Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 59



“By the Moonlight Alone”

Almost Midnight

Bristol, Virginia

I’ve meandered off Highway 81 to stop in Bristol, Virginia, the purported “Birthplace of Country Music.” I hadn’t planned on stopping here, and it’s nearly midnight. But I’m thinking that later I might want to say that I did.

Since I’ve got the GPS, I allow myself to get lost a little, looking for a place that’s open for maybe a coffee, maybe ice cream. I don’t find anything but a convenience store, but I’m not in a King-Cone-in-my-car kind of mood. It’s a little actual humanity that I’m after. But I can’t seem to find it. I feel small and lonely in the dark of this unfamiliar town.

I turn into a residential neighborhood, just to see. It’s full of neat, modest brick houses with white doors and trim that practically glow in the dark. As I turn around, I hear a train hooting somewhere close. I pull over. I want to listen to the train—a bit of manufactured travel reverie, yes, but I indulge myself. After it fades I can hear only the crickets. I’d like to stay here with them, but surely my car looks out of place on this street at this hour. I drive around Bristol for a bit, listening to Carter Family songs: “Wildwood Flower” and the lesser-known “One Little Word.” Then I peruse my iPod for my favorite—“Meet Me by the Moonlight Alone.”

The narrator of this song is about to go to jail on the following day. The lyrics explain that he’s had a sad life. But he describes how much, nonetheless, he loves his sweetheart. Like many Carter Family songs, it’s a rearrangement (by A. P. Carter) of an older favorite. The song shares the chorus (and some of the lyrics) of the popular “Prisoner’s Song,” recorded in 1924 by Vernon Dalhart. Variations on the same song have also been titled “Someone to Love Me.”

I return to the convenience store to park and listen some more. I open the window—no crickets here, and no moonlight. Just the bright parking-lot lamps and the rumble of the nearby highway.



Meet me by the moonlight, love, meet me

Meet me by the moonlight alone

For I have a sad story to tell you

To be told by the moonlight alone

These words have always grabbed me, as they capture a longing I’ve never known how to express myself. Because deeper than a longing for romance, to me, is the desire to find that one person to whom you can tell your sad story. Once, in the moonlight, before you’re ready to go on. It’s not an intimacy that lasts forever. That’s not the point.

So many of the Carter Family’s songs are about that which one cannot have forever. It is a sentiment that their generation surely understood more keenly and experienced more regularly than my own. You can tell from the Carters’ voices and their restraint. In the words of the songs A.P. chose, and in the tough, sad beauty of Sara’s voice, you can almost always hear a reality that generations after theirs tend not to remember so regularly or so comfortably—the fragility of what we have—or don’t have—here.

Their best songs are as beautiful and stark as the rustle of leaves on a cold autumn night. Have you ever heard that sound late at night on your driveway—then shivered, and then hurried inside to avoid the feeling it gives you? Listening to the Carter Family is often like standing firm there in the dark, allowing yourself to be alone in the simple, scary beauty of it.

There’s no glitter or sass with the Carter Family. Since their material is primarily Appalachian folk songs, there is naturally a lot of suffering and death. And while many of those songs promise the comfort of a heaven beyond, many simply acknowledge life’s difficulties without attempting any reassurances. Life is hard. Marriage is hard (“Single Girl, Married Girl,” “Are You Tired of Me, My Darling?”). Love is hard (“I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes”). Work is hard (“Coal Miner’s Blues”). And death is, of course, merciless (“Sad and Lonesome Day”).

And for all the words about heaven, there’s a fair amount about what’s left behind in death. Where one will be buried, who will remember us, miss us, or care that we were ever here (“Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow,” “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?,” “Lay My Head Beneath the Rose,” “See That My Grave Is Kept Green”).

While I admire both of the women of the Carter Family, it is A.P.’s story (and his occasional trembling voice in the background of their songs) that haunts me, along with the words of “Meet Me by the Moonlight Alone.”

Alvin Pleasant Carter was a peculiar type from boyhood, they say. He was a loner so full of nervous energy that his hands shook—attributed, by his mother, to a lightning bolt that nearly struck her when she was pregnant. Still, he was an accomplished fiddle player and sang as well. He tried several jobs in his youth and apparently wasn’t all that good at any one of them. A.P. was working as a fruit salesman, the story goes, when he first heard Sara singing through a window of a house he was approaching in hopes of making a sale. And fell in love.

It wasn’t until after over a decade of marriage (and some local performing) that A.P. managed to convince Sara and her talented cousin Maybelle (who was also his sister-in-law) to take a step toward pursuing a real musical career together—something unheard of for people of their background at the time. In 1927, he dragged them down to Bristol, Virginia, to sing for a New York scout from Victor Records. The trip resulted in a recording session, and soon after, the popularity of their music, starting with “Single Girl, Married Girl,” their first hit.

While the Carters enjoyed rare success throughout the Depression era, it wasn’t all fame and happiness for the family. Sara hated the spotlight, but A.P. drove her and Maybelle to record and perform more. He would also disappear for weeks at a time, searching for songs in the Virginia mountains—leaving Sara alone with their three children and all of the household responsibilities. And when he was home, his moods were unpredictable; he was often brooding, sometimes easily angered. Ever the eccentric, he even had a tendency to wander off during recordings and performances, frustrating Sara and Maybelle.

During his many absences, Sara started a love affair with one of his cousins. That relationship eventually led to their divorce in 1936. Sara continued to record and perform, however—reluctantly, but for the sake of providing for her family. The Carter Family’s audience didn’t know that she and A.P. had split. That would’ve significantly damaged their image as a happy, traditional family. They continued to give concerts with bills that proclaimed that “the program is morally good.” But in 1943, Sara—by then married to A.P.’s cousin—chose to stop performing with the group.

While Sara lived the rest of her life with her new husband in California, A.P. returned to Virginia and opened a general store. He reportedly spent the rest of his life brokenhearted at his loss of Sara, his loss of the musical life, his forgotten dream. He died in 1960.

He’s considered the father of country music, but some aspects of his peculiar personality remain a mystery. Where did his drive to write and discover new songs come from? What was the story he wanted to tell? Was it the story of his people, or something from within that he never found expressed quite right? What was the one little word he never managed to say? Was his love for Sara just about having a personal mouthpiece, or was it simply true and unrequited love?

Perhaps it was enough that her voice inspired him to bring so many songs to so many people. Well, maybe not enough. (Because is there ever really enough for the hungry human soul?) But perhaps a gift like that, however temporary, was more than most of us can reasonably expect to receive.

And again, the point is not—and can never be—to have forever.

The sound of the train and the trucks will fade. Even that of the crickets. The sound of your love’s voice fades and the sad story dies with you, or with the one you told it to. Either way, it disappears. A few will wonder what your story was and then no one will at all. There is a certain beauty in that, isn’t there—in how it all disappears?



—Tammyland