Alvin Pleasant Delaney Carter, born in 1891, was a tall, restless man who walked the back roads of Poor Valley with a notebook, listening for songs other people had forgotten. Sara Dougherty Carter, born in 1898, had a deep, plain voice that sounded like she meant every word. They married in 1915 and lived in this house through the years that changed everything for them - 1927 when Ralph Peer recorded them in Bristol; the late 1920s and 1930s when their records sold by the millions; the long, slow drift apart that ended their marriage and ended the original Carter Family group. They recorded their last sides as a trio in 1941. Sara had remarried by then and moved to California; A.P. stayed in Maces Spring. He lived in this house, in different forms over the years, for most of his life.

Bungalow style was an Arts and Crafts ideal that arrived in rural Appalachia as something more practical than fashionable - a way to make a tight house bigger without tearing it down. The Carters added a half-story for sleeping space. Their daughters Gladys, Janette, and Joe grew up here. Janette would later found the Carter Family Fold next door, the venue that still hosts old-time and bluegrass music every Saturday night. The house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, six years after Sara's death and twenty-five years after A.P.'s. It survives now as a witness to a marriage that did not last but produced music that has.

A song about leaving home means something different when you can stand in the yard where it was learned. The Carter Family songbook - Wildwood Flower, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Keep on the Sunny Side - became the inheritance of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, and countless others. A.P. died in 1960. Sara died in 1979. Their house remained, the way the songs remained: weathered but still standing in Poor Valley at the foot of Clinch Mountain, near the bend of road that leads to the Fold.