The Carter Family recorded “Single Girl, Married Girl” on the morning of August 2, 1927, in Bristol, Tennessee — one day after Ralph Peer’s talent scout had evaluated their audition and invited them to return. A.P. Carter, Sara Carter, and Maybelle Carter were among the first major artists to record at what has been called the Big Bang of Country Music. The recording was released on Victor Records in January 1928 as the B-side of “The Storms Are On the Ocean” — only their second issued record.
The song draws from an older Appalachian folk tradition and presents its argument with striking directness: the single woman dresses as she pleases, spends her own money, comes and goes freely; the married woman dresses plainly, rocks a crying baby, has no freedom. The contrast is entirely negative in its portrait of married life, carrying a dark folk-song humor that stops well short of comfort. The Carters adapted material from the community tradition around them; who specifically originated this lyric is not on record.
A notable version is the original 1927 Victor recording, among the earliest documents of what would become the Carter Family’s canonical catalog. The Bristol Sessions as a whole — which also produced the first recordings of Jimmie Rodgers during that same August week — are the closest thing country music has to a founding moment, and this recording sits near the center of it.
