This website is intended as a virtual space for celebrating the life and work of Janette Carter while we seek to share, refresh and renew her dedication to traditional music; for sharing music, memories, pictures, dreams and plans; for seeking ways to continue to strengthen the ideals that she envisioned as the work of the Carter Family Fold; and for discussing the issues that face the Fold, the music and the community we love and share. Above all else it is about the music.

Janette Carter started the Carter Fold in 1974 with her brother Joe and her children, Dale Jett and Rita Forrester. She did it to honor a promise to her father and to ensure that her family’s music, and the rich tradition that gave it birth, would remain a living heritage. Five years later, when the Fold was entrusted to a non-profit corporation, the Carter Family Memorial Music Center, the Articles of Incorporation put the Fold’s mission in these words:

… “to preserve and further old-time music played on acoustical instruments, more specifically to carry on the work, goals, ideals, education, traditions and musical heritage of Sara, Maybelle and A.P. Carter… to continue to present live performances of old-time music which tends to express the heart and emotion of the performer, above all else, the heart must be kept in this music, and the commercialism out.”

Since that time, under Janette’s wise hand, the Carter Fold became an incomparably precious resource for Scott County, for Appalachia, and for a musical community centered in Poor Valley and stretching worldwide. At the Carter Family Fold the heart was indeed in the music.

When Janette passed away in 2006, the charge to run the Fold fell to Janette’s children and to the Carter Family Memorial Music Center board. As strong as Janette’s dream may have been, the Fold was built with the love and labor of many; the Friends of the Carter Family Fold take it as our mission to promote and preserve Janette’s charge that “the heart must be kept in this music.”