Longin’ For Ol’ Virginia
The Carter Family’s Long, Strange Trip
by
D.R. Tyler Magill

To oversimplify, this is what it took for the Carter Family to become country music icons: an airwaves range-war between America and Mexico, and the manhood of hundreds of goats in Brainard, Kansas.

Clinch Valley’s Carter Family — spouses A.P. and Sara and Sara’s cousin Maybelle — rightly considered the First Family of American folk music, would become the first group inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Yet they never toured nationally and were never among the most popular performers of their day. By 1939, the Carters had recorded dozens of sides for the Victor, Columbia and Decca labels.

Financially, like the rest of Appalachia during the Depression, they were in dire straits, unable to afford to tour and taking outside work. A.P. (as important a folksong collector as he was a performer) even moved to far-from-rural Detroit in search of work. This would lead to a great deal of tension in the family and would contribute to his and Sara’s separation in 1933.

Despite the split, they continued to work together professionally, though they didn’t see each other outside of the studio. Their manager, Ralph Peer (who had first recorded them in 1927 for the now legendary Bristol Sessions), was faced with an obvious dilemma. How could he break the Carter Family to a national audience and, at the same time, not exacerbate tricky family and financial situations?

A few years earlier and hundreds of miles away, a charismatic quack named Dr. John Romulus Brinkley had made quite a fortune offering revitalization cures. Tired blood? Lethargy? Or worst of all, unable to perform your most intimate duties? Dr. Brinkley of Brainard, Kansas had just the right bottle of spirits, oils and simple syrup to psychosomatically cure what ailed you. For the right (rich) impotent customer, he would perform his signature operation, which was grafting slivers of goat testicle onto those of humans. Whether or not it worked was irrelevant; business boomed, and Brinkley made money hand over fist — enough to start a radio station, KFKB (standing for Kansas First, Kansas Best), which broadcast gospel, hillbilly rave-ups and, late at night, infomercials for his products.

The Kansas City Star, which owned a rival station, demolished the good doctor’s reputation in a series of broadsides and had him stripped of his medical license. Thwarted in attempts to increase KFKB’s wattage, he looked simultaneously south and from sea to sea. He would have his powerful radio station, indeed a monopoly over the airwaves. And he knew where to get it: a tiny town called Villa Acuña, in Mexico.

Mexico had had its own problems with American radio, which had clear-channel access to Mexico but wouldn’t cede that right back. The Mexican government came up with a simple idea: build transmitters more powerful than those of the Americans, literally jamming their frequencies. And who better to run one of them than a rich, cocky, scorned American with radio experience?

Dr. Brinkley moved his studio down to Del Rio, Texas, across the river from his 300-foot tower in Villa Acuña. From Texas he would reopen his medical practice and start broadcasting again over the river. In time, his new station, called XERA, would transmit at up to a million watts, certainly powerful enough to be heard in Kansas and even, on clear nights, all the way to Russia.

The savvy Ralph Peer knew that this station would be the perfect way for the Carter family to perform for an audience of millions and, in 1937, got them a lucrative contract on Brinkley’s XERA, where they would perform as part of the daily "Good Neighbor Get Together."

Sandwiched between Mainer’s Mountaineers, Cowboy Slim Rinehart and Doc & Karl, the Carters immediately established themselves as the thoroughbreds in XERA’s stable. Their Decca sales spiked and their popularity skyrocketed, and just in time. They recorded for border radio for only four years, during which time Sara divorced A.P. and found romance with Coy Bayes, A.P.’s cousin. She would retire in 1943, moving to California and bringing about the dissolution of the original Carter Family. However, the Carter Family’s legacy was at this point national rather than confined to the Virginia schoolhouses they had played through the first half of the ‘30s. The over 100 songs they recorded with XERA money in that short time kept them releasing new material throughout the ‘40s and cemented their spot in the pantheon.

Dr. Brinkley’s fall from power was meteoric. When he began broadcasting pro-Hitler rants, the American government moved swiftly to shut him down. They granted Mexico clear-channel access to America and outlawed the practice of rerouting American broadcasts to foreign towers. By 1942, Brainard’s cure-all man would be stripped of his station and bankrupted from legal battles. When he died of a heart attack, only creditors and goats noticed.

Recommended on CD:
My Clinch Mountain Home: Complete Victor Recordings 1928-29 (Rounder)
When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland: Complete Victor 1929-30 (Rounder)
Worried Man Blues: Complete Victor Recordings, 1930 (Rounder)
Sunshine in the Shadows: Complete Victor Recordings, 1931-32 (Rounder)
Gold Watch & Chain: Complete Victor Recordings, 1933-34 (Rounder)
Longing For Ol’ Virginia: Complete Victor Recordings, 1934 (Rounder)
Carter Family on Border Radio Vol. 1-3 (Rounder)

--- Originally published in 64 Magazine, Jan.-Feb. 2001. For more information, log on at www.64magazine.org