‘Carter Scratch’: The Transformative Guitar Technique

Maybelle Carter’s unique guitar rhythm influenced musicians across genres.

The Mother Maybelle Carter exhibit at Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum features her 1928 Gibson L-5 acoustic guitar, which she used to revolutionize guitar playing with her signature “Carter scratch.” Rick Diamond/Getty Images

No other group set the tone for the future of country music while it was still in its infancy like the Carter Family. The trio didn’t simply witness the official creation of the genre in the 1920s, they helped birth it.

In the summer of 1927, musicians A.P. Carter, his wife, Sara, and her cousin Maybelle Carter traveled to the quaint town of Bristol, Tennessee, for the Bristol Sessions. There, pioneering producer Ralph Peer set up a makeshift studio and recorded country music royalty like Jimmie Rodgers. Though no one could have predicted it at the time, the project became so influential that Bristol is now known as the “Birthplace of Country Music.”