This is the third of three entries that look at the influence Lesley Riddle exerted on The Carter Family's musical repertoire, and on the development of country music.
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| Lesley Riddle (on right) with Brownie McGhee |
In 1927, the year before A.P Carter met Lesley Riddle, the Carter Family recorded their first songs. The recording industry was still in its infancy and copyright restrictions had not been fully formalized or understood. A.P. had not much interest in legal or corporate matters, anyway.
Ralph Peer, on the other hand, was very interested in copyright. He had offered RCA his services for an annual salary of $1, provided he could retain the song copyrights. At this early stage even the top executives at RCA did not recognize their value, and granted Peer his wish. When Peer, at the legendary 1927 "Bristol Sessions," discovered the Carters, he gave them fifty dollars per recording.
In a 1959 recorded interview, Peer stated that he received royalty earnings of a quarter million dollars for three months in 1928 alone. That would be the equivalent of five million dollars today. You can hear him in the short video below.
Before meeting Peer, A.P. Carter was a farmer in Poor Valley, Virginia. When he had free time he loved to disappear, to walk the mountain trails, work odd jobs, meet strangers, listen to their music. And so, when Ralph Peer asked him to collect songs that the Carters could record and copyright, A.P. was doing something he already enjoyed.
This pursuit took him, in that first year, to the black section of Kingsport, about 80 miles from Ashville, North Carolina. Somebody had told him that John Henry Lyons had a song he should hear, “Motherless Children Sees a Hard Time.” Lesley Riddle, a young black guitar player, was visiting John Henry when A.P. showed up.
Lesley (friends called him Esley) played a few songs for A.P., including the traditional song The Cannonball which A.P would record and copyright in 1930: “Oh listen to the train/Coming down the line/Trying to make up/For all of my lost time/From Buffalo to Washington.”
Probably excited by Riddle’s extended repertoire, A.P. invited him to his home in Maces Spring, Virginia, where Esley stayed a week performing songs for the Carter Family. Esley showed Maybelle his manner of playing bottle-neck guitar, and his picking styles. He later told Mike Seeger that he didn’t actually teach Maybelle anything, “she would just watch and learn. She was that good.” Esley later said that he rarely heard the Carters play for him; they were more interested in the songs he knew.
This was the start of a long friendship and collaboration between Esley and A.P. They embarked on about fifteen song-collecting journeys together between 1928 and, possibly, 1936, sometimes for as long as three weeks.
Esley had an excellent musical memory. While A.P. would write down the lyrics, Esley would work out the melody on guitar and later play it back for Sara and Maybelle. The Carters then developed their own arrangements. None of them could read musical notation, but they would (usually minimally) modify the lyrics and add their own interpretations to the tunes.
Between 1927 and 1941 the original Carter Family recorded over 240 songs.
In the chart below I perused copyright records, looking for songs the Carters copyrighted between 1927 and 1931. (The list should expand if you click on it.)
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| A (probably partial) list of songs copyrighted under the name A.P. Carter between 1927 and 1931. By 1941 the list grew to over 240 songs. |
While Ralph Peer had many clients, including Jimmie Rodgers, he made millions of dollars from the Carter copyrights alone. The Carters made $50 per recorded side, and a 0.5 cent royalty on each song sold. Which would be a large figure in those days - enough to afford land, cars, fancy clothes ... but it did not come close to Peer's earnings. Riddle received no song writing royalties from his ventures with A.P. across Appalachia. There is a rumor that either A.P or Maybelle gave Esley a new artificial leg in way of thanks.
I doubt any of them thought much about this at the time. Ralph Peer was certainly happy with the arrangement. The Carters were thankful for the money and the security it afforded. A.P. Carter and Esley Riddle acted out of friendship for each other. For instance if, while going to a restaurant during their travels, Esley was refused a place in the dining room, A.P. would walk out. Friendship knew no colour, and they enjoyed each others' company.
When not travelling with A.P., Esley worked as a shoe-shine boy at a barber shop in Kingsport. He continued that career most of his life, coupling it with crossing guard after he and his wife moved to New York. Education and physical disability limited his employment opportunities.
Esley made no recordings until Mike Seeger
tracked him down in the mid 1960s, and made several recordings of him over the
following years. One album, “Step By Step,” is easily available. Other
recordings and interviews are in the archives of the Mike Seeger collection at
the American Folklife Centre. The elderly Riddle plays bottleneck slide, he
picks intricate melodies, he plays piano. His voice, understated, communicates with the
songs, resides within them while not drawing attention to itself.
It was when he started receiving royalties from his work with Seeger that Riddle began to wonder if he should have been compensated for his contributions those many years earlier.
From their earliest recordings in 1927 to their final recordings in 1941 the Carter Family performed their songs with such a deep honesty that they held much of the country enthralled. The Carters adapted songs of trouble and woe and love and death and family for their contemporary rural audience, who listened and knew they were hearing truths. Life is hard. We are equal, all of us, because beneath and above us lies death. But there is real love in the world. There is community and family and our relationships with each other, and THAT is our saving grace. Motherless children have a hard time ... and don’t we all?? We need each other.
At the beginning of their careers, the Carter Family was made up of four people: A.P., Sarah, Maybelle, and Esley. For those first few years they needed Esley Riddle. It would be a blunder to forget him.
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