Carter Family Fold
A. P. Carter Hwy
Hiltons, VA 24258
(276) 386-6054
www.carterfamilyfold.org
She always served food [at the Carter Fold]. Mom was a firm believer in food as a way of making everybody around her feel welcomed and loved. –Rita Forrester
Rita Forrester, granddaughter of A. P. and Sara Carter, is the executive director of the Carter Family Fold. Her mother, Janette Carter, established the Fold in 1974 as a tribute to her father, A. P., who asked her to carry on the family’s musical legacy. For thirty years, Janette welcomed friends, family, and strangers to her hometown of Hiltons, Virginia, communing with them over food and song. She sang every song as if it were the first time, and she cooked as if she were at home, making cornbread, soup beans, and homemade cakes to feed the pilgrims who traveled so far to reach the Fold. When Janette passed away in 2006, Rita saw it as her duty to try to fill her mother’s shoes—a big job, to be sure, but Rita is, after all, her mother’s daughter. Every Saturday night, Rita welcomes people to the Fold with some words about her family, and then she sits in with the band to sing from the Carter Family songbook. Afterwards, she retreats to the kitchen, where she makes sure the cornbread is done, the soup beans are hot, and the cake is sliced and ready to serve. Almost all of the food served at the Fold is made from Carter Family recipes. Rita is committed not only to carrying on her family’s musical legacy, but celebrating their culinary legacy, as well. To her, it’s all connected.
What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
Subject: Rita Forrester, Family Member & Executive Director
Date: February 21, 2009
Location: Carter Family Fold - Hiltons, VA
Interviewer & Photographer: Amy C. Evans
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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans for the Southern Foodways Alliance on Saturday, February 21, 2009. I’m in Hiltons, Virginia, at the Carter Family Fold in the kitchen here with Rita Forrester. And, Rita, if I could get you to introduce yourself for the record and what you do?
Rita Forrester: My name is Rita Forrester, and I’m the Executive Director of the Carter Music Center. I’m also the cook for the Carter Fold.
And daughter of Janette Carter.
I am. I’m Janette Carter’s daughter and A. P. and Sara Carter’s granddaughter.
May I ask you to share your birth date, if you don’t mind?
Not at all. It’s September 5, 1954.
And would you mind if we started talking about your grandparents and then easing into your growing up years here in Hiltons?
Well, of course, my grandparents were A. P. and Sara Carter. My grandparents divorced—well long before I was born. My granddad, A. P., lived with us until probably a year before his death, because my mother and father were divorced, he was sort of the father figure in our household and someone that I really just really worshiped, practically, was my granddad.
Can you describe, for the record, his personality and then the kind of person he was?
He was a sweet caring person. After he and my grandmother divorced, he raised his children alone, which in that day in time was pretty much unheard of. He was a loving father and a loving grandfather and, to me, that was more the way I thought of him than the famous musician that he was. By the time I came along, he was retired, and he wasn’t doing much with his music.
He had the store then, A. P.’s Country Store?
He did run the little country store, which is next door to the Fold building here and it is now a museum. He ran it as a little country store, one-room country store.
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Now when [your mother, Janette Carter] started the Fold in the [nineteen] ‘70s, can you talk about that time between when her father, A. P., died and when she decided to start the Fold here?
Well my mom, for years, she was the only one in our household. My parents were divorced. My mom wouldn’t take jobs if it meant she was going to be away from us. She worked at the school cooking, or she worked at Shoney’s and restaurant cooking, but she wanted to be home when we came home from school, my younger brother [Dale] and I. And she made a point to do that, so she wouldn’t do a lot of traveling or anything until we finished high school. And then, when we finished high school, she decided that it was time that she could do some of the things that she had wanted to do and her music—devoting more time to her music was one of them. She began to travel. And then in ’74 is when she started the music shows here. She had promised her dad that she would try to do something to preserve his music. He was afraid his music was going to be lost and forgotten. That was the beginning of the rock and roll; everybody was listening to rock and roll, and folk music was on a downturn and he was really afraid it would be forgotten. And he asked her to do something to make sure that—that didn’t happen.
