Janette Carter

Janette Carter was born in Little Valley, Virginia. She was not quite 4 years old when her parents, A.P. and Sara Carter, and her aunt Maybelle Carter made their first recordings over a shoe store in Bristol, Tennessee. Those sessions on the RCA label are viewed as the beginning of commercial country music.

When she was about 6 years old, Janette Carter began performing with her family as a buck dancer. At 12, she took up the autoharp and began traveling with the family act. She also accompanied her father on song-collecting expeditions to rural homes, where he would write down the words and she would remember the tunes. He later said, “She was my tape recorder.”

In the late 1930s, Janette Carter performed with her family on radio station XERA, whose transmitter was located across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas. After A.P. Carter died in 1960, Janette Carter retired from music and raised her three children. But a few years later, she began performing solo, and in 1974 she began staging shows in her father’s old grocery store. She went on to found the Carter Family Memorial Music Center, which includes a 1,000-seat music shed and a museum in the old store. Among family members who provided support were Maybelle Carter’s daughter June Carter Cash and her husband, country star Johnny Cash. The center holds a festival each August.

Janette Carter directed the center and served as master of ceremonies and performer at the Saturday night shows, often accompanied by her brother Joe. She toured in the United States and abroad, appeared on radio and TV and was recognized as a living musical treasure. But by all accounts she remained an unaffected country woman who called everybody, including former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, “honey.”

Carter told a Washington Post reporter in 1989 that a visitor to the center had once asked her what she was striving for. “That’s when it hit me,” she said. “I’m not striving for anything. I’ve reached it.”