Joe Carter Passes Away

Joe Carter, 1927-2005 Joe Carter, son of A.P. and Sara Carter, who passed away Wednesday evening, March 2, 2005 at the age of 78.

Joe and his sister Janette were recently honored by the Birthplace of Country Music Alliance at the 9th Annual Leon Kiser Memorial Tribute for their contributions in keeping the musical legacy of the Carter Family alive.

As an infant still nursing, Joe was brought with his parents and his aunt Maybelle to the 1927 Bristol Sessions. Joe was a regular performer at the Carter Family Fold -- entertaining the audience with his singing, guitar-playing, song-writing and comedy skills . . . and notably his imitations of barnyard animals and goldfish and hummingbirds and shite-pokes, and natural sounds such as a dull handsaw cutting through a board or drops of water plopping in a rain barrel.

Joe was one-of-a-kind and will be missed by all. So long "Joe Bull".

Read the obituary that appeared in the Bristol Herald Courier

Read the obituary that appeared in the Kingsport Times News

The article below was written by David Johnson, adjunt professor of communication and journalism at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise and appeared in the March 12th edition of the Bristol Herald Courier.

 

 

 

 

Joe Carter Was One of Kind                                                              

That’s how I felt when I attended the remembrance service for Joe Carter last Sunday at the Mount Vernon United Methodist Church in Hiltons, Virginia.

Carter, 78, was the youngest child of A. P. and Sara Dougherty Carter, founding members – along with Maybelle Addington Carter – of the original Carter Family, who last month received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in music.

As recently as 12 days before his death on March 2 from cancer, he attended Saturday evening musical performances at the Carter Fold in Hiltons, founded in 1974 by his sister Janette with considerable assistance from Joe, who in those days was a builder.

Like Janette, Joe was a fixture on Saturdays, joining Janette and her son Dale Jett for a few Carter Family songs, and playing one or two of his own.

Joe was best known at the Fold as the man who did amusing imitations of animal sounds. That may have disguised the fact that he was a fine songwriter – one of the many talents of a remarkable man whose mind held as much as many libraries, and who was five times as much fun.

Dale Jett and friends played two of Joe’s songs during the remembrance service – the stirring gospel number “Right at Home,” included on Joe and Janette’s 2004 CD “Last of Their Kind,” and the unrecorded “God’s Love.”

Though described by a friend as not a particularly religious man, Joe expressed a strong faith through his lyrics:
I’m at home on the mountain/ Right at home in the valley/ It is there for everyone to see/ I have someone to guide me/ He’s walking right beside me/ Right at home with the man from Galilee.

His songs could be thoughtful, as in the sweeping vision of history seen “Through the Eyes of an Eagle,” and humorous, as in “Pole It, Reba” - his Mark Twain-like tribute to a Cajun queen on the run on the Mississippi.

Twain, the author of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn,” would have had quite the conversation with Joe Carter, since both had great senses of humor and were enamored of things rustic and natural.

Joe found wonder in rocks, which he painted to bring out the shapes he saw of a wolf and a Native American papoose.

He found wonder in wood, which he commissioned an instrument maker to craft into beautiful guitars.

When I interviewed Joe in December 2003 – ostensibly on the subject of A. P. Carter – he asked my friend Carrie Cannaday, whose grandfather Bill Cannaday had played fiddle at the Carter Fold, to go to his truck to pick up a new guitar made from a persimmon tree.

Most natural wood guitars are made from spruce, mahogany, rosewood, and maple. Woods like persimmon and mulberry would not come to most maker’s minds as good instrument material.

What came to most people’s mind was not what Joe Carter was about. He was a large, friendly man with many interests. Bob Dylan, in his recent autobiography, recalls Joe as “quite a character.” The most frequently uttered phrase at his remembrance was “one of a kind.”

The persimmon guitar was a beauty. The painted rocks were works of art. The songs were products of inspiration and craft.