She wasn’t sure how to accomplish that, and she said that, you know, she had prayed about it and she looked down and realized that—of course he had left her the little house that she lived in just on the hill here and the one-room store, so she decided that she owned the store and she could start music shows there. She knew a lot of people in the music industry and from where she traveled to various festivals she had met a lot of people who were touring and performing. So she started having shows every other Saturday in the little store, and the very first one, there were more people than would fit inside the one-room, so it spilled out into the parking lot. And it didn’t take it long to outgrow that little small one room. A couple of years and then this building was built and her brother, Joe, built the building and helped her and her sister, Gladys.
And so when she started the musical performances here at the Fold, did she start serving food at the same time or did that come later?
No, she always served food. Mom was a firm believer in food as a way of making everybody around her feel welcomed and loved. I never remember a time when there wasn’t something on our table or our stove. She would leave the—the food that she cooked in the morning, the extra biscuits or whatever would stay on the table in case anybody came in that was just passing through. Her brother might come in and want a bite to eat. So there was always food; there was always something to eat. And she saw the thing she was doing here with the music was a big part of everything, but food was an essential part of making that experience warm and welcoming. She kind of wanted the music shows to feel like you were coming into the Carter Family’s house—into their home and, you know, you don’t come into a home unless there’s food, too.
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Has the food that you’ve served here changed over the years?
We hope it’s still, you know, has that feel of what you would get if you were coming into somebody’s home. It has become more difficult to do because of the volume that we have to cook in order to feed everyone. We’ve had to rely a lot on freezing certain foods, and my mom never wanted to run out of food. It was so important to her that the band had something to eat before they left at night. And, you know, if they had a long distance to go, she wanted them fed. She didn’t want anybody turned away that wanted something to eat before they left here, so that meant that we froze a lot of foods. And like we’ll freeze our hotdog chili, our barbecue is frozen, and we unthaw it on Saturday and, of course, we buy the fresh hot dogs and put them in that morning but we also keep frozen ones in case we run out on Saturday night.
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Y’all were saying earlier when we were chatting here around the table about people coming as much for the food as they come for the music, and somebody who comes—is it from Florida all the way here?
There used to be a gentleman who would come every year for the [Carter Family Memorial Music] Festival, and he said the main thing he came for was Fern’s cornbread. My cousin, Fern [Salyer], would do the cornbread.
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Would you share the cornbread recipe?
Yes, I can share the cornbread recipe. I’ve written that down. We pretty much use her recipe, but it’s sort of a family recipe. It’s just kind of traditional, the kind of meal that we use and—and how we prepare it that sort of—. I always use Three Rivers [white] cornmeal. I don’t know if that’s available everywhere, but for one batch—and that’s the six compartment large muffin pan we use. And I eye it a lot; I don’t always measure it. I don’t always measure it evenly, but roughly two cups of Three Rivers cornmeal—self-rising—two eggs, and a fourth a cup of oil into the batter and then two tablespoons of sugar and one and a fourth cups of buttermilk. And sometimes I’ll use a little flour just to keep it a little lighter but very little flour. I won't use much flour. And then we put Wesson Oil in the bottom of those muffin tins as well. Of course we mix all that up into a batter, and I kind of heat the oil in the muffin tins a little bit before we put the batter in, and then you bake that at 450 [degrees] for about fifteen to eighteen minutes and you’ve got—. Of course we increased the amounts a lot when we go—like we’ll—an average Saturday we’ll cook fifty-four to sixty corn muffins. During a festival, we’ll need 300 to 400 corn muffins, so it’s a huge undertaking.
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Now tell me about the soup beans—Carter Fold soup beans.
The soup beans are—we use pinto beans and I’ll buy a ten-pound bag of the dried pinto beans and you have to “look” them. We call it “looking them,” but you go through and pick out any bad beans that might have molded, and there’s actually little rocks that are in the bean bags, so you have to go through and sort the rocks out. Once you’ve done that, I just place them in a large—it’s really a pressure canner and put them in there—. I let them soak anywhere from twelve to twenty-four hours, and I’ll change the water a couple times and put really hot water on them to swell your beans up and—and get them back to the right consistency that you want them. And I’ll change that water a couple of times, wash them for the last time, take that hot water off, and then put them into your pressure canner with—I use three cups of Wesson Oil. Now country people would throw a big hunk of middling meat or fatback in there. Of course I can't do that because the Health Department and you know we—we have to cook not with—in other words, we couldn’t buy fatback to throw in there and a lot of people like the Wesson Oil because it’s healthier. So we just use the Wesson Oil, but I use three cups of oil, and I’ll put four tablespoons of salt and then cook it in that large pressure canner. You’ll let it—start it out on high. Of course you’ll fill the water up to about four inches or so above your beans—at least four inches, so you have plenty of soup. Cover that and put your canner lid on and put your jiggler on, and let it get to ten pounds of pressure on high heat, and then keep it there for forty-five minutes and then let it cool. And then I always like to put it in the refrigerator and let the beans cool back down because then that soup thickens up real nice, and then you’ve got a real nice thick soup for the beans.
