The Carters' Questions

From my personal department of compulsive research, in response to a Facebook post about questions in song titles.

Here's an idea for an (as far as I know) nonexistent album, YouTube playlist, or master's thesis, titled: "Uncertainties: The questioning songs of the Carter Family."

• "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?"
• "Will The Roses Bloom In Heaven"
• "Will My Mother Know Me There?"
• "Why Do You Cry, Little Darling"
• "Can* the Circle Be Unbroken"
• "Where Shall I Be?"
• "Happy Or Lonesome" (The lyric asks, "Are you still happy, I wonder, or are you lonesome too?")

Of course, some of those questions might be described as faith-based with positive answers rhetorically implied; the Carters' discography at Wikipedia doesn't always include question marks.

* And then there's the "Will" versus "Can" story about that presumably unbroken circle, explored by the Birthplace of Country Music Museum: Will the Circle Be Unbroken, history of a song. Here are the original lyrics and the Carter Family version.

Wildwood Flowering in 2024

 I just saw a comment on the 1928 recording of Wildwood Flower by the Carter Family that set me off researching so much that I have to share the results here to justify the time I spent in "SecondHandSongs.com" "Discogs.com" and "YouTube.com" -- all amazing resources!

The commenter who got my attention said they always thought the song was from the 1960s. (It's actually from the 1860s, as someone pointed out in the same discussion.)

My (expanded) reply:

It definitely "came back" in the early 1960s!

The New Lost City Ramblers and Maybelle Carter did it at a Newport Folk Festival, Flatt & Scruggs did it at Carnegie Hall, the Stanley Brothers and a dozen others (even Duane Eddy's twangy electric guitar!) recorded it, and almost every high school and college student learning to play "folk guitar" struggled with Maybelle's "Carter scratch" bass-and-chord thumb-pick guitar style.

(Search YouTube for her 1961 Grand Ol' Opry live video with closeups.)

Some learned the tune with different lyrics -- Woody Guthrie's c.1942 song, "The Sinking of the Reuben James," about the first U.S. ship sunk in World War II. The song was brought back c. 1960 in thousands of concerts and coffee house singalongs by Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio and more.

And then there was the pot-farming parody, "Wildwood Weed"... Even the NLCR did that one in concert, minus Maybelle! (But with a cute reference by Mike Seeger to his brother Pete.) Author credits for the parody apparently belong to Texas songwriter and radio host Don Bowman around 1964. Fascinating that YouTube has all of these versions.

I'll put a couple of YouTube videos here if the computer doesn't crash, then get on with my day...