“Mother” Maybelle Carter

She was born Maybelle Addington in Nickelsville, Virginia, on 10 May 1909. Her sister Madge, eight years older, and her cousin Sara Dougherty, eleven years older, were neighbourhood singing partners, and Maybelle took up the autoharp and the banjo before she got her first guitar, an inexpensive Stella, at about thirteen. On it she taught herself to play a melody and its accompaniment at the same time. Sara had married the fruit-tree salesman A. P. Carter and moved to Poor Valley, on the other side of Clinch Mountain, and in March 1926, at sixteen, Maybelle married A. P.’s younger brother, Ezra “Eck” Carter, and joined them there.

A year later the duo had become a trio. In late July 1927, seven months pregnant with her first child, she traveled with A. P. and Sara to Bristol, Tennessee, to audition for Victor’s Ralph Peer, and on 1 and 2 August they recorded six sides, among them “Single Girl, Married Girl” and “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow.” In the group Sara sang lead and played guitar or autoharp, Maybelle sang the higher harmony and played lead guitar, and A. P. sang bass. The audition led to some three hundred Carter Family releases. She refined her playing under the influence of Lesley Riddle, an African American guitarist who helped A. P. gather songs, and besides the thumb-lead style she fingerpicked melodies on the treble strings with a thumbed bass, as on “The Cannon Ball” (1930). On a few early records she also played slide, the last of them “My Old Cottage Home” in 1931. “Wildwood Flower,” first recorded in 1928, became her signature guitar piece. The group spent several winters on Mexican border radio and a wartime year on WBT in Charlotte, North Carolina, before it broke up in 1943.

Maybelle formed her own act at once with her daughters, encouraged by Ezra, as Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters. Their repertoire took in the old Carter songs and the popular sounds of the day. Her Gibson L-5, bought in 1928 for $275, was now one of several lead instruments, along with Helen’s accordion, and Maybelle worked out a way of holding the autoharp, usually a lap instrument, in her arms and playing both melody and accompaniment with a thumb pick and finger picks. In 1949 the group took on its first player from outside the family, Chet Atkins, on fiddle and electric guitar. After three years at WRNL in Richmond, Virginia, the act moved to WRVA’s Old Dominion Barn Dance, to WNOX’s Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round and Tennessee Barn Dance in Knoxville, and to KWTO in Springfield, Missouri. They made their first records for RCA Victor in 1949, joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1950 and later recorded for Columbia; their Columbia single “Fair and Tender Ladies,” recorded in February 1952, has been called the first fingerpicked autoharp solo on a commercial record. Maybelle remained an Opry member until 1967, and in 1955 the act toured with Elvis Presley.

By the early 1960s her style had fallen out of fashion and her daughters were busy with other work, but after A. P.’s death in 1960 the folk revival discovered the Carter Family’s records. In February 1961 she played autoharp on Flatt and Scruggs’s Columbia album Songs of the Famous Carter Family, and she demonstrated her guitar and autoharp styles at the Newport Folk Festival and at early bluegrass festivals; some of those Newport performances and workshops were later issued as Wildwood Pickin’ (Vanguard, 1997). She recorded solo albums too: Mother Maybelle Carter for Briar, cut in 1959 and later reissued by Kapp as Queen of the Autoharp, an album of autoharp solos for Smash and a collection of Carter Family favorites for Cumberland (1965). Sara came out of retirement to make An Historic Reunion (Columbia, 1966) with her, singing lead to Maybelle’s harmony as before, and the two appeared together at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival.

June Carter married Johnny Cash in 1968, and Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters signed on with Cash’s touring show and then his network television program, singing backup for him and doing their own set; the family appeared regularly on The Johnny Cash Show from 1969 to 1971. In those years Maybelle handed most of the lead guitar to Helen and played mainly autoharp. In 1971 she was a featured guest on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, singing and playing “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” and “Wildwood Flower” and the first solo verse of the title song, which brought her a Grammy nomination. A Columbia double album under her own name reached No. 44 on the country albums chart in 1973, and her “Pick the Wildwood Flower” with Cash reached No. 34 the same year.

Shortly before Ezra’s death in 1975 she decided to retire from music. She died on 23 October 1978 and is buried beside Ezra in Hendersonville Memory Gardens in Hendersonville, Tennessee. BMI credits her as writer, co-writer or arranger of sixty-four songs and instrumentals. In 2004 her Gibson L-5 was bought for $575,000 for the collection of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

• 1970: Country Music Hall of Fame, with the Carter Family
• 1993: U.S. postage stamp honoring the Carter Family
• 2001: International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor, with the Carter Family
• 2005: Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, with the original Carter Family
• 2007: Library of Virginia, Virginia Women in History