Feature article
|
 |
|
 |
Jeanette Carter: a real treasure, and not only because of music
By Jim McGuinness
 |
In October 1999, my wife and I drove down from New Jersey to visit the Tri-Cities region for the first time.
Our mission was simple: to hear music at the Carter Fold.
Upon reaching our destination on a Saturday afternoon, we spotted an elderly woman in the Fold’s front yard.
After asking for and receiving information about the starting time for that evening’s show, we were about to drive off when my wife blurted, “We love it down here. We wanna move here!”
“Purty, ain’t it?,” the woman replied.
That was our introduction to Jeanette Carter, who for 32 years served as caretaker of the Carter Family legacy through a weekly series of old-time music shows at the Fold, located in the Hiltons, Va., community that would soon be our home.
Each Saturday night, Jeanette would present a program that would take people back to a time when what mattered most in country music was the harmony of the voices, the acoustic picking of the instruments and the naked emotion in a song’s lyrics.
It was a time far-removed from the glitz, glamour and marketing strategies of modern-day Nashville.
A few years back, Jeanette herself ventured to Nashville, where the Carter Family was being honored at the Ryman Auditorium. Upon returning, she told an audience at the Fold: “I just got back from Nashville, and, honey, you can have it.”
Jeanette Carter died on Sunday at age 82, leaving behind an indelible imprint on Carter Family and country music history.
Although not as gifted musically as the original Carter Family — her parents, A.P. and Sara, and her aunt, Maybelle — Jeanette, with the help of her brother, Joe, found a way to contribute in a manner no less vital.
“Her personal legacy is huge,” said Dr. Doug Pote, writer of “Keep on the Sunny Side,” Barter Theatre’s play about the original Carter Family. “It is very hard to follow in famous footsteps. She was able to do it by building on what they had done, and by finding a way to expand it.”
The importance of her own contribution to family lore was apparently lost on Jeanette, who saw the Fold not as a means for personal accolades, but as a way of fulfilling her father’s dying wish from 1960.
“She was a genuinely modest person,” said country music historian Charles Wolfe. “I don’ t know if she ever appreciated how famous she was and how important she was. Too often, she looked at herself as A.P. and Sara’s daughter.”
Wolfe had many opportunities to visit Jeanette while working on the 220-page book that accompanies “In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain,” the massive 12-CD Carter Family box set issued by Germany’s Bear Family Records. He remembers her as a savvy promoter who honored her family’s musical legacy while at the same time moving the music forward.
“She realized the music wouldn’t stay alive with just her and Joe,” Wolfe said. “She was very generous, inspiring and encouraging to a lot of younger musicians that wanted to play the Carter style of music.”
Jeanette also had a homespun charm that was all her own. When you met Jeanette, you could expect to be called “honey,” regardless of who you were. The most famous such occurrence came in the fall of 2002, when Jeanette was in London for a Carter Family symposium, and greeted Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with, “Hi, honey, how ya doin’?”
Mark Zwonitzer, author of “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music,” remembers being charmed the first time he met Jeanette at her Poor Valley home.
“She said, ‘When you get a little Poor Valley dirt on your feet, you never wanna leave,’” he said.
Zwonitzer also remembers Jeanette as someone with boundless passion for the Fold.
“It had to have been a heavy burden for her, physically and mentally,” Zwonitzer said. “But she seemed to be happy doing it, as difficult as it was. She really enjoyed those Saturday nights.”
Musicians, in turn, considered it an honor to play at the Fold, where Jeanette and Joe, who died last March, would open the show, then sit on the bench behind the night’s featured band while they played.
“She was such a sweet lady,” said Jeanette Williams, who brings her band to the Fold annually. “She always made it feel like you were coming home when you played there.”
“Coming home,” of course, meant living by the house rules. At the Fold, the rules include no drinking alcohol, no cussing, no close dancing and no dancing during gospel tunes. If you were a musician, there was one other rule to follow if Jeanette Carter was sitting behind you onstage.
“You have to have a fiddle in the band when you’re playing the regular Saturday night shows,” Williams said. “So we always tried to have a fiddle tune every 2-3 songs. If you didn’t move along, she’d let you know. Jeanette would grab my husband’s pant leg to let him know it was time for a fiddle tune.”
As a teen, Jeanette Carter would sometimes sing with the family act, which would grow to include Maybelle’s three daughters, June, Helen and Anita. But her biggest contribution would come decades later, when Joe, a master carpenter, helped construct the edifice now known as the Carter Family Fold.
Even with a building in place, Jeanette’s task wouldn’t be easy. There wasn’t much of an interest in Carter Family music in the early ‘70s, as the folk music boom of the ‘60s had crested and the country music industry was searching for the next big thing that would sell.
“If you can imagine back in ‘73, Jeanette is down there in Poor Valley — in the middle of nowhere — with this promise to her father, trying to find a way to fulfill it,” Pote said.
“Carter Family music wasn’t really available in very many places,” Wolfe noted. “Jeanette’s place was really the last resort for a lot of musicians who wanted to play that style.”
That last resort nevertheless perservered through country music’s “urban cowboy” and “boot-scootin’” phases to become a popular attraction not only with locals, but with travelers looking to get a taste of the real thing. Each Saturday, Jeanette would proudly start the show by asking audience members where they were from, then beam as people responded with different locales across the United States and beyond.
“I would imagine the Carter Fold attacts more people to the Valley than anything else,” Wolfe said. “ She fought hard and long to promote it, and that place is known worldwide now.”
So is the Carter Family’s music, which has been the subject of plays, books, documentaries, box sets and a general rebirth in popularity in recent years.
A big reason for the resurgence is Jeanette, who overlooked the physical and mental strain of the weekly shows at the Fold for the sake of keeping the music alive.
Through her efforts at the Fold, she assured that the Carter Family would maintain a presence in contemporary music – that the circle would remain unbroken. For that reason, she may indeed be the greatest Carter of them all.
--------GoTriCities--------
Jim McGuinness writes about all things musical for GoTriCities. E-mail him at jmcguinness@timesnews.net.
|
|
|
|
|
