A.P. Carter
Best known for
Songwriter
Lead Vocals
Harmony Vocals
Alvin Pleasant Delaney Carter was the founder and driving force of the Carter Family — the act whose 1927 Bristol Sessions recordings are widely credited as the “Big Bang” of country music. A traveling salesman, fiddler, bass singer, and indefatigable song collector, A.P. gathered hundreds of the old mountain ballads, gospel songs, and sentimental parlor numbers that, as arranged and recorded by his trio, became the foundation of the American country music canon.
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- Born Alvin Pleasant Delaney Carter in a log cabin near Maces Spring, in Scott County, Virginia — in Poor Valley, on the north side of Clinch Mountain. Eldest of eight children of Robert C. Carter, a farmer and part-time banjo and fiddle player, and Mollie Arvella Bays Carter, a singer of hymns and old folk ballads.
- Suffered from a lifelong tremor in his right hand, which his mother attributed to having been struck by lightning while pregnant with him. Despite it, he learned fiddle and guitar as a child. An uncle, Flanders Bays, who taught singing schools around Scott County, gave him formal instruction in shape-note singing.
- As a young man, worked various jobs including a stint as a railroad carpenter in Richmond, Indiana, and selling fruit trees for his uncle’s nursery. On one of those fruit-tree calls in 1914, in Copper Creek, he heard Sara Dougherty singing “Engine 143” to her own autoharp and was captivated. They married in Scott County on June 18, 1915.
- A.P. and Sara moved to Maces Spring by 1919 and had three children: Gladys (1919), Janette (1923), and Joe (1927). Maybelle Addington, Sara’s first cousin, married A.P.’s brother Ezra in March 1926 and joined the informal singing trio.
- On August 1–2, 1927, the Carter Family drove 26 miles to Bristol, Tennessee and recorded six sides for Ralph Peer of the Victor Talking Machine Company at what became known as the Bristol Sessions. Those recordings — including “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow,” “Single Girl, Married Girl,” and “The Poor Orphan Child” — launched their recording career.
- A.P.’s song-collecting trips through Appalachia, often accompanied by African-American musician Lesley Riddle, produced the vast Carter Family repertoire: “Wildwood Flower,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Wabash Cannonball,” “Keep on the Sunny Side,” “Gold Watch and Chain,” and many dozens more that became country standards. By the end of 1930, the group had sold more than 300,000 records.
- A.P. and Sara separated in 1933 and divorced in 1936, but continued to perform together. The group recorded more than 300 sides across 16 years, with sessions for Victor, ARC, Decca, and Columbia. In 1938–1941 they performed on the ultrahigh-frequency border-radio stations XERA and XEG from Del Rio, Texas — broadcasts that reached most of North America.
- The original Carter Family disbanded in 1943. A.P. returned to Maces Spring and ran a general store in Hiltons, Virginia. Beginning in 1952, he reunited with Sara and their children Janette and Joe as the A.P. Carter Family (or “New Carter Family”) and recorded for Kentucky-based Acme Records, mostly in the same Bristol building where the trio had first recorded in 1927.
- Died at age 68 on November 7, 1960, in Kingsport, Tennessee, of arteriosclerotic heart disease. Buried in Mount Vernon United Methodist Church Cemetery in Maces Spring. His death certificate listed his occupation as “musician.”
- In 1970, the Carter Family became the first musical group inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. That same year, A.P. was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His daughter Janette founded the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, Virginia in 1974 (opened 1979) — still an active old-time music venue.
- His A.P. & Sara Carter Home in Maces Spring is on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places.