268 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II
to A. P.’s brother. As a singing trio, the Carters had been entertain-
ing local audiences for some months before approaching Ralph Peer.
What they had to offer Victor was unlike anything that had previously
been heard on hillbilly records.
Sara Carter, with her strong, deep alto voice, generally took the vocal
leads while providing a light background accompaniment on guitar
or autoharp, a type of zither. Maybelle Carter sang backing vocal har-
monies and stood out as the trio’s most gifted instrumentalist. Her
distinctive style of guitar playing came to be known as Carter style or
“thumb-and-brush” picking: a melodic line plucked on the bass strings
with the thumb, the melody notes alternating with chords strummed
on the higher strings with one or two fi ngers. Sometimes Carter orna-
ments the melody with a hammer-on: she plucks a string just before
placing her fi nger forcefully behind a fret, creating a characteristic
“boing” sound.
The sound of the Carter Family’s records gives the impression that
A. P. was the least important member: he doesn’t play an instrument, his
bass voice is somewhat tremulous and always in the background, and
his rhythm and pitch are uncertain. But in fact he was the driving force
behind the success of the Carter Family. A farmer at the time the trio came
to Bristol, A. P. had earlier traveled while working for a railroad and as a
fruit tree salesman, collecting songs with the interest of an avid amateur
singer and fi ddler. So g reat was his interest that he even made expeditions
solely to hunt for songs, which for several years he collected with the aid of
African American blues guitarist Leslie Riddles.
As an amateur song catcher, A. P. Carter collected everything that
caught his fancy: ballads, sentimental songs, minstrel songs, gospel
hymns, and blues. All of these song types went into the Carter Fam-
ily’s repertory, usually after passing through A. P.’s reworking. Not content sim-
ply to preserve old songs, he used them as raw material to be reshaped into a
new musical product. The advantages of his method were multiple: while cre-
ating distinctive material that audiences would link to the Carter Family, A. P.
also copyrighted the songs, thus earning songwriter royalties on Carter Family
records in addition to his cut of the performer royalties.
By present-day standards, this practice amounts to plagiarism, and that may
in fact be a fair assessment. But any judgment of A. P. Carter’s business practices
must also consider his position at a historical moment when musical worlds col-
lided: the traditional sphere, in which authorship is communal, informal, and
not of primary importance, and the popular sphere, in which ownership is a
controlling economic factor. Arising here are legal and ethical issues around
musical ownership that are still with us.
Examining a typical Carter Family song shows how A. P. took older material
as a starting place and arrived at something uniquely his own. “Can the Circle
Be Unbroken” (LG 11.2) was one of the Carter Family’s signature songs, a staple
of the country repertory. Most performers after the Carters, however, change
the chorus to begin “Will the circle be unbroken”—the title of a 1907 gospel hymn
whose melody closely resembles A. P.’s. The folklike, gapped-scale melody is also
found in an African American religious song, “Since I Laid My Burden Down,”
fi rst recorded in 1928 and memorably performed by blues singers such asLG 11.2K The Carter Family, including
A. P. Carter, his sister-in-law
Maybelle (left), and wife Sara
(right, who also played autoharp).
Residents of the Clinch Mountains
of Virginia, the trio won fame
in the South after they began to
record in 1927.172028_11_254-279_r3_ko.indd 268 23/01/13 8:42 PM