{"product_id":"will-you-miss-me-when-im-gone-the-carter-family-and-their-legacy-in-american-music-9780684857633","title":"Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music","description":"\u003cp\u003eWill You Miss Me When Im 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 per song for any he recorded. These Bristol recording sessions would become generally accepted as the \"Big Bang\" of country music  producing two of its first stars: Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. By the early 1930s  the Carter Family was the most bankable country music group in America  with total sales of more than a million records. By the late 30s  they were appearing regularly on high-power radio station XERA  which broadcast from coast to coast. A whole generation of country people could gather around the radio and hear the sound of music that came straight from their world. Johnny Cash in Arkansas  Waylon Jennings in Texas  Chet Atkins in Georgia  and Tom T. Hall in Kentucky all listened to the Carter Family. It was their formal schooling  Country Music 101. Inside the Carter Family  however  things were hardly perfect. Though nobody outside the family knew it  Sara had left her difficult and quixotic husband in 1933. In 1936 she won a divorce. Even throughout the long and painful breakup  the Carters kept performing together  singing an ever-widening range of new songs they wrote or old songs they remade: songs of love  of betrayal  and of the death of fondest hopes. And they kept at it even after Sara married A.P.s cousin Coy Bays in 1939. After fulfilling a final radio contract in 1943  Sara and Coy moved to California to settle near his family. The original Carter Family never performed or recorded together again. With Sara gone  A.P. retreated home  opened a general store  and lived out the next two decades in obscurity  the odd man out in a new and reconfigured Carter musical clan. Meanwhile  Maybelle and her daughters (Helen  June  and Anita) went out and got themselves new radio contracts  working in Richmond  Virginia; Knoxville  Tennessee; and Springfield  Missouri  before ascending to country musics ultimate stage  Nashvilles Grand Ole Opry. Nearly fifty years in the business won Maybelle the title \"Mother of Country Music\" and the adoration of generations of guitar players and just plain listeners. The story of the Carter Family is a bittersweet saga of love and fulfillment  sadness and loss. Will You Miss Me When Im Gone? is more than just a biography of a family; it is also a journey into another time  almost another world. But their story resonates today and lives on in the timeless music they created.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45666370191413,"sku":"ByrdShop_0684857634","price":21.92,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780684857633.jpg?v=1782429966","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/will-you-miss-me-when-im-gone-the-carter-family-and-their-legacy-in-american-music-9780684857633","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}