Country Music and Vittles

I remember that time and how I would wake around 4 o'clock to my pappa's record player. He loved music. We had all the latest records and a wind-by-hand Victor Victrola that played three minutes to a wind. Our records were by the "skillet-licking crowd," Jimmie Rodgers or the Carter Family. My pappa loved Mamma Maybelle's song Wildwood Flower.

When I awoke to this music, I knew I must hurry into the kitchen where my pappa always sat after feeding the stock and building the fire in the stove for breakfast to be cooked. Always, if I hurried, I could sit on my pappa's lap before the little ones woke up.

He sat there and chatted with my mamma while she made homemade biscuits and a good breakfast. He would hold me very close and tell me stories and sing little songs. This to me was heaven. Our kitchen was large. It had a very big wood-burning stove with a warming closet at the top and a big tank at the end for heating water as my mamma cooked.

We always had food in abundance. We kept two milk cows and raised at least five or six "killing hogs," which provided bacon, sausage, ham, shoulders, cracklings, lard, fresh pork chops, backbones and ribs, liver, brains, pig feet, and head souse.

Sometimes we canned fresh meat to preserve it. We stuffed sausage in homemade cloth bags in large amounts, probably making 50 to 100 pounds at a time. This was always a good time of working together and testing the sage and other spices.

We often had milk and cornbread for the evening meal. My mamma churned by hand and we had lots of butter and buttermilk. We always had chickens for eggs or to eat. I cannot remember ever buying these items at the store.

The farm provided corn, fruit, potatoes, pumpkins, melons, berries, and cabbage for eating and making sauerkraut. Corn was sent to a gristmill to be ground for cornmeal each week. We canned everything we could and dried fruit, beans, and peas. We raised turnips and greens.

While working the farm we ate cantaloupe, watermelon, tomatoes, sugarcane, