Half-dovetail log construction is a Scots-Irish technique that came down the Appalachians with the people who settled them. The notches slope so that rain runs off rather than collecting in the joint, and the logs lock together without nails. A skilled axeman could raise a one-room cabin in a season. This one rose at the head of Poor Valley, in what the maps then called Maces Spring - a community that took its name from a local spring rather than the post office it never had. A.P. spent his earliest years here, then in nearby homes as the family moved within the valley. The cabin remained as a witness to the place he came from, a fixed point in a life that ranged widely across the southern mountains in search of song.

By the early 2000s the cabin had been standing for more than a century, and time was telling on it. Singer Marty Stuart - former member of Johnny Cash's band, devoted student of Carter Family music - raised the funds to move and restore it. The cabin was lifted from its original site and resettled next to the Carter Family Fold, the venue Janette Carter had founded in 1979 to honor her parents and aunt. Refurbished and rededicated before Janette's death in 2006, the homeplace now stands a few steps from the stage where the family's songs are still sung every Saturday night. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 - the first Carter site in Maces Spring to receive that recognition.

The cabin does not look like much from outside. That is part of the point. The man who was born in it learned early that the best songs came from people whose houses looked like this one - farmers, miners, widows, neighbors. He carried what he heard home, taught Sara and Maybelle the melodies, and let Ralph Peer's microphone in Bristol carry it the rest of the way. Stand inside the cabin now and the single room feels smaller than the imagination expects. That is also part of the point. American music did not begin in a concert hall.