Between 1927 and 1941, A.P., Sara, and Maybelle Carter recorded close to three hundred songs. Their records introduced a generation of listeners to ballads, hymns, and dance tunes that had been carried into the southern mountains by Scots-Irish, English, and African American singers and had then taken root there for a century. When the original trio broke up in 1943 - Sara having remarried and moved to California - A.P. could have chased the music industry. He did not. He went back to Maces Spring, built a store, and lived above it. He recorded again briefly in the 1950s with his children, but mostly he kept the store and walked the back roads where he had first heard the songs he made famous.

The building is simple. One story, frame walls, the cross-gable roof typical of mid-century country stores. A.P. and his friends raised it in 1945. He lived in part of it and conducted business in another part - the residence and the store under one roof, the way a great many small Appalachian merchants kept shop. Neighbors stopped in for cornmeal and conversation. A.P. was by all accounts a quiet, courteous host. He died in 1960. The store was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, the same year as the house he and Sara had raised their family in down the road.

The store building is now the Carter Family Museum, run by the Carter Family Memorial Music Center alongside the Carter Family Fold. It was renovated in September 2009. After the work was done, a crowd gathered to watch Rita Forrester - Janette Carter's daughter and A.P.'s granddaughter - cut the ribbon with Marty Stuart, who then performed with his band the Fabulous Superlatives. The collection inside includes the artifacts of two careers stitched together: the records, photographs, and instruments of the original trio, and the everyday objects of the storekeeper A.P. became when the records stopped. The museum opens before Saturday concerts at the Fold next door. Both buildings - the store and the venue - hold the same name and the same idea: that the songs A.P. carried out of these hollows should keep finding their way back.