Janette Carter
Institute Of United States Studies, University of London, England
11/12 October 2002

by Marianne Ebertowski

On the poster they are smiling: three beautiful dark-haired people in their Sunday best. On the right, a tall handsome man in a suit, left hand in pocket, in the middle, a small curly-haired woman with beautiful almond-shaped eyes. Her guitar seems to be bigger than she is, even though she's wearing high heels. On her left, standing behind a desk, hands on her autoharp, another curly-haired woman with a gentle, serious smile on her face. The shoulder pads of their dresses make both women look like they've got wings. "Ladies and gentlemen, the Institute of United States Studies of the University of London proudly presents: The Carter Family!" A storm of applause rises. Then three perfectly entwined voices, accompanied on guitar and autoharp, start singing: "There's a dark and a troubled side of life..."

Well, I wish, and with me, I'm sure, all the hundreds of music lovers who turned out for the "Sunny Side of Life" conference/concert in London. But, alas, time has passed on and so have A.P., Maybelle and Sara. It is exactly 75 years ago that the three of them traveled from Maces Spring, southwest Virginia to a recording studio in Bristol, Tennessee and recorded their first six songs for Ralph Peer of the Victor Talking Machine Company. A.P. and Sara took two of their young children with them on the journey. The third, 4-year old Janette, was left behind in her grandmother's care. It has been Janette who carries on the Carter Family's heritage by presenting music in her father's grocery store since 1974, and later in the Carter Fold building. It was she who founded (and still directs) the Carter Family Memorial Music Center in Hiltons, Virginia in 1979. Now she's with us here. At 79 she still plays a mean autoharp, sings better than most of us, and remembers almost all of the words to the 300+ songs her mother, father and aunt recorded. She has a disarming sense of humor as I know better than most because I was lucky enough to have her almost an hour all to myself.

It all started a few months ago, when I first heard that Janette Carter would attend the conference. I knew I just had to meet her. Unfortunately, the computer at the Carter Family Music Center had suffered a breakdown, so in the old-fashioned way I sent a letter to Hiltons, VA. It worked.

My mind goes back to when I was a kid. I don't know what it was about the Carter Family that so totally fascinated and endeared me and still does. There were those strange voices, sweet harmonies seeming to come from beyond the grave. There was a sort of guitar playing I had never heard before: deep, fluttering thumb-picked melodies and slides that gave you goose pimples. There was that strange wiry sound of the autoharp. But most of all, there was something mysterious about these people who were older than my grandparents and probably not even alive as far as I knew. There was something warm and wonderful about them at the same time. They sang of "the dark and troubled side of life" I knew pretty well already, but in some sort of comforting way, like they knew something I didn't but longed for, some spirit of community and comfort which didn't exist where I came from. Sometimes their lyrics added to the mystery. I spent years of my life trying to figure out what Sara meant when she sang "I will twine with my mingles," without success. Later on in life, when I could make my own money, I bought a cheap autoharp and guitar to catch that mystery. I never quite did. A long time after Maybelle, Sara, and A.P. are all gone, the mystery of the Carter Family lingers on in my mind.

I'm standing in London's largest bookshop thumbing through a book on Southern Mountain music when my cell phone rings. It's Rita Forrester, Janette's daughter. Could I be in the hotel in a couple of hours time. Of course, I can. I buy the book and order a cup of tea in a bar down the road. The book focuses on bluegrass, but contains a couple of pages on the Carter Family and a picture of A.P., Sara and Maybelle sitting on a bench in a majestic valley. How serious they usually look on pictures. I have often wondered whether they were always that serious. Apparently academics have written whole theories about that.