During our interview, Joe said that his good friend Johnny Cash had recorded “Through the Eyes of an Eagle” before Cash’s death in September 2003. If so, we can hope the song will surface in one of Cash’s posthumous releases.

At the grave-side service, after Joe’s body had been lowered into the orange soil of the Mount Vernon cemetery only yards from the headstones of his mother and father, Johnny and June Carter Cash’s son led those assembled in a verse and two choruses of the Carter Family favorite, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”

John Carter Cash’s voice failed him at first as he tried to speak about Joe. His was not the first voice to struggle with tears. One of Joe’s three daughters, Lisa Dickerson, had choked up during the church service after sharing several laugh-invoking anecdotes that illuminated the genial nature of her father’s life.

Those who listened inside the church or outside where a speaker had been placed learned about the remarkable breadth of this man: his love of family and nature, his ability to see things that others missed, his constant curiosity, and his playfulness.

The curiosity led a friend to take him up in a helicopter in search of a meteorite crater. The playfulness led him, in his final weeks – face covered with shaving cream – to pretend to try to bite the hand of the nurse who was shaving him. The nurse became his great friend.

The thousands of friends, neighbors and visitors who attended the Saturday programs at the Carter Fold will not soon forget Joe’s startlingly accurate imitations of animals such as an old brood sow calling a male hog, or a redbone hound going head to head with the sow down by the trough.

What we learned at the remembrance was that Joe’s love of imitating animals came from a profound sense of kinship with the natural world. He could watch a great blue heron fly down river and lure it back with a call. He could see that a cow was about to escape the gate and persuade it to come running home by imitating a calf.

“We just about thought that ol’ cow was going to get up with us on the porch,” said the teller of that story.

Joe Carter was laid to rest on a day he would have loved. It was warm for early March. The sky was blue and the sun was bright. A slight breeze cooled the hill where stands the church – a structure that Joe’s father and grandfather had helped to build in 1906, and where his father had sung in the choir.

As a member of the first family of country music – a family that became country royalty when Johnny Cash married Joe’s cousin June – Joe Carter was destined to have a life that involved songs and guitars.

Yet he also was a man who served his country in the United States Navy, supported his family as a construction foreman, stood side by side with his sister as she built a living memorial to the music of their parents, and made new friends almost every day he was on this earth.

As one of his newest friends, I met Joe Carter at a performance of “Keep on the Sunny Side” – the play about the Original Carter Family that has been a hit for the Barter Theatre in Abingdon since 2002. I wondered that night what Joe might be thinking to see his parents – and indeed himself – portrayed on stage. Joe said he liked the play, though he never attended again.

When I interviewed him the following year, Joe shared some of his memories, but preferred to talk about his current interests, such as the persimmon guitar and the song he was writing, “Finger Lickin’ Blues.” He played what he had so far.

I asked him if he would give us a Carter Family song, and he played the melody to “Wildwood Flower” – not smoothly, but with gusto. Even with an audience of two, he did his best to please.

Last October, I sat down next to Joe at the Carter Fold, picking up our guitar conversation where we had left it. He said he had given the mulberry guitar to Johnny Cash because John had admired it. When I said that was generous, he responded that John always had been generous to him.

One thing Joe seemed to enjoy during our conversations was keeping secret the sources of his unusual woods. He said it was hard to find mulberry and persimmon large enough to make guitars, but he had been able to find the right trees.

During the remembrance, I sat next to John Derting, who had gone to school with Joe in Hiltons. I mentioned Joe’s guitars to Derting. “He was always after my father about his mulberry,” he said.

Here, on a sunny day on a hill above what used to be Maces Springs – the home of generations of Carters – my conversations with Joe Carter had come full circle. I had learned the source of the mulberry. I had learned to appreciate Joe as the unique man he was.

When I am able to transfer my taped interview with Joe to compact disc, I will give a copy to his family as my contribution toward rebuilding the library of warmth and wisdom that we lost in early March