And now the soup beans are such a tradition in Appalachian cooking, and I’m sure in your family, and do people, when they visit the Fold, realize that they’re getting this really traditional meal?
I think they do. One of my favorite stories is the lady had a visitor here from Turkey—the country of Turkey—and you could tell he knew nothing about Appalachia and certainly nothing about our foods, and we had soup beans and cornbread that night, and he asked, you know, “Well what should I eat?” He asked the lady with him, and she said, “Well you have to have soup beans and cornbread because it’s what we eat here. It’s a traditional Appalachian food.” So to see people from other cultures be introduced to it, it’s really pretty unique. But we—we’re kind of known for our soup beans and cornbread. That’s one of people’s favorites when they come here and it is a perfectly traditional Appalachian food, you know, and we do it a lot. We serve it a lot.
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And now with the cookbook that you’re talking about that you have here at the Fold and I have—you know I’ve been looking at the June Carter Cash’s cookbook [Mother Maybelle’s Cookbook] of Mother Maybelle’s food, and I wonder, being the first family of country music and how you’re talking about how food is so important to your family and to country people in this area, what it means to be known for both?
Well it—you know, any woman in the South, I think, is proud of her cooking. That’s just part of Southern tradition. That’s part of being a good wife, a good mother. You want to try to be the best cook you can be. And you know, my Aunt Maybelle [Carter] was—of course she was known as Mother Maybelle. She mothered everybody she came in contact with. My mom had that same quality. She wanted to take everybody in and make them feel welcome and make them feel at home. So it definitely goes hand-in-hand. I know the first time Johnny Cash came to our house; June brought him around to meet every relative before they married, and it was an unannounced thing, so we did not know he was coming. It was in the summer, and she just called and said, “We’ll be there for lunch,” and my mom was in a full-blown panic. We had nothing but vegetables. It was summer, so we did have our vegetable garden, but we really had nothing to serve them. We had no meat in the house, but we didn’t eat a lot of meat. We ate mostly fresh vegetables, so she said, “I don’t know what we’re going to fix.” So we went to the garden, and we did fresh green beans, corn, cornbread, sliced tomatoes, you know, all the—probably soup beans. I imagine she had some soup beans, too, and she probably did macaroni, just the things that she had. And I remember him saying—we didn’t even have tea. We served them water. I remember it very clearly. And she said, you know, “He’s going to think that we just don’t have anything.” And I remember him saying that that was probably the best meal he had in he couldn’t tell her how long. Of course, he grew up in Arkansas, very poor just like the Carter Family, and was not used to real fancy things. And, to him, that was probably like going back home to have that good country cooking. Yeah, so it’s nice to be known for your cooking, as well as the music.
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Did Johnny Cash mean Johnny Cash to you back then?
Well we were awe-struck by him. Of course he was a big country artist and, you know, we didn’t—we were just like everybody else; we were in awe of him. If he came into a room, he had so much charisma that you weren’t aware of anything else in that room except him. He was just that commanding of presence and that commanding a person but he—he embraced June’s family just like he did his own. He really loved us all and was so good to my mom here. You know, he did I don’t know how many benefits. Part of the stuff that’s here today would not be here except for him. He came about once a year and did a benefit show to raise money for the Fold. He believed in what Mom was doing, and he was probably her biggest advocate. I really believe he was. He helped—probably his last dozen performances were here. He would perform here when he came to visit, even after he retired, and of course word would get around and we would have a full house when that happened.
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And so when your mother passed or before she passed, did you know that you were going to take over the Fold? Were you prepared for that?
