Biography of The Carter Family

The most influential group in country music history, the Carter Family switched the emphasis from hillbilly instrumentals to vocals, made scores of their songs part of the standard country music canon, and made a style of guitar-playing, "Carter-picking," the dominant technique for decades. For nearly 70 years the Carters's "Wildwood Flower" was first victim of most young country people learning to play the guitar. In 1970 the original Carter Family became the first group elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame.In a remarkable coincidence, on Aug 1-4, 1927, the first two stars ("superstars" in today's inflation) were recorded in Bristol, TN, by an RCA scout looking for rural talent. One was the great Mississippi Blue Yodeler, Jimmie Rodgers; the other was a family group consisting of Alvin P. Carter, his wife Sara, and their sister-in-law, Maybelle. These three -- a gaunt, shy gospel quartet member and two reserved country girls -- sang a pure, simple harmony that influenced not only the numerous other family groups of the 30s and the 40s, but Woody Guthrie and Bill Monroe and the Kingston Trio and Doc Watson and Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris, to mention just a few. It's unlikely that bluegrass music would have existed without the Carter Family.A. P., the family patriarch, collected hundreds of British/Appalachian folk songs and, in arranging these for recording, both enhanced the pure beauty of these "facts-of-life tunes" and at the same time saved them for future generations. Those hundreds of songs the trio found around their Virginia and Tennessee homes, after being sung by A.P., Sara, and Maybelle, became Carter songs, even though these were folksongs and in the public domain. Among the more than 300 sides they recorded are "Worried Man Blues," "Wabash Cannonball," "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," "Wildwood Flower," and "Keep on the Sunny Side," their radio theme.The Carter Family's instrumental backup, like their vocals, was unique. On her Gibson L-5 guitar, Maybelle played a bass-strings lead (the guitar being tuned down from the standard pitch) that is the mainstay of bluegrass guitarists to the present. Sara accompanied her on the autoharp or on a second guitar, while A. P. devoted his talent to singing a haunting though idiosyncratic bass or baritone. Although the original Carter Family disbanded in 1943, enough of their recordings remained in the vaults to keep the group current through the 40s. Maybelle, through a Flatt and Scruggs album of Carter material, found a new and younger audience in the 60s; her work on the famous three-record album Will the Circle Be Unbroken (under the aegis of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band), blended the old-guard country with the new, restoring to her the fame of 40 years earlier. This time, though, the audience was predominantly urban and educated. ~ David Vinopal