After waiting for a couple of minutes in the hotel lobby, a soberly dressed young woman, a friend of the Carters, leads me to Janette's hotel room. I enter and get stopped in my tracks by a tall middle-aged woman with wild dark curly hair, a Carter, no doubt about that. She must be Rita, and she is. We shake hands. But where is Janette? Suddenly there's a deep, booming voice from the corner of the room: "Who are you?" I'm suddenly not so sure anymore and almost drop my book. When Rita steps out of the way, I witness an unearthly sight: Janette Carter is sitting in the corner behind a desk, grey curly hair, grey-blue eyes, a colorful jacket over a long purple skirt, shoulders and head upright, hands folded on the table. She looks strangely out of place in this sterile modern London hotel, like a glimpse of a different century. I introduce myself and shake hands with her. Rita asks her mother whether she wants her to stay during the interview, but Janette doesn't seem to feel terribly intimidated by my presence. Rita disappears onto the streets of London with an encouraging and relieved wink in my direction.

To make some sort of entrance, I show Janette the book I have just bought for myself. "Do I have to look at this book right now or do I leave it for later?" she asks. "Oh, don't worry about that book," I say, " I just bought it." "Is it about the Carter Family?" she insists. "No, but there's a few pages on them and a picture," I answer. Janette nods approvingly. She puts her glasses on the book, folds her hands on top of it and looks at me in expectation of my first question.

"Ms. Carter, you are A.P. and Sara Carter's daughter. The Carter Family has become an American music institution. As a music lover you might think that it must have been great growing up around them, but I could imagine that it was also kind of tough."

"Well, we were poor people. Naturally their music brought more in than what they made as just farmers. But I never felt any different. I never felt more important. I never felt I had more. I guess I had less than a lot had. But it never did change me."

"I just read in that book that Bill Monroe once said: 'I thought bluegrass music would never get any further than the farmer.' Did you expect that your family's music would ever get any further than 'the farmer'?"

"Well, I don't think my daddy ever realized. He was a man who was far beyond his time. It took me a long time to realize what impact they had and I don't think it was ever revealed too much till after my daddy died. You know, you never realize the worth of anything till it's gone. My mother and father and Maybelle, they worked together from '27 to '42 or '3. Of course, when my mother and father broke up and my mother remarried and went to California, that made it more difficult. I stayed with my daddy most of the time. Some time with Grandma Carter. My mother and daddy just kind of lived from place to place. I also have an older sister, but she never was involved in music. She just never did take it up like others and we never was made to play music. We just picked it up on our own. "

"You were really never pressured to play music or sing?"

"They never told us! They wanted us to, anyway my daddy did, but they didn't make us. When we grew up there wasn't any entertainment or anything much and people made music in their homes after their work was done. They didn't have to spank us to go to Sunday school or to church. The church was run over. Now you see these beautiful big churches and there's hardly anyone in them. There's changes in the music. I'm not crazy about the way it is now, but I have no time to sit down and listen to any new ways. I have to get down to what I gotta do."

"You have never really chosen a musical career in the sense you're mother and your father did. Is there a reason for that?"

"Do you mean why didn't I continue more with my music? Well, I tell you, I went through a divorce and I just had two small ones, Rita and Dale, and I had an older son, and I didn't want to leave my children. I wanted to be with them and raise them. That's what I've done. For several years I put aside my music, practically didn't do nothing, but I'm so glad I did. I never thought that my life would get better when I'm older, 'cause you think when you get older, well, you'll gonna have health problems -- which I do -- but God has continually blessed me. I'm very dedicated and you're gonna get me wound up by saying something which is not true about my parents. I want people when they interview me to talk of their music. Everybody has their personal lives and their faults and their divorces and their family lives and I don't like to talk about it, because it's two different things: your music and your personal lives. So keep it all separate, because, oh, if you get into this, there's a bunch of us Carters..."

She raises her hands in mock despair and, suddenly, there's a big ear-to-ear smile on Janette's face, making her look like the mischievous young girl she must have been. It has the effect of the sun breaking through the clouds. "Great God!" she chuckles

"You said you wanted to be with your kids. You had to travel a lot yourself when you were a kid. At some point your family moved down to Texas. I've got these Mexican Border Station recordings"

