“Wildwood Flower”: The Guitar Picker’s Song

Part 5 (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. 

Professional songwriters may have written “Wildwood Flower”, but it has since become not only a country classic, but also redefined as a “Carter Family Song” (Malone 10, 67).  It has been selected by National Public Radio as one of the 100 most important songs of the 20th century and is “the closest thing country music has to a true anthem” (Zwonitzer and Hirshberg 109).  This is largely due to the guitar playing of Maybelle Carter and her influence over several generations of musicians.

The song was first recorded on May 10, 1928 in one of the early Victor recording sessions in Camden, New Jersey.  Several other famous Carter songs were recorded the same day, such as “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?”, “River of Jordan”, and “John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man”; but it was “Wildwood Flower” that would have the biggest impact, both immediately (within eight months the song had sold nearly 100,000 copies) and in the long run (Zwonitzer and Hirshberg 108, 116-117).    It is a song with subject matter familiar to many forms of popular music: abandonment by a lover.  This may have helped with its immediate popularity, but it was the guitar playing on the song that helped it maintain its popularity as artists such as Merle Travis, Doc Watson, Joan Baez and many others would continue to record and perform the song in their own styles for decades to come (Zwonitzer and Hirshberg 340).

In their book, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music, Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg state that, “By the end of the twenties, Maybelle Carter’s scratch – graceful and thumpingly rhythmic at once – was the most widely imitated guitar style in music.  Nobody did as much to popularize the guitar, because from the beginning her playing was as distinctive as any voice” (109).  Bill C. Malone, in Country Music, U.S.A., goes so far as to claim that, “In the decades after 1927 it became the height of accomplishment for southern country guitarists to learn the Maybelle Carter guitar style; her rendition of ‘Wildwood Flower,’ for example, was the model used by subsequent fledgling guitarists when they did their first solo guitar piece” (66).  Chet Atkins is just one of many country legends who state that “Wildwood Flower” was the first song they ever learned to play on the guitar, calling it, “kind of our national anthem in East Tennessee” (YouTube).

Maybelle’s style of guitar playing was unique, both in her flat-picking style and in her decision to use a thumb pick rather than loosely holding the pick, or plectrum, between her thumbs and first fingers.  The use of the thumb pick came natural to Maybelle, who had been taught to play the banjo when she was younger.  It is perhaps because of her use of the thumb pick that she was able to create a new hybrid style of playing.  “Carter-style is characterized by playing the melody notes on the bass strings and rhythmic fills on the treble strings. What makes this style significant is that it makes the guitar perform as both a lead instrument and rhythm instrument at the same time” (Bluegrass Guitar). 

Until the late 1920’s, the fiddle dominated most ‘hillbilly’ music.  In fact, the first recorded hillbilly act was Fiddlin’ John Carson in 1923 – not coincidently recorded by Ralph Peer, the same Ralph Peer who discovered The Carter Family.  Though Peer was doubtful of how well Carson would sell, Carson in fact sold extremely well prompting a career change for the young Peer.  The style of Maybelle’s guitar playing would have appealed to the same audience as fiddle music.  Up until that point, the guitar had been used primarily as a backing or rhythm instrument while the fiddle and/or the vocals would carry the melodies, but Maybelle was able to incorporate both styles into her guitar playing.  Although Sara sometimes played the Autoharp, usually Maybelle was the sole instrumental accompanist in the Carter Family.  This put most, if not all, the instrumental weight on Maybelle, which could have led to her style evolving in the way that it did in order to fulfill all the expected roles of the backing instruments, thus “filling out” the sound.

“Wildwood Flower” was not the earliest recording on which you could hear Maybelle Carter’s guitar style; you can go back as far as their earliest recordings in Bristol and hear her scratch guitar, with her thumb carrying the melody and her fingers strumming the rhythm.  However, “Wildwood Flower” would be a favorite showcase for her style and a country music classic.  Guitar players still continue to cut their teeth on this track, the same song that guitar legends like Chet Atkins first learned to play.