Janette Carter was born in 1923, A.P. and Sara's middle child. She grew up watching the original Carter Family record their first sessions for Ralph Peer in Bristol in 1927, then tour and broadcast through the years that made their songs a national inheritance. After the trio broke up in 1943 and her parents drifted apart, Janette stayed close to her father in Maces Spring. She made him a deathbed promise to preserve the music he had spent his life collecting. The Fold was the form that promise took. She built it next to his old store with help from her brother Joe Carter, who often joined her on stage. She served as master of ceremonies and performer every Saturday night until her own death in 2006. Her daughter Rita Forrester now fills that role.

The rules at the Fold are simple. No electric instruments - a tribute to the old-time music the Carters preserved. No smoking or drinking on the premises. A dance floor sits in front of the stage, and on most Saturday nights it fills with people doing Appalachian buckdancing and clogging, the percussive flat-footed step that crosses Irish, Scottish, and African traditions. The performers are mostly local - musicians who play the same songs A.P. learned in these hollows, joined by touring acts who treat the Fold as a kind of pilgrimage. The acoustics are open and forgiving. The audience knows the songs.

Johnny Cash married Maybelle Carter's daughter June in 1968, making him family to the Fold. He came back many times to play - the electric-instrument rule quietly suspended for him. His final concert anywhere was here, on July 5, 2003. June had died on May 15. Cash was visibly grieving, visibly frail, but he insisted on the show. He sang to the crowd at his mother-in-law's people's pavilion, took requests, and gave his last interview as a performer to the audience around him. He died on September 12 of that same year. Cash's daughter, his band, and Carter relatives have all returned to play the Fold since. The yearly Carter Family Memorial Festival in August celebrates the anniversary - the 45th was held in 2019.

Just behind the pavilion stands the 1880s log cabin where A.P. Carter was born. It used to sit several miles away. In the early 2000s Marty Stuart - former Cash band member, lifelong student of the Carter songbook - raised funds to move and restore it. The cabin was rededicated next to the Fold before Janette's death. Across the road stands A.P.'s old store, now the Carter Family Museum, renovated in 2009. The three buildings - cabin, store, pavilion - form a small living archive of the music that came out of this valley. The Fold's seats are usually findable on a Saturday night. For gospel and special shows, ticket-holders are advised to reserve well ahead.