Cynthia May Carver
Cousin Emmy was the stage name of Cynthia May Carver, a Kentucky-born singer, banjo player and all-around entertainer who led her own radio show and band, Cousin Emmy and Her Kin Folks, in the 1930s and 1940s. She wrote “Ruby,” which the Osborne Brothers and Red Allen recorded in 1956 as “Ruby, Are You Mad,” and in the 1960s she found a new audience through the folk revival and the New Lost City Ramblers.
She was born on 14 March 1903 at Lamb, Kentucky, into a family of sharecroppers. By her own account she taught herself on her sister’s guitar and was playing with her fiddling father at seven. Around 1917 her mother moved the children to Bloomington, Illinois. In her late teens and early twenties she and her brother Burton toured central Illinois as a singing duo, and she performed then as Jo White.
After singing on the Grand Ole Opry over WSM, she made her name on WHAS in Louisville with Frank Moore and His Log Cabin Boys, singing “Ground Hog.” Moore gave her the name Cousin Emmy, and she went on to her own radio show. Recordings of three of her Louisville broadcasts from 1939 survive. In 1941 KMOX in St. Louis hired her, and by 1943, when Time profiled her, she was leading an hour-long early-morning show that mixed square-dance music, comedy and hymns. The magazine credited the station with some two and a half million listeners. She played banjo, fiddle, guitar, harmonica, dulcimer, ukulele and more, and claimed about sixty songs of her own.
Decca first recorded her in New York on 12 April 1946, and “Ruby” with “The Broken Hearted One You Left Alone” was released that June on Decca 23583. On 26 March 1947, at Decca’s Hollywood studio, she recorded with John Will Drake and Wesley Tuttle on guitars and Arthur Shapiro on bass. From those sessions came the four-disc album Kentucky Mountain Ballads, which included “I Wish I Was in Bowling Green,” “Johnny Booker,” “Free Little Bird” and “Lost John.” She later moved to California and appeared in the film Swing in the Saddle. At their first MGM session, in Nashville on 1 July 1956, the Osborne Brothers and Red Allen recorded her “Ruby, Are You Mad,” with her name on the songwriting credit.
While playing at Disneyland she met the New Lost City Ramblers, young musicians who already knew her Decca records. She appeared on Pete Seeger’s television series Rainbow Quest, and on 25 July 1965 she played the Newport Folk Festival just ahead of Bob Dylan’s electric set. On 24 April 1967, at the Sound House in El Monte, California, she recorded sixteen songs with John Cohen, Mike Seeger and Tracy Schwarz of the Ramblers, on banjo herself. Folkways released them in 1968 as The New Lost City Ramblers with Cousin Emmy, with new versions of “Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man?” and “Bowling Green” and the first issued recording of her “Chilly Scenes of Winter.” She died in Sherman Oaks, California, on 11 April 1980.
