Carson was a pivotal figure in the cultural history of Atlanta and the South not only because of what he did, but also because of what he represented. Born just after the Civil War in North Georgia’s Fannin County, Carson labored variously as a farmer, railroad hand, moonshiner, mill worker, and house painter. He brought his family to the Atlanta area in 1900 to work for the Exposition Cotton Mill, and in 1911 they moved into a four-room company house in Cabbagetown, a community adjoining the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill where John and other family members signed on to toil twelve hours a day. Then, during a 1913 mill strike, Carson earned change as a street musician, “busking” for coins on Decatur Street and in other likely locations. Indeed, 1913 was a banner year for Carson not only because of the strike, but because the first of the fiddling conventions that would win local fame for him took place that year. 1913 was also the year of the murder of thirteen-year-old factory worker Mary Phagan. Carson’s commemorative ballad “Little Mary Phagan” caught fire, especially among mill workers outraged by the crime and by what they perceived as attempts by Phagan’s supervisor and suspected killer Leo Frank to buy his way out of responsibility for it. On the day of Frank’s 1915 lynching, Carson sang the song for a crowd gathered at the Marietta Courthouse until he was hoarse. The ability to express the feelings of displaced farmers made him a valuable tool for rurally oriented politicians such as Tom Watson and Eugene Talmadge. Performing at their rallies, Carson served as the symbol of the imagined lost virtues of an agrarian past. His local renown also made him a valuable commodity for the newly established WSB. In September 1922, he became the first country fiddler to appear on radio, afterward becoming such an on-air fixture that WSB broadcast a special program each year on his birthday.