Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music Quotes

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― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“Sam Phillips’s boys—Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash—were raised on gospel and country music.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“Chet Atkins recalled one of Williams’s pathetic efforts to wean himself from booze during a road trip to Kansas City with the Carters: “I’d see him down at the newsstand, buying a whole bunch of comic books: Captain Marvel, Superman, and all that stuff. That was his reading material when he was trying to go straight. But he would call his wife at two o’clock in the morning and she would be out catting around. And that drove him to drink, of course. He never stopped loving Audrey. Men tend to fall in love with women they can’t control. That’s my opinion . . . and should be yours.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“By the middle forties, the Grand Ole Opry was the dominant force in country music in the nation.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“A.P., Sara, and Maybelle were at their best when they were plying the sharper edges of private and personal pain.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“In 1927 the Carters’ public appeal was a hard thing for a city boy like Peer to appreciate—and he didn’t. The family’s music sprang mainly from the narrow traditions of white southern gospel and the balladry that had floated for generations in the thin mountain air of Appalachia.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“A German immigrant named Emile Berliner started to carve songs into seven-inch wax disks, and to make as many copies as needed from a single master recording, while the two biggest companies in the business—Edison and Columbia—raced each other to improve fidelity and to drive prices down enough to make the phonograph a middle-class vanity toy.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“If Pleasant Carter was jealous of his dashing younger brother with his automobile and his pockets full of crisp dollar bills, he never expressed it. But what he saw happening all around him made it harder and harder for him to see himself as a lifelong dirt farmer. A.P.’s wandering gene was always getting the better of him.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“The new songs leaned heavily on mother and home (and the leaving of same), lonely wandering in the cruel, cruel world, and dying wishes. The songs also owed much to the first great American tragedy, the Civil War.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“The church was the most important institution in Poor Valley. It served as a family of families and helped that larger family push back against the uglier potencies of nature: weather, disease, death, and the darkness in one’s own heart.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“Finally, and most notably, the ever-present tremble gave A.P.’s voice a slight quaver, so that when he spoke, it was like a ripple on a pond, and when he sang, it was faster, like the shimmering rush of a mountain creek over mossy rocks below.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“Mollie Carter would sing the hymns she loved best: “The Land of the Uncloudy Day,” “Amazing Grace,” or “The Gospel Ship.” But she also sang traditional ballads, known as “English” songs, because the form—if not the songs themselves—had crossed the Atlantic with the English and Scotch-Irish who settled the southern mountains.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“A.P. had to go out into those Appalachian hills and scare up twenty or thirty new songs a year to feed the hungry maws of their record company and their fans.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“The Carters won fame—if not fortune—because they could recast the traditional music of rural America for a modern audience. And like their music, the Carters themselves had to negotiate the gap between the insular culture of preindustrial Appalachia and the newly modern America.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“For more than half a century, the reason for the Carter Family’s breakup has been a matter of uninformed reckoning. And no one in the family would talk about it. Not Maybelle, not Sara, and certainly not A.P.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music

“As the explanation wound on, Eck began to get a whiff of the unmistakable scent of bullshit.”
― Mark Zwonitzer, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music