If influential Appalachian songbird Sara Carter were still alive, she would have turned 126 years old today, July 21.
Carter was an original member of The Carter Family. She was the autoharp aficionado with a textured, compelling mid-toned voice that helped push The Carter Family into the history books as one of the foundational building blocks of country music.
Sara wasn’t born a Carter. Sara married A. P. Carter in 1915. Sara’s first cousin, Maybelle, married A. P.’s brother, Ezra. Together, they formed The Carter Family and recorded the famous Bristol Sessions, some of the first recordings of what would become known as country music. The group created nearly 300 records in its career, earned induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Grammy Hall of Fame, and was featured on a commemorative postal stamp.
“The Carters won fame—if not fortune—because they could recast the traditional music of rural America for a modern audience,” Mark Zwonitzer wrote in his book Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music. “And like their music, the Carters themselves had to negotiate the gap between the insular culture of preindustrial Appalachia and the newly modern America.”
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Sara Carter: Born in the Heart of Appalachia
Sara was born in the heart of Appalachia, in Flatwoods, in Wise County, Virginia. Her parents were William Sevier Dougherty, a sometime sawmill operator, and Elizabeth Kilgore Dougherty. Sara’s mother died when she was three years old, and she and her sister went to live with their mother’s sister, who had no children.
They nicknamed her Jake, and she started learning to play the five-bar autoharp. Sara sold greeting cards to earn money, and when she was 12, she bought an eight-bar autoharp from the Sears Roebuck catalog. As legend has it, in the spring of 1914, A. P. Carter heard her playing and singing the train-wreck ballad “Engine 143.” They were married about one year later. The couple had two daughters and a son. They spent the next decade performing as a duo in churches and at other local information gatherings.
In 1926, Sara’s cousin, Maybelle Addington, married into the Carter family. Sara, her husband, A.P., her cousin, Maybelle, and her cousin’s husband, Ezra, formed The Carter Family. Sara never learned to read music but often sang lead and played the auto harp. The next year, the group responded to a newspaper ad to audition for the Victor Talking Machine Company. The group managed to wow talent scout Ralph Sylvester Peer, and they recorded “Bury Me under the Weeping Willow,” “Little Log Cabin by the Sea,” “Poor Orphan Child,” and “The Storms Are on the Ocean” in Victor’s studios on August 1, 1927.
Sara Carter Remarried and Moved to California
The Carters recorded “Single Girl, Married Girl” and “The Wandering Boy” the following day, launching one of the most historical and impactful careers in music. Over the years, their hit songs included “Can the Circle Be Unbroken,” “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” “Wabash Cannonball,” “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone,” “Wildwood Flower,” and “Keep on the Sunny Side.”
The band’s success was the demise of Sara’s marriage. She and A. P. separated in 1933 and divorced three years later. However, they kept the band intact. She remarried in 1941, this time to A. P.’s cousin, Coy Bayes. She left her children with A. P. in Virginia and moved to California in 1943. The original group disbanded, and she remained based in California until her death in 1979. She is buried near her first husband in Virginia.
(Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
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