Fiddlin' John Carson - Early Life

Early Life

Carson was born in (or near) Fannin County, Georgia, and grew up on a farm there. His father worked as a section foreman for the W&A Railroad Company. In his teens, Carson learned to play the fiddle, using an old Stradivari-copy violin brought from Ireland in the early 18th century. When he was eleven years old he used to roam the streets of Copperhill playing for tips. In his teens, he worked as a racehorse jockey.

In 1894, he was married and a couple of years later, in 1900, he began working for the Exposition Cotton Mill in Atlanta followed by work in other cotton mills of the Atlanta area for the next twenty years, eventually he was promoted to be a foreman. In 1911, Carson's family moved to Cabbagetown, Georgia and he and his children began working for the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill. Three years later, in 1914, the workers of the cotton mill went on strike for their right to form a union, and Carson had nothing else to do but to perform for a living in the streets of North Atlanta. In these days, he wrote many songs and he used to print copies and sell them in the streets for a nickel or a dime. Some of the songs he wrote dealt with real life drama like the murder ballad "Mary Phagan". Because the governor of Georgia, John Marshall Slaton, commuted the death sentence of the accused murderer of Mary Phagan to a life sentence, Carson, in outrage, wrote another version of "Mary Phagan" where he accused the governor of being paid a million dollars from a New York bank to change the verdict. Carson was thrown in jail for slander. (The accused killer, Leo Frank, was lynched; decades later, a witness gave testimony indicating that the killer had probably been another man, Jim Conley.)

On April 1, 1913 Carson performed at the first annual "Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers' Convention", held at the Municipal Auditorium in Atlanta, where he only became fourth. But between 1914 and 1922 he was proclaimed "Champion Fiddler of Georgia" seven times. The governor of Tennessee, Robert L. Taylor dubbed him "Fiddlin' John". In 1919, Carson began touring, mostly the areas north of Atlanta, with his newly formed band the Cronies. He became associated with many politicians of Georgia, like Tom Watson, Herman Talmadge and Eugene Talmadge, relations that gave rise to new songs like "Tom Watson Special". Carson and his daughter Rosa Lee began a series of performances for different political campaigns: for the Tom Watson U.S. Senate Campaign in 1920, for all of the Gene Talmadge's campaigns, and for the Herman Talmadge governor campaign. On September 9, 1922, Carson made his radio debut at Atlanta Journal's radio station WSB in Atlanta, It was reported by the Atlanta Journal that Carson's fame quickly spread all over the United States following his broadcast at WSB.