Bloomington-Normal and McLean County are not really known as a cradle of country music. But there was this one time...in the 1930s.
Cynthia May Carver, better known by her stage name “Cousin Emmy,” was a pioneer in country and roots music during the golden age of radio from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Carver was born in south central Kentucky in 1903, the second youngest of seven children. Everyone in the family was musical.
“When I was a little girl, my sister went and took guitar lessons. She’d have to go and get her teacher to tune her guitar. Well, I’d run it down every day when they’d go out into the tobacco patch or work in the corn field. I’d run it down, tune it up," Cousin Emmy said in a 1943 Time Magazine profile..
"Got to playin’ pretty good on it. So, my father was a great violinist. I asked him one day, ‘Let me play with you.’ He said, ‘When you get big enough, I will.’ I was 7. I said ‘Well, let me try it.’ And he did. And from then on out, I played with my father, on all the concerts and things that he went to.”
Around 1917, Carver’s parents split up and her mother moved with the children to Bloomington where extended family lived, said Bill Kemp, librarian at the McLean County Museum of History.
“Molly, the mother, worked as a housekeeper. The children worked all sorts of odd jobs to help put food on the table. It was a really hard-scrabble life here in Bloomington,” said Kemp.
In her late teens and early 20s, Carver and one of her brothers, Burton, formed a singing and musical duo that toured Central Illinois.
“She was known then as Jo White,” Kemp said. “She could play the banjo and the guitar, and the fiddle, the piano, the accordion, the saxophone, the harmonica, and the ukulele. And it goes without saying, though we'll say it anyway, she could play the jaw harp and the musical saw as well.”
The rise of radio and Country and Western music in the United States are inextricably linked to white southern migration, said Kemp.
“You have an influx of poor whites during World War I seeking industrial jobs in the north, so you have a lot of people from Kentucky and Tennessee and the Carolinas settling in the north,” said Kemp.
Radio stations such as WGN in Chicago offered programs attractive to that audience — what were known as "barn dance" shows.
Carver performed regularly on one such show in Louisville, Kentucky, on WHAS, as "Cousin Emmy and Her Kin Folk."
In 1935, Cousin Emmy had her first big break when she won the National Old Time Fiddlers’ Contest — the first woman to take the top prize. Apocryphally, that led to a gig in West Virginia, where she taught "Grandpa Jones" of later television show "Hee Haw" fame, how to play the banjo.
By the mid-1930s, she had simply become Cousin Emmy and was part of a morning show on KMOX, a 50,000-watt AM radio station in St. Louis. She and her band played Appalachian fiddle numbers, cowboy ballads, and earthy gospel numbers.
“First, I hits it up on my banjo and I wow ‘em. Then I do a number on the guit-tar and play the French harp and sing all at the same time. Then somebody hollers ‘Let’s see her yodel,’ and I obliges. And then somebody yells, ‘Let’s see her dance,’ and I obliges. After that we come to the sweetest part of the program — hymns,” said Carver.
Carver played up her hillbilly roots, for street cred, perhaps more legend and lore than fact, more tall tales than truth.
“She described her early life and upbringing in ‘a log cabin with cracks so big you could throw a cat through one and never touch its hair,” Kemp said. “She would tell many stories, such as that, for example, that she only had two weeks of schooling and she learned to read by looking at mail order catalogs.”
She would say "she ‘ain't got no time for courtin," and would be reported always as unmarried or single.
“But we do know that she had been married at least twice, perhaps three times, with one divorce coming in the late 1940s to a St. Clair County, Illinois farmer,” said Kemp.
In 1943, she had an audience of 2.5 million people on KMOX, said Time — the magazine featured her on its cover.
“Cousin Emmy is a slightly faded blonde of about 30 with a voice like a locomotive whistle and a heart of gold. She has a broad, bony face, a wide mouth, lots of platinum colored hair, immense enthusiasm, and a masterly capacity for mugging,” said the article.
Not everyone in the Carver family shared that success. One brother stayed in Kentucky, but was later killed during a poker game in Iowa, said Kemp. Her sister, Pearl, came to McLean County already married, but later remarried and farmed east of Bloomington. Another brother worked in a cement finishing and contracting business in Bloomington.
In the 1960s, the young musicians who comprised the folk revival rediscovered artists like Cousin Emmy and brought her to a younger audience. She appeared in Pete Seeger's television show, "Rainbow Quest." She recorded an album with the New Lost City Ramblers.
“I was playin’ Disneyland. They commenced to hollerin’ out ‘Johnny Booker’ and ‘Bowlin Green’ and I thought, ‘My goodness! Its been about 20 years since I recorded that song’ and I thought they’re not that old. What goes on here?" Carver said on a recording with the New Lost City Ramblers.
"They come backstage where I was at. And they said ‘Well, we love that music.’ And I said, 'Well boys, where in the world did you ever hear of that at?’ They said, ‘Oh we play it!’ I said, ‘You do?’ So, I invited them out to my house and I’m a tellin’ you, only they’re better, you’d have thought that was Cousin Emmy in the room pickin’ and a singin.'"
Kemp said Carver also is a footnote in a seminal moment in U.S music history. On July 25, 1965 at the Newport, Rhode Island Folk Festival, Bob Dylan went electric, switching from an acoustic guitar to an electric one.
“He was booed while on stage by hardcore folk fans who didn't like the fact Dylan was plugged in,” said Kemp. “And who's on stage right before Bob Dylan gets booed? None other than Cousin Emmy, formerly from Bloomington, Illinois,” said Kemp.
Kemp said her last performance in Bloomington may have been as part of The New Friends of Old Time Music series once hosted at Illinois State University in the 1970s.
Carver passed away at age 77 in 1980 in Sherman Oaks, California.
McHistory is a co-production of WGLT and the McLean County Museum of History.
