The Wave on the Sea · The Rambling Boy

The Carter Family did not so much have a singles era as invent the idea that mountain music belonged on records at all. In the summer of 1927, A.P. Carter — along with his wife Sara and his sister-in-law Maybelle — made the long drive down from Maces Spring, Virginia to Bristol, on the Tennessee line, where the talent scout Ralph Peer had set up a temporary studio to record local musicians for the Victor Talking Machine Company. The handful of sides the trio cut there over two days in early August are among the founding documents of country music.

For the next decade and a half they recorded prolifically: for Victor, for the budget label ARC, for Decca, and for Columbia, in studios from Camden, New Jersey to Memphis to New York. A.P. roamed the Southeast collecting old ballads and hymns, and the Family put them on shellac in arrangements so durable that bluegrass bands have been mining them ever since — "Wildwood Flower," "Keep on the Sunny Side," "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," "Wabash Cannonball."

In the late 1930s the act found a second life broadcasting over the powerful "border radio" stations along the Mexican line, beaming the old songs across the entire continent after dark. A final run of sessions for Victor in 1941 closed the original group's career; A.P. and Sara had long since separated, and the trio disbanded in 1943.

Their singles were never bluegrass — bluegrass did not yet exist — but Maybelle's guitar style and the Family's repertoire became part of the genre's bedrock. Nearly every act in this catalog is, in some measure, still playing Carter Family songs.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.