Sara Carter: The Great-Aunt of Popular Music
When the Carter Family broke up in 1943, it was Maybelle, cousin to A.P. and Sara, who took over and carried on the Carter legacy. Through her daughters, who performed as the Carter Sisters, Maybelle brought the Carter name into the next generation of country music.
June Carter, Maybelle’s daughter, married Johnny Cash in 1968, and their children, including Carlene Cash and John Carter Cash, carried the bloodline from the earliest days of country music into the modern day.
But Mother Maybelle’s continued role in the legacy of country music goes beyond the Carter Family.
Cash was certainly influenced by his mother-in-law’s signature style of playing, known as the Carter scratch, and he acknowledged her influence on the rest of country music.
“Whether country music is played in New York City, as we are tonight, in an American rural crossroads town or in a foreign land, this next lady is loved and respected, and you can’t really measure her influence in our business, so important she’s been,” Cash said when he introduced her on his show in 1974.
She reportedly rejected Elvis Presley when he showed interest in her daughter, Anita, and would give Hank Williams a cup of coffee and a place to talk when he was too drunk to go home.
Mother Maybelle has been called the Mother of Popular Country music.
But what about Sara Carter?
In the Ken Burns documentary Country Music, Marty Stuart (whose marriage to Cindy Cash connects him to the Carter Family lineage) said “If Taylor Swift or Carrie Underwood, or whoever the hottest girl of the moment is wanting to know where they come from, they need to go all the way back to the voice of Sara Carter [of The Carter Family].”
Sara’s voice has been described as “the major element in their continued success and certainly the prime factor in securing their initial recording contract…. Over the years Sara’s voice took on a deep, almost masculine tone and… seemed to improve almost from one recording session to
the next.”
It was Sara’s voice that first caught the attention of A.P. Carter and made him fall in love with her and set off the Carter Family in the first place.
In the same way that we can trace the bloodline from the Carter Family in 1930s Virginia through June and Johnny Cash in the 1960s to Roseanne Cash and Carlene Carter now, so too can we trace the musical genealogy from Sara and Maybelle to present day country women like Taylor Swift, Brandi Carlisle, Maren Morris, Mickey Guyton, and Mae Estes.
Maybelle may have pioneered the Carter Scratch, but Sara paved the way for women in country music in other ways.
No matter how taken A.P. was with Sara’s voice, Ralph Peer, who was responsible for the careers of both the Carter Family and Jimmie Rogers, was initially reluctant about having Sara as the lead singer of the band. But their first record with Peer proved him wrong, selling 100,000 copies.
Their commercial success led them to become the first country women to tour, long before the modern privileges of “big tour buses and interstate highways and fast food and Laundromats [to make]travel a little more bearable.” Which was all the more complicated by their role as mothers.
Credit is often given to A.P. Carter for the ingenuity of going out and collecting songs and many praise him for the preservation of these songs, but without Sara and Maybelle’s contributions, perhaps no one would have listened to these songs that needed preserving.
When Sara and A.P. divorced in 1936, she was the first commercially successful country star to get a divorce, which “was very unusual
for the times — both in conservative and religious Appalachia, socially, and in the music world, professionally.” But the divorce never affected the Carter Family’s image as A.P. and Sara still played together publicly until 1943. Most fans never even knew about the divorce, much less that Sara had remarried.
When the Carter Family stopped recording together in 1943, Sara went back to California to live with her second husband and only performed in public again in 1970 when Johnny Cash brought Sara and Maybelle back together for the first time in 27 years on his show.
It makes sense that Johnny Cash referred to the two women as Mother Maybelle and Aunt Sara. Of course that’s who they were to him and June, but that’s who they were to all of country music. If Maybelle is the Mother of Popular country music, then surely Sara is aunt to all as well.
Just because Sara Carter didn’t have the Carter Scratch or didn’t collect the songs like A.P. did, doesn’t mean she wasn’t as vitally important part of country music history. And she helped pave the way for country women in the generations to come.
Sources consulted:
