Will The Circle Be Unbroken-The Music Of The Carter Family (First Generation)

You know it took a long time for me to figure out why I was drawn, seemingly out of nowhere, to the mountain music most famously brought to public, Northern public, attention by the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, The Seegers and the Lomaxes back a couple of generations ago. The Carter Family famously arrived via a record contract in Bristol, Tennessee in the days when radio and record companies were looking for music, authentic American music to fill the air and their catalogs. The Seegers and Lomaxes went out into the sweated dusty fields, out to the Saturday night red barn dance, out to the Sunday morning praise Jehovah gathered church brethren, out to the juke joint, down to the mountain general store to grab whatever was available some of it pretty remarkable filled with fiddles, banjos and mandolins.

As a kid, as a very conscious Northern city boy, I could not abide that kind of music  but later on I figured that was because I was so embroiled in the uprising jail-break music of my generation, rock and roll, that anything else faded, faded badly by comparison. Later in high school when Brian Pirot would drive us down to Cambridge and after in college when I used to hang around Harvard Square to be around the burgeoning folk scene that was emerging for what I later would call the folk minute of the early 1960s I would let something like Gold Watch And Chain register a bit, registering a bit then meaning that I would find myself occasionally idly humming such a tune. (The version done by Alice Stuart at the time gleaned when I hear her perform at the Club Nana in the Square one time when I had enough dough for two coffees, a shared pastry and money for the “basket” for a date, a cheap date. The only Carter Family song that I consciously could claim I knew was theirs was Under the Weeping Willow although I may have unconsciously known others from seventh grade music class when Mr. Dasher would bury us with all kind of songs and genre from the American songbook so we would not get tied down to that heathen “rock and roll” that drove him crazy when we asked him to play some for us.) But again more urban, more protest-oriented folk music was what caught my attention more when the folk minute was at high tide in the early 1960s.           

Then one day not all that many years ago as part of a final reconciliation with my family which I had been estranged from periodically since teenage-hood, going back to my own roots, making peace with my old growing up neighborhood, I started asking many questions about how things turned so sour back when I was young. More importantly asking questions that had stirred in my mind for a long time and formed part of the reason that I went for reconciliation. To find out what my roots were while somebody was around to explain the days before I could rightly remember the early day. And in that process I finally, finally figured out why the Carter Family and others began to “speak” to me.         

The thing was simplicity itself. See my father hailed from Kentucky, Hazard, Kentucky long noted in song and legend as hard coal country. When World War II came along he left to join the Marines to get the hell out of there. During his tour of duty he was stationed for a short while at the Portsmouth Naval Base and during that stay attended a USO dance held in Portland where he met my mother who had grown up in deep French-Canadian Olde Saco. Needless to say he stayed in the North, for better or worse, working the mills in Olde Saco until they closed or headed south for cheaper labor and then worked at whatever jobs he could find. All during my childhood though along with that popular music that got many mothers and fathers through the war mountain music, although I would not have called it that then filtered in the background on the family living room record player.

But here is the real “discovery,” a discovery that could only be disclosed by my parents. Early on in their marriage they had tried to go back to Hazard to see if they could make a go of it there. This was after my older brother Prescott was born and while my mother was carrying me. Apparently they stayed for several months before they left to go back to Olde Saco before I was born since I was born in Portland General Hospital. So see that damn mountain was in my DNA, was just harking to me when I got the bug. Funny, isn’t it.