Charles Hirshberg
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Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music
Mark Zwonitzer, Charles Hirshberg
Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? is the first major biography of the Carter Family, the musical pioneers who almost single-handedly established the sounds and traditions that grew into modern folk, country, and bluegrass music—a style celebrated in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
A.P. Carter was a restless man, seemingly in a constant state of motion. On one of his travels across the sparsely settled mountains and valleys that surrounded his home in southern Virginia, he met and married a young girl named Sara Dougherty. Orphaned as a child, Sara was remote by nature but seemed to find release in singing the typically melancholy ballads that were a part of her home tradition.
For fun, A.P., Sara, and her cousin Maybelle (who married A.P.’s brother “Eck” Carter) would play and sing the hymns and ballads known in their Poor Valley community, occasionally adding songs A.P. had collected during his travels. Then, in 1927, they traveled to Bristol, Tennessee, to audition for a New York record executive who was hunting “hillbilly” talent and offering an amazing fifty dollars…