"I worked there when I was 15, 16 years old and, of course, I wasn't even married. Those tracks wasn't made for records, they were made for transcriptions to be played over all them border stations. Of course, the Carter Family had records, but after they broke up, it was harder still to continue. They did, but their pace slowed down. They continued to work at their music, because it was a better way of life and they made some money, which was a lot better than trying to farm. And not till I was in my fifties did I decide to devote my time to music. It was really hard to turn loose. I used to cook in the school, I cooked in restaurants, and I did different work at the weaving mill. My life has been so full, but in the back of my mind has always been that I wanted to do something with that talent. I don't say I've got that much talent, but God gave it to me, and like they say, everybody has a talent and if you don't use that talent, he will take it away from you. So I've been using what little talent I've got and I've always thought I'm not a real excellent musician like my people, but I do the best I can. That's all I can do, do the very best. You gotta believe in yourself. If you believe in yourself and you believe in God and if he's not against you, well, then it doesn't matter who is against you. That's the way I feel about it. And I like to go places, like coming all the way over here, that was quite an ordeal (big smile and chuckle again) oh, heaven...it's the first time I've been over here. I was in Japan one time, me and my brother Joe, but this is the first time I've been to Ireland, it's the first time I've been to London, and I reckon we're going to Paris. My daughter wants to. I love this place, it's really beautiful, but I'm ready to go back home. It's so pretty over here. I wish I could just go out and walk and walk, but I've got a lot of trouble with arthritis. All these buildings, they interest me. It's so different from where I live."

I had forgotten all about her age and tell her she should just say when she's tired. "I'm not tired!" Janette protests and I don't dare to argue.

"So, when you moved down to Texas in 1938 after your mother and father were divorced, your life must have changed quite a bit."

"It was quite a change, but they wanted us children with them. I think this quickened their decision to work at XERA. They wanted the children with them and keep 'em there. They certainly didn't want to spend the rest of their life away from them and have somebody else tend to them. You want your children with you. I got three and I wish I still got all of them at my feet. That's the most important thing to me, I think, if you have children you still tend to them and love them. People have to work, take odd jobs; it's just the way life is. You more or less have to work, the men and the women both, to take care of them."

"Is Rita a music person?"

"No, but my youngest, Dale, is the one that can play and sing. Rita is a little manager. She helps me with all my books, my secretary work, and a lot with the Carter Fold. She lives next door to me. Well, Dale lives in the valley, too, but he does different work. I left him with all this this weekend. He may have all his hair pulled about by now (cracks another big smile and chuckles). He loves the music. He is very dedicated to it. And my brother Joe works with me. We worked together for 28 years there at the Fold. We played and sang together every night. It's going on for a long time. Sometimes I think I cannot go down there for another night, but I go in the end. I will get very tired, but I talked to a lot of old people and they said: 'We don't know what we would do if we didn't have this.' The old, they come, and the children, they come, the grand children come. I always tell 'em: I 'm a-tryin' to keep the roots alive. If you don't, the tree dies. If you keep the roots a-goin' there will be different branches come out from there. It's hard to try to keep things a-goin' with such a tiny little place as we have over in the valley ... you think, why in the world would anyone come to a tiny little place like that? And for a long time it looked like it had come to a certain level and it just stayed there. But then, well, they think it's the 'O Brother Where Art Thou' that started all that uproar about all this music and it has hit tremendously. I noticed that quite a lot of young people seem to begin to appreciate the music."

"Do you know of any young performers who play in the way or in a similar way the Carter Family did? Gillian Welch, does that name ring a bell?"

"No. Is she a singer?"

I tell Janette everything I know about Gillian Welch and David Rawlings and that she's in "O Brother" as well.

"Well, what about that!" she says approvingly. "I know there's quite a few young people who took up music since I started having my programs way back in '74. I noticed a lot of them have formed bands on their own."

"The Carter Family became the first big recording artists in the States, along with Jimmie Rodgers. The interesting thing is, there were two women in the group. That must have been very special in those days."

"It was unusual for women to be making music and traveling around and smoke cigarettes. My mother smoked. That was strictly (big smile and chuckle again), well, they didn't speak of women very well who shared a cigarette (laughs), but they did."

"Sara, your mother, also wrote and arranged music."

