I’ve been reading Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?, the story of the Carter Family, and something awesome occurred to me.
The world’s 1st guitar hero was an 18 year old girl.
Most folks have never stopped to consider this. Before Maybelle Carter, the guitar did not carry the melody.
The fiddle carried the tune. The banjo carried the tune. The singer carried the tune. The guitar sat behind all of them and kept time. It lived in the parlor, strumming chords while somebody else did the talking. A guitar was a layer. It was not a voice.
Maybelle made it a voice.
What she did sounds simple until you try it. Her thumb walks the melody out on the low strings while her fingers brush the chords up top. Bass line, rhythm, and melody, all out of one guitar. They came to call it the Carter scratch.
That matters because of what a melody is. A melody is the part of a song you can whistle. It’s the part of the song that stays with regular people. Before Maybelle, that part was delivered by the fiddle or the voice. She put it in the guitar. Listen to “Wildwood Flower.” Her guitar doesn’t decorate the tune. It sings it. That had never happened before.
And she was eighteen years old when the world first heard it.
By the end of the twenties, Maybelle’s scratch was the most widely imitated guitar style in music.
Chet Atkins said “Wildwood Flower” was the first song he ever learned on guitar, and he called it “kind of our national anthem in East Tennessee.” Doc Watson first learned to pick by following Maybelle’s thumb lead, before he ever took up a flatpick and changed the instrument again. You can hear her thumb down in Merle Travis, and from Travis the line runs on to half the fingerpickers alive. Earl Scruggs made his name on the banjo, but he said he owed his love of the guitar in country music to Maybelle, because “she always played the tune.”
Always played the tune.
There’s the whole sermon in four words.
The pickers who learned from her taught the rockabilly boys, Scotty Moore, James Burton, and Carl Perkins, and the line runs on from them to George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Keith Richards has named his debt to her outright. So has Jerry Garcia. Bob Dylan. Country, bluegrass, folk, and rock and roll. American music as we know it is deeply rooted in Maybelle’s thumb.
That’s why generations of the finest guitar players who ever lived sat down, like kids at a kitchen table, and learned at her feet.
The world’s 1st guitar hero was an 18 year old girl from Poor Valley, Virginia. She’s the reason the guitar solo exists.
Tell me I’m wrong.
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