SARA CARTER: —had no business with me.
COY BAYES: Maybelle’s children were growing up and they were growing into an act of their own, and I knew that it was falling apart anyway. So I said, “Let’s go back to California and settle down. I think we will be a little happier.” And that’s just what happened.
DALE JETT: I think my grandfather was brokenhearted, because he worshipped her, I really believe, from the time that he first heard her singing “Engine 143” in that holler across the mountain. I don’t think he ever lost that love, and it was sad.
FERN SALYER: Maybelle went with her girls, and they played in Richmond, they played in North Carolina, they played in Knoxville, and that’s where they hooked up with Chet Atkins. They got asked to go to the Grand Ole Opry, and [the Opry] said, “We don’t want Chet Atkins, we just [want] you-all.” But they wouldn’t go without him, so they finally went together. And Elvis Presley toured with them for a while. He wasn’t that big at that time, and Aunt Maybelle said she couldn’t keep the buttons sewed on his jacket where he was jumping around.
A.P. missed that, being in the show business—he didn’t just lose his wife, he lost his showmanship and getting onstage and doing things. . . .
DALE JETT: Maybelle, she’s seen the fruits of her labor, more so, as opposed to A.P. I’ve got a piece of paper showing he borrowed twenty-five dollars from the bank in 1959, the year before he died. And I can tell you, he didn’t drink, he didn’t squander it away. But I’m not sure that he ever really wanted a whole lot. Really, he wanted to make music, that was his passion.
He opened a little grocery store, and he also stayed down here at the Hilton fire tower, on top of Clinch Mountain—there’s a watchtower that the forestry department would pay someone to stay up in the tower and watch for forest fires, and he worked up in the fire tower in the late ’50s, not too long before he died. That’s kinda odd to me, too—you know, it would be very lonely. . . . But, there again, it would have been peace and quiet, and maybe he still had songs left in his head.
FERN SALYER: Well, you know, [Bob] Dylan, he asked Johnny Cash once, he said, “Johnny, did you ever meet A.P. Carter?” And Johnny said, “No, I never had that opportunity. . . . I didn’t know him.” And then he said, “But I guess nobody knew him.” And it’s kinda like that: nobody knew A. P. Carter.