"Yes, she did to a certain extent and so did Maybelle, but the one that was always seemed to be pushing her to get it done was daddy. He was the one who traveled around and went to schools and theatres and churches and reunions and somebody would tell him a good story or give him a good tune. Way back then, there weren't motels, there weren't telephones, and there weren't electric lights or cars. They'd go put on a music show in some school and I remember clearly going to some strange person's house to spend the night, and it was just very common people to stay with. Well, you never thought of getting hurt or knocked in the head. You just trusted people in them days. That's it."

"Your father went on the road a lot with an African-American called Lesley Riddle. Do you remember anything about him?"

"Daddy was a friend of his. The first time he said he seen him, he was on the streets in Kingsport playing the guitar. He just had one leg. Mommy felt sorry for him and bought him a leg. He came over to the house often and, oh, he was a good guitar player! Maybelle learned some runs on the guitar from him. I can remember going to his mother's house over in Kingsport. My daddy took me with him. I'd scream and cry when he went over to go, so he took me and I enjoyed it. It never bothered my daddy that they were one color and he was another. He liked all people. He loved people. They kind of lost contact with him for years and finally, when I had music in the little store, Mike Seeger told me that Lesley Riddle was still alive and he lived in New York and he was coming over to Johnson City to do a concert. Mike said: 'Why don't you have him over here in the store?' So I let him come in over there and let him do a little program. Good, good guitar player he was! I think he had even some of his fingers took off, they got mashed somehow, but he still could get all the music out of a guitar that was meant to be got."

"And I was a close friend of Elizabeth Cotton," Janette continues, "I had her in my little programs since the store and I had her for a festival and she came down to stay with me. She's dead now since quite a while. She was something else on the guitar, oh!"

"Freight train!" I call out, remembering almost breaking my fingers over that one.

"Well, yeah. She really made it big with that one. She was really a nice lady."

Janette picks up my book again. She has clearly decided it's a present for her. I feel embarrassed, because she's right. She's the sort of person one shouldn't visit without a present. "You say this got some pictures of the family?" she asks.

"Just one. Probably not one you haven't seen before. I always wondered: they usually look so serious on pictures. Were they really always that serious?"

"Oh, they were dead serious."

"This picture that they used for the conference, it's the only one I know where they smile."

"Well, most of the time they weren't a-smilin'."

She scrutinizes the picture in the book. 'Yeah, that's an old picture. Looks like it's took out in the yard their at home. It's pretty. You know, it's something else to write a book. I've wrote a little book. I didn't bring it with me. I very nearly didn't bring nothing with me (smiles). I done well to go here myself." (laughs)

"You heard that Mike Seeger had all his instruments stolen in Oslo?"

"O Lord, they would have had me in the hospital! The expense of musical instruments! My autoharp (a beautiful light-colored instrument with a flower design), that's a hand-made piece. This was given to me by the man who makes them. He's made, I think, around 800 autoharps. This one was built about ten years ago."

"There is a very special story about your first autoharp!"

"Yeah, like I said, we were poor people and people sold eggs to buy groceries with. I saved enough money for an autoharp to give it to daddy. They paid me a quarter each song when they went out to play music. I saved 13 dollars so I could get me an autoharp. I gave him my money and told him to get me an autoharp and he brought back an old hen and chickens. He said we needed groceries more than I needed an autoharp and I could play my mother's harp. But I wanted an instrument of my own. So I have saved up twice to get the little autoharp and it was 26 dollars. It's in my museum, my little black autoharp. I don't play it anymore. I just put it under a glass case and let it stay there. It's got it a home! "

"I bought one when I was about 20, a cheap black thing with green felt."

"Yeah, that's them. You know, they didn't always hold them up in their arms as they do now. They used to put them on their laps. My mother and Maybelle, when they put on programs, they would sit on two chairs and daddy would stand up behind them."

