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to sign recording contracts. For most,
the road to stardom presented hard
and frustrating challenges with goals
that were seldom reached. Entertain-
ers supplemented or relied heavily
upon personal appearances made in
movie theaters, school houses, chur-
ches, or at store openings, root beer
stands, or in honky-tonks and dance-
halls — generally without benefit of
sound amplification.
The Chuck Wagon Gang wedded the
singing traditions of two farm fami-
lies who had migrated to Texas from
Kentucky and Arkansas. David Parker
Carter (born on September 25, 1889),
always known simply in the quartet as
'Dad,' came to Texas as a small boy
with his parents from Milltown, near
Columbia, Kentucky. In 1909 he mar-
ried Carrie Brooks (born on February
7, 1891), an emigrant from Arkansas,
whom he had met, appropriately, at a
singing school. They settled for a
while near Tioga, in northeast Texas,
the area where Gene Autry had been
born in 1907, but then found them-
selves often on the move, looking for
steady work and a settled home life.
To support the family, Dad farmed
and did railroad work for the Rock Is-
land Line in Texas and Oklahoma.
Dad's railroad career — chief ly as a
brakeman in Missouri and Oklahoma
— ended suddenly in 1927 when he
was seriously injured in a crash near
El Reno, Oklahoma. The right side of
his face was crushed, and he lost most
of his teeth on that side of his face.
After the railroad refused payment,
he filed suit but never received
proper compensation. To support his
growing family, he picked cotton (as
did his children) on a succession of
farms in the Southwest, worked in
grain harvests in Kansas, but some-
times quite reluctantly had to depend
on government relief programs. Many
a day, the family was forced to rely on
government handouts of molded
cheese, or on the meat of jackrabbits,
antelopes, prairie chickens, and blue
quail (Eddie, one of the Carter sons,
told his great niece, Shaye, that he
sometimes shot quail with his sling
shot in order to help feed the family).
(
ABOVE
) Color tinted photograph of David
HDadH Carter and Carrie HMomH Carter on
their wedding day, November 14, 1909.