A.P. Carter and the Importance of Song Catching to the Music of the Carter Family

Part 2 (of 5) of a recently re-discovered document that I wrote for an independent study with Dr. John Kimsey while I was at DePaul University in 2008. Works cited available upon request.

While the Carter Family began by singing and recording songs that were already known to them or their family, their success meant that eventually they ran out of songs to record.  New songs would have to be written or found to record in order to insure the Carters would be able to record, and therefore sustain their livelihood during the Great Depression.  Sometimes it required both finding and writing songs, as A.P. Carter would find incomplete songs and finish them himself with the help of Sara and Maybelle.  If it had not been for the wandering work of A.P., the Carter Family might not have been able to achieve the success and lasting legacy they hold in American music.

There has been a lot of scholarship done in recent years that has shown that a lot of songs that were thought to have been legitimate or “pure” ethnic folk songs were actually songs written years before as pop songs in Tin Pan Alley.  It is my argument that the origin of the song is not as important as the evolution of the song and A.P. certainly must have felt the same way.  He would travel around, all over Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina, looking for people with songs he’d never heard.  While he would ask if these songs were “old”, he didn’t do any scholarship to ascertain their origins.  What he was more interested in was finding out whether or not these songs had been passed down from generation to generation.  Therefore, these songs were going to be found in an altered or incomplete state, and therefore available for the Carter Family to arrange and record.  An example of this is the song, “Sweet Fern”.  The song most likely originated from a parlor song called “Sweet Bird”, written in 1876, but A.P. changed some words and the arrangement while out picking blackberries.  The song underwent further changes when he brought it home to Sara and Maybelle (Zwonitzer and Hirshberg, 120).

 In their fascinating biography of the Carter Family, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music, Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg describe the song process as “collecting, home manufacture, and invention all rolled into one, like Old Man Curtis’s rocking chair-powered butter churn.  Its separate parts might be familiar, bit in combination, they constituted something entirely new” (120-121).  Zwonitzer and Hirshberg go onto describe how A.P. took the notes of songs he obtained from folks and would mull them around in his head, either while out picking blackberries, walking or any number of other wandering activities, and use the time to try and figure out ways to fill in the gaps in the songs (120-121).

Another important aspect to A.P.’s song catching was his love of people and his inability to put up barriers for himself in the quest for the next great song.  While it may have been socially taboo at that time in the American South, A.P. had no problems socializing or sharing a table with black people.  As early as 1928 the Carter Family had recorded the black spiritual “River of Jordan”.  Later on, he would meet Lesley Riddle, a black musician in Kingsport, Tennessee, and their partnership would be responsible for many other songs.

The addition of Lesley Riddle to the Carter’s inner circle was beneficial in more ways that one.  Riddle himself knew many songs. He drove A.P.’s Chevy so that A.P. could daydream without running off the road. Riddle is said to have had an excellent memory; and most importantly, he could play guitar, thus making it that much easier to teach songs to Maybelle and Sara.  A.P. and Lesley would go out on the road collecting songs and then come back to the Carter homestead in Virginia where Lesley would teach the songs to Sara and Maybelle. 

Perhaps the greatest contribution Riddle had to the legacy of the Carter Family was the introduction of black Pentecostal church music.  While Christian music was very familiar to the Carters, this new brand of Christian music coming out of the black Pentecostal churches was unlike any sacred music they had heard before.  Zwonitzer and Hirshberg describe it as living on “with its wild abandon, its rhythmic, driving flight, and its stark lyrical imagery.  In those songs, people weren’t just orphaned – they were orphaned, crippled and blind – but they still had their train ticket punched for heaven” (136)(emphasis author’s).  The Carter Family went on to record numerous sacred songs that had their origins in the black Pentecostal church such as “On a Hill Lone and Gray”, “On My Way to Canaan’s Land”, and “When the World’s on Fire” (137).

If one would say that the Carter Family did nothing more than collect other people’s songs and record them to their own benefit, that would be far too simple of a viewpoint.  Both A.P. and Sara did write completely original material and arrange all of their collected material.  I believe it is fair to say that the Carters, much like other great musical acts later on, did benefit from circumstances beyond their control.  No one else had yet collected most of these songs and put them out, so being so early in recording history did have its benefits. However, the Carters did two things that are to the benefit of all American musicians down the line: one, they collected songs from far and wide and recorded them, ensuring these wonderful songs would live on and not be forgotten; and two, created an brand new art form in creating something original out of pieces of existing material.  Great songwriters such as Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan would go on to “borrow” melodies or chord progressions from the Carters and countless others have “borrowed” from Guthrie and Dylan.  Nowadays hip-hop artists are “borrowing” entire sections of songs to use as the basis of their new songs.  Not only was the song catching process important to the music of the Carters and to the folk music of Appalachia, it was important to the evolution of American music.