The Carter Family

The Carter Family

has a legendary place in country music. Their songs, and the image of a family band playing wholesome music, have influenced countless of younger musicians who still play their repertoire. This story will explain how the powerful border radio stations of the 1930s and ‘40s, located in Mexico, first helped spread the family’s parlor-style country music to a mass audience. We’ll also hear from Janette Carter, who runs the Carter Fold in southwestern Virginia.
Who could imagine that when Dr.John Romulus Brinkley's dubious Milford, Kansas, medical practice ran into trouble, it would lead to one of the most influential periods in the development of country music?

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The Carters became known nationwide and enjoyed increased record sales as a result of their border radio years. According to Charles K. Wolfe, "This gave them the largest radio audience they ever had, and soon even the old Bluebird [label] records were selling like wildfire." And in the decades that followed, many country artists credited the Carter Family as their inspiration. The story goes that Waylon Jennings, growing up in Littlefield, Texas, remembered back to being about four years old when his father used to pull the truck up beside the house and run a cable from the battery to the radio so he could listen to the Carter Family on XERA. Johnny Cash, too, remembered hearing the Carter Family (including 10-year-old June, whom he would marry some three decades later) on the border radio broadcasts.

The border stations, wrote Bill C. Malone, "popularized hillbilly music throughout the United States and laid the basis for country music's great popularity in the late '40s and early '50s."