells us that Maybelle gave interviews telling where several of the songs came from, how A.P. put them together, etc., but I wanted to know more. After all, some of these songs have stood the test of time for over 75 years.

Although the book contains some disappointments, I can say the same for it that I do for the recordings: I'm thankful for what we have. It hurt me to read how the music of the Carter Family was almost forgotten by the music industry and the public in the 60's. This music is timeless. If you've never heard a Carter Family disc, buy one. Better yet, buy the 5-disc 1927-1934 set. (It's a steal on Amazon!) Then read the book. Sadly, we will probably never see their like again. But they were here for a short time, and what a difference they made and continue to make. The circle remains unbroken...but yes, we do miss them.

397 pages with photos