Well I always envisioned—I have a baby brother [Dale] who helped for a long time, and I sort of hoped it would be the two of us doing it together, and it was that way for about a year. And then he decided that he didn’t want to be here performing anymore. So it did all fall on my shoulders, but it had pretty much been on my shoulders, the business part of it. I had seen my mom just gradually not being able to do the things that she did, like she would book a band and then book another one, not realizing that she had booked two. So when I saw that happening in about ’02 or ’03 I said, “Mom,” you know, “maybe I need to start working with the booking and learn what you’re doing,” you know. Of course I had always been helping in the background with grants and that sort of thing, but she had pretty much run things the way she wanted to all those years, and she deserved to. She built it from the ground up, and I would never, you know—I wanted her to do anything she wanted to do, and the things she wasn’t able to do I sort of stepped in and gradually started doing those things. And then it just got to be greater and greater, and of course she made it a point to be here really until the week before she died. She came faithfully but it was a challenge to get her here and to have her be rested and dressed because she—for probably the last two or three years of her life she couldn’t dress herself or even get herself a drink of water, so I had a full-time job and my mom, practically an invalid, at her house next door to me, my dad who was becoming one in a house in Bristol, and then trying to make things work at the Fold, too, and a son who was sick during that whole time, so everything sort of just snowballed and it was difficult. But folks like Faye and Blanard [Collins] helped me; and then the lady who cleans here, Eula, she would come in during the day and help my mom and cook her meals, and then in the evenings, you know, my family and I would take over; and weekends we would be with her, but she couldn’t be left alone. So it was a challenge to keep it all. And mom would help here, you know, on Saturdays until—like Aunt Nancy was telling you, until about ’03 or ’02 or ’03 when she got to where she wasn’t able. We would spend the whole day setting the kitchen up—Mom and I would—and we wouldn’t have a break until right before the show started. But when she got to where she couldn’t do that anymore, then Aunt Nancy [Carter] and Mary [Hartsock] came and started helping.
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So you have all this family and friends coming in to help you make this happen every week. Are there any young folks who come and lend a hand in the kitchen or other parts?
Well my oldest son, Justin, he does our sound. We do have some young folks. We have young folks who help with our parking but mostly it’s folks that are my age, you know, and older who do the volunteering and the helping and, you know, we do have some young people who come, but primarily they come at festival time, you know, and help us then.
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What do you think your grandfather would say today about the Fold and you running it?
Well, I hope he’d be proud. You know, he did want his music to continue. I think he’d be amazed that, you know, so long after his death and so long after the recordings in ’27—it’s been over eighty years now, you know, that people are still listening to the Carter Family music. I think he would be truly amazed. I think he would have loved the fact that this face was on a postage stamp. I think he would have liked that best of all. He would have enjoyed the fact that they went into the Hall of Fame, but he wasn’t a big advocate of Nashville music. He tended to think it was a little bit flashy and over the top for him. He liked to present his shows—you know, the posters for their shows would say, “This program is morally good.” He wanted to be dressed in his three-piece suit, and he wanted that show to be prestigious. He did not want to be viewed in any other way, and it was a very serious thing for him. So you know I hope he’d be very proud of what we’re doing here. He’s a lot of the reason I work as hard as I do because I did just practically worship the ground he walked on. He and my mom are the reason that I keep struggling so hard to do this.
My granddad died never having fully realized his contributions to music. My grandmother and Maybelle got to see the induction in the Hall of Fame and some of the accolades that came their way, but my granddad did not. That’s another reason we try to cook so much here is because folks coming from long distances, there’s not a lot of places for them to eat once they leave Kingsport or Bristol, twenty-some miles away, so we feel like we have to have food here for them when they get here.
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Well if I could backup for a minute again and talk about…Fred Sauceman also wrote an article about Sara’s tomato dumplings.
The tomato dumplings is kind of an everyday thing that my mom loved, and she would make them a lot for Tom T. Hall. He was a big fan of tomato dumplings, so when he came he had to have the tomato dumplings. It’s a very simple, basic country food.
Are there other foods that like that musicians would request from your mother?
