If Jimmie Rodgers bridged the gap between blues and country, then The Carter Family did the same for folk and bluegrass.
This is the first song the vocal harmony trio recorded at the same Bristol Sessions that brought Rodgers to fame on 1 August 1927, organised by talent scout Ralph Peer.

Their fusion of folk and hillbilly music, merging traditional tunes from the Appalachians and British Isles, would become the biggest influence on future generations from Woody Guthrie and Bill Monroe to Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris.

They got together in Maces Spring, Virginia, in the mid-1920s when Alvin Pleasant Carter, a gaunt, shy fruit tree salesman universally known as “A.P.”, formed a vocal group with two equally reserved country girls, his wife Sara (Dougherty) and sister-in-law Maybelle (Addington), who was married to his brother Ezra..

Sara played the autoharp and usually sang lead vocals but on this song it’s Maybelle, with Sara singing harmony. A.P. was not supposed to sing on the tune but he had a habit of wandering around the studio – to the annoyance of Ralph Peer – and hovering near the microphone until the muse took him (about ten seconds on this occasion) before adding his haunting harmonies to the mix.

Maybelle’s distinctive playing style, leaning heavily on the bass strings of her Gibson L-5 guitar (the so-called “Carter Scratch” method of playing lead and rhythm simultaneously) has been much admired by guitarists, among them Ry Cooder, who has named her as a great influence.

One commenter here argues that if you take the guitar playing of Maybelle and bluesman Robert Johnson “and stew them for a good long time the result is Chuck Berry.” It’s certainly true that blues and country – black and white – are the roots of rock’n’roll.

The photo of A.P. holding Maybelle’s guitar that appears in the ‘video’ here (he never actually played it) was taken for a cover story to run in Life magazine in December 1941. But it never ran because the Pearl Harbor attack took place and wiped it off the front page.

Their influence would be passed down musically and literally, with Maybelle’s daughter June joining a second generation of the group – and marrying Johnny Cash – and their children Carlene and John Carter Cash taking it into a third generation.