A Biography of the Carter Family: Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?

I’m sure it was much to the chagrin of my fiancée, I finished up another book this weekend. God bless her and I love her for putting up with me. She had a gift card that was a few years old, so I made her purse a little lighter and used it on a couple of books. The book I finished, “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?,” was written by Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirshberg and was published in 2002. It is a biography of the Carter family and their legacy in American Music… and what a legacy it is. I can’t think of a family that has had more influence over country music.

From a historical perspective, the book is highly enlightening in its telling of the story of the Carter family and to a lighter extent, country music itself, with the tangled web of stars past; names like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, Johnny Cash, and Tom T. Hall weave in and out of the story. I did notice a couple of factual errors, such as Hank Williams having a bottle of whiskey in the car with him the night he died, when in fact, he did not or Johnny Cash’s brother dying in a farming accident when it was actually while using a table saw. Mark Zwonitzer paints a portrait of the economic and social landscape of the times as the years tick by, placing the Carter’s success in perspective. The time period was far enough ago to incite marvel at the way things were and how much they have changed since the beginning of recorded music. It almost seems fictitious.

My favorite stories were of Alvin Pleasant “Doc” Carter, the bass that would randomly pipe in on the Original Carter Family recordings. He had a nervous restlessness about him and would disappear off stage during a show or leave the recording studio while a session was going on, only to return later during the same song and pitch in again. His off kilter disposition and shaking, most noticeable in his hands, was attributed to a lightning bolt that struck a tree while his mother, Mollie Carter, was standing under while pregnant with him. A.P. would get something in his head and he couldn’t sit still until he got started, but he usually didn’t go much further than gettin’ started. He decided that his house out in the country needed a fence, so he set out to build one, but after he got the front gate all plumb and square, that’s all that was erected, a single solitary gate. The biography is worth reading for these stories alone. A.P. was the ambition and the driving force that pushed his wife, Sara, and sister-in-law, Maybelle, to Bristol on that fateful day in 1927 that would begin decades of Carter family music. After realizing the potential of music, he scoured the land, collecting songs from any willing contributor and even began to write his own. When all was said and done, he had amassed a catalog of hundreds if not thousands of songs. Maybelle Carter was the resident guitarist and developed a unique style called the Carter Scratch that would be influential to the generations of music to follow. She was content to sit in the background while Sara sang lead.

By the time I finished reading the book, I knew enough about the people in Maces Springs, VA that they very well could be my neighbors. I counted about five generations of Carters over a few decades and it’s all packed into approximately 400 pages. And, just like the book can’t cover everything in all their lives, this article can’t do the book justice. I didn’t even say anything about the years that followed the split of the Original Carter Family. It is a masterful compilation of anecdotes, interviews, pictures, and history spun into a wonderfully compelling story. What makes it even greater is that it really happened. I felt a tinge of sadness as the story came to an end, but the final words, etched in stone at the resting places of A.P. and Sara said it all: “Keep on the Sunny Side.”