A.P. Carter

Alvin Pleasant Delaney Carter was born on 15 December 1891 in a log cabin near Maces Spring, in Scott County, Virginia, at the foot of Clinch Mountain, the eldest of the eight children of Robert C. Carter, a farmer, and Mollie Arvella Bays Carter. His mother sang hymns and ballads handed down in her family, and his father had played the banjo. As a boy he sang in church and in a quartet with two uncles and a sister, and he learned the jew’s harp, guitar and fiddle. At local singing schools he learned the seven-shape-note method, and his uncle Flanders Bays, a singing-school teacher who traveled a wide circuit in southwest Virginia, taught him to read the shape-note songbooks that later supplied many of the Carter Family’s gospel songs; in time A. P. helped him run the schools. It was his bass voice, more than his playing, that marked him out as a musician.

Around 1911 he went to Richmond, Indiana, to work as a carpenter for a railroad, and he first tried writing songs there out of homesickness. Back in Virginia he sold fruit trees, and on a sales trip across Clinch Mountain in 1914 he heard Sara Dougherty singing “Engine 143” to her autoharp. They married in Scott County on 18 June 1915 and by 1919 had settled at Maces Spring, where they sang together in churches and around the neighborhood, Sara on autoharp and A. P. on fiddle or guitar. Brunswick offered to record them at Norton, Virginia, but the company wanted to bill A. P. as a fiddler, “Fiddlin’ Doc,” and he turned it down. In March 1926 his brother Ezra married Sara’s cousin Maybelle Addington, and she joined the couple on guitar and harmony.

In July 1927 the three drove a borrowed car to Bristol, on the Tennessee–Virginia line, to audition for Ralph Peer of the Victor Talking Machine Company. On 1 August they recorded “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow,” “Little Log Cabin by the Sea,” “The Poor Orphan Child” and “The Storms Are on the Ocean,” and the next morning “Single Girl, Married Girl” and “The Wandering Boy.” Peer also wanted the unrecorded songs A. P. had gathered and offered to publish them through his new company, Southern Music, if A. P. would claim authorship. The first Carter Family record came out on 4 November 1927, and a second Victor session followed at Camden, New Jersey, on 9 May 1928. In the trio Sara sang lead and Maybelle the higher harmony, and A. P. sang the bass part, though on many records only now and then. On stage he announced the numbers and introduced the others.

From then on he ran the group. He collected, composed, arranged and rehearsed its songs, negotiated with the record companies and booked its radio and personal appearances. To keep up with the demand for new material he went through old songbooks and sheet music, shape-note hymnals, the old-timers in the surrounding hills and valleys, and the records of other country and blues artists, and he traveled on song-hunting trips with the African American blues guitarist Lesley Riddle, who was especially good at remembering melodies. What he found he reworked to fit the trio’s style: Victorian parlour songs, hymns and spirituals, British and American ballads, blues and pop songs, and new pieces of his own and from friends. Some songs became so closely tied to him that he is often taken to be their author when he was not; “Keep on the Sunny Side,” the group’s theme song, was published in 1901 with words by Ada Blenkhorn and music by Howard Entwisle.

The Carter Family recorded for Victor and its Bluebird label until 1934, then for the American Record Corporation in 1935, Decca from 1936 to 1938 and OKeh in 1940, before returning to Bluebird, almost three hundred records in all. When record sales fell at the start of the Depression, A. P. spent six months looking for work in the Detroit car industry. He and Sara separated early in 1933 and divorced on 15 October 1936, but she went on recording and performing with the group. Its best-paid work came in three winters from late 1938, broadcasting from Del Rio, Texas, over the Mexican border stations XERA and XEG, whose signals reached much of North America; by the winter of 1939–40 his daughter Janette and Maybelle’s daughters Helen, June and Anita had joined the act. The trio made its last records in RCA Victor’s New York studio on 14 October 1941, worked on WBT in Charlotte, North Carolina, from the autumn of 1942, and broke up when that contract ended in March 1943. The Carter Family appeared on the Grand Ole Opry only once.

A. P. went home to Maces Spring and opened a country store. He promoted small concerts, by the Stanley Brothers among others, sold songbooks and pictures over regional radio, and was a familiar visitor at WCYB in Bristol, where early bluegrass musicians remembered him talking about the Carter Family’s best years. In November 1953 he offered the young Bill Clifton a house for the winter and dates for the following season. From 1952 to 1956 he recorded again for the small Acme label as the A. P. Carter Family, with Sara and their children Janette and Joe. The first session was at WAIN in Columbia, Kentucky, on 11 January 1952, and most of the rest were cut at WOPI, 410 State Street, Bristol, the same address as the 1927 sessions; in 1954 he also recorded with the Phipps Family. In 1959 BMI gave him a citation of achievement for his arrangement of “Jimmie Brown, the Newsboy,” recorded by Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, and the same year the Kingston Trio’s “A Worried Man,” from his “Worried Man Blues,” reached the charts.

He died in Kingsport, Tennessee, on 7 November 1960, aged 68, and was buried in the cemetery of Mount Vernon United Methodist Church at Maces Spring. LP reissues of the Carter Family’s records began the next year, and recognition followed within the decade. His daughter Janette founded the Carter Family Fold at Hiltons in 1974; its building opened in 1979, his store became a museum of the family’s three generations of music, and in 2004 the cabin he was born in was moved to the site. Virginia Route 614 through Maces Spring is named the A. P. Carter Highway.

• 1970: Country Music Hall of Fame, with the Carter Family, the first group elected
• 1970: Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame
• 1985: the A. P. and Sara Carter House placed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places
• 1993: U.S. postage stamp honoring the Carter Family
• 1998 and 1999: Grammy Hall of Fame for the Carter Family’s “Can the Circle Be Unbroken (Bye and Bye)” (1935) and “Wildwood Flower” (1928)
• 2001: International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor, with the Carter Family
• 2005: Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, with the original Carter Family