Every time Janette mentions her daddy she seems to get carried away down memory lane in an unstoppable way. "He sung bass," she tells me," he done most of the collecting and the writing and the poetry. He took tunes or phrases. Maybe he would learn a tune and he didn't know the words to that song, but he put words... It's hard to understand how two instruments could make such an impact on music. But, if the Carter Family played a blues number, if they played a ballad, if they played a hymn, if they played a love song, all of their music, it was Carter Family. It was very, very distinct. I give hundreds of interviews and I guess people think that I'm a fanatic about my people, but I am so proud of them. They've done so much, my daddy and my mother. What little I know about music, I owe it to them. Whatever little I can do to add to their legacy, I do that to give them credit. First of all, I tell people, I give God credit, because he gives me health, he gives me the strength to go on and to keep their music alive. I depend on him and then I depend on my children. My music comes third down the line."

I shake hands with Janette and thank her for her time. I still have millions of questions, but I don't want to wear her out. She has two exhausting days in front of her. "I'm so glad to finally meet someone of the Carter Family," I say. "Well," Janette is all smiles again, "I'm glad I met you." I throw a last a look at my book. I hope Janette will like it, and, if not, she won't associate me with it.

The conference next day features a lot of interesting music writers like Bill Malone and Neil Rosenberg. My favorite is young film documentary maker Mark Zwonitzer, whose genuine affection for the Carter Family and their music and his sense of humor should make his just recently released biography, "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music," a fascinating read. But what really gets to me is when Bill Clifton underlines his speech with a video clip of the Carter Family. When suddenly the picture of Sara and Maybelle comes to life, I feel tears burning in my eyes. When the clip freezes after 90 seconds, I feel bereaved. I have never seen moving pictures of the Carter Family before. It feels like getting someone back from the dead and then having them taken away from you again and it hurts. Strange how you can feel so strongly about people you've never met in your life. It also touches me how beautiful Sara and Maybelle are.

Janette's on stage when the clip is shown, at a place where she can't see it. I'm sure she's seen it before, and I wonder what it does to someone of her generation to see your mother when she was a young and pretty woman. Janette tells the story about the Carter Family like she's done the last 30 years, but, suddenly when she talks about her daddy she is overwhelmed by emotions. So is the audience. Luckily we're all saved by Mike Seeger who walks in with a friendly smile, guitar in hand and starts picking and singing "Keep On he Sunny Side," the theme of the conference. Janette joins in the chorus, has trouble with the pitch, but we don't care and sing along with her. "I can't remember having sung that bad!" she jokes. When she leaves the stage, back straight and head up high, the audience rises to give her a standing ovation.

The next day, London's Shaw Theatre is sold out. When Janette Carter occupies the stage after Mike Seeger and Bill Clifton, the audience goes wild. She sits down at the little table prepared for her and starts playing the autoharp and singing her first song. Today her voice is in better shape and, of course, she's got her autoharp to hang on to. She plays, sings, tells the story of her family, and cracks jokes. My favorite is the one about the little kid she met when giving a workshop at a school in Canada. "Ms. Carter, how old are you?" the boy asked her when Janette was a young woman of 57. "When did you learn how to play the autoharp?" the boy continued. "When I was twelve," Janette answered truthfully. The boy shook his head sadly and said, "You could do better!"

When Janette sings, we sing the choruses with her, loud enough for her to hear us, gently enough so we can hear her voice. When Janette does her final song "Will You Miss Me?", I feel a lump in my throat because I know I will. Then Mike Seeger, Bill Clifton and all the other musicians rush onto the stage to play "Keep On the Sunny Side" again. Janette leaves the stage waving gracefully, big smile on her face, roses in her arms. The Carter Family song "Give me the roses while I live" springs to my mind: "Wonderful things of folks are said/ When they have passed away/ Roses adorn their narrow bed/ Over the sleeping clay/ Give me the roses while I live/ Trying to cheer me on/ Useless are flowers that you give/ After the soul is gone." That's what I should have done, I think, bring her flowers for the interview. Well, at least, I brought her a book.

* The author would like to thank Rita Forrester for making this interview and article possible, Janette Carter for spending time with me when all she probably really wanted to do is get some rest and Lucy Rainbow, Program and Development Officer at the Institute of United States Studies, University of London for bringing me in touch with the Carters and for generally doing a great job organizing the whole event.


Contact Marianne Ebertowski at: ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net

  
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