The Carter Family: First Family of Country Music
05 March 2011
Autoharp player Janette Carter is the daughter of A.P. and Sara Carter.
STEVE EMBER: I’m Steve Ember.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: And I’m Shirley Griffith with PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English. Today we tell about the Carter Family, the First Family of country music.
STEVE EMBER: It was August second, nineteen twenty-seven. The news had spread fast. A man named Ralph Peer was coming to the city of Bristol, on the border between Virginia and Tennessee. He wanted to make recordings of local people singing and playing musical instruments. And he said he would pay fifty dollars for each song recorded. That was a lot of money in those days.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Many people came to Bristol that day to play for Mr. Peer. But one group seemed to have just the sound that he was looking for. They were a man named A.P. Carter, his wife, Sara, and her cousin, Maybelle. They had traveled more than one hundred twenty-five kilometers from their home in the mountains of Virginia. They called themselves the Carter family.
(MUSIC: “THE STORMS ARE ON THE OCEAN”)
John Carter Cash with his grandmother Maybelle Carter's Gibson L-5 guitar.
STEVE EMBER: Sara sang lead, the loudest and highest notes. A.P. sang bass, the lowest notes. Maybelle sang harmony, somewhere in between. She also played the guitar in a new and unusual way. It sounded almost like two people were playing at the same time. She played the main part of the songs on the lowest guitar strings. And then she quickly strummed by playing all the strings at once. This kind of playing became known as the “Carter Scratch.” Guitarists around the world would soon begin to copy her style.
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