Well Tom T. Hall always wanted her potato soup, cornbread, and tomato dumplings, and I think that was because he grew up in Kentucky and the country, and of course his wife, Dixie, was not really a country girl. She grew up in England, and she learned our cooking but it’s different when you learn it than when you grow up doing it all your life, so I think that kind of took him back to maybe how his mom prepared the foods that he ate growing up. We always cooked for Marty Stuart, and he doesn’t have a particular food that he requests, but he expects that wherever he is, that if he’s within a fifty-mile radius there will be a full meal, you know, meat and vegetables and cake and it all gets carried to him. And of course when he comes here, we always make a big spread, you know. I know the first time he came and brought his band the—we did like—we did turkey and we had dressing; we had all the country foods and homemade rolls and stuff. And one of his—I guess it was one of the roadies. I don’t remember what the guy’s position was, but he came over to me later and he said, “Ma’am, I don’t know what kind of food I just ate but,” he said, “it’s the best stuff I’ve ever had.” And he said, “I just am amazed.” And Mary said, “Well now you’ve done it.” He said, “You’ve spoiled them. I’ll never get them by here again without thinking they have to stop and you have to feed them.” So we’ve sort of made that a tradition. Of course he comes and helps us do—he’ll do benefit shows on occasion, and I think Johnny Cash sort of passed that on to him, you know. Johnny couldn’t help us, and I think without maybe not telling Marty that specifically he wanted him to do it, I think Marty knew that he would like him to sort of watch after us and he does. And so we try to cook him anything he wants. He normally gets a homemade cake at Christmas and he pretty much gets whatever he likes.
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The Carter Fold serves fans of the Carter Family and fans of the musicians who come here, but what do you think it’s meant to the community right here all these years?
Well I think, initially, the community didn’t know what to make of the Fold. I think they thought it might change their lifestyle, and they were a little bit apprehensive; and we are in the Bible Belt, so I think a lot of people thought that maybe it wouldn’t be run as the kind of family establishment that it really is. And I think, initially, my mom was the topic of a couple of sermons because they thought maybe this would be a dance hall or people would drink. That does not happen. It’s family fun and most of those people who had the doubts should really come and see. And I think they’ve learned that it’s a clean, fun, family environment and that, you know, we don’t allow alcohol. There is none of that so it’s—they didn’t know what to make of it. I mean a lot of people thought my mom had lost her mind. She was in her fifties when she started this, and I think they just thought she’s crazy, you know, to tackle something like that. She didn’t set out to create a tourism destination, and she didn’t really set out to found a museum or to found a non-profit corporation. It just grew so quickly that that was how she coped with it and how it evolved. But she set out to do one thing and that was to fulfill a promise to her dad, not to do all these other things, but those other things happened in the process.
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How do you feel about not only carrying on the Carter Family musical tradition, but carrying on, you know, traditional Appalachian foodways here in Hiltons?
Well, you know, that just is sort of part of who you are. If I didn’t come down here and do what I do on Saturday night, I would be riddled with guilt like the feeling you have when you don’t go to church on Sunday. I would feel like I had let somebody down, so I feel like I have to keep doing this and doing it in a way that brings all the honor and dignity to my family that they deserve. And that means doing everything to the best of my ability—the food that we cook, keeping it clean; everything we do—keeping the grounds clean, keeping the artists who come here of a certain caliber and keeping the shows clean, doing the Gospel shows—all of that is just part of my growing up. And it just feels like it’s natural, and it’s what I’m supposed to do. It’s my duty and my obligation, I think.
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What do you think is the future of the Carter Family Fold?
Well I sure hope it will be here for years to come. I mean we’ve invested a lot of time and a lot of our own money in making sure that it does. And I hope it will. And my son, my oldest son, Justin, is on our Board of Directors, and I hope that he’s learning everything I’m doing so that one day he’ll step up and, hopefully, he’ll have a wife to help him do the cooking because I’m not sure he’ll want to tackle that but lots of volunteers and folks to help him, so I hope it continues for years to come.
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Well is there any specific note you’d like to end on or final thought?
Well just that we’re glad you’re here with us…and that anybody who comes here would have a true sense of Appalachian culture—not just the music, but the food and the whole experience of being an Appalachian and living in the mountains. It’s a wonderful place to be and to grow up, and if folks can take a little bit of that back home with them, then I feel like we’ve done what we need to do here at the Fold.
To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.