Mother, Matriarch And Mentor

Maybelle Carter apparently made a mean chicken gizzard soup, which called for chicken livers, necks and backs, besides the gizzards. Her daughter June Carter Cash published that recipe, along with a host of others, in Mother Maybelle's Cookbook: A Kitchen Visit With America's First Family of Song in 1989, a little over a decade after her mother's passing. Only those who'd had the privilege of being guests in Maybelle's home had witnessed what she could do with soup pots and frying pans in the name of painstaking hospitality. Even so, the notion of being able to purchase the recipes for her homecooked meals fit with how the public knew her — as the musical matron who put her Gibson L-5 archtop guitar, autoharp and long memory to use holding her rightful place in professional communities she helped inspire.

There was really no precedent for Maybelle Carter, not at the beginning nor by the end of her five-decade career. In the late 1920s and '30s, when she was starting out, people who hadn't seen her perform live, had only heard her on Carter Family records and radio broadcasts, scarcely believed it could be a young woman supplying the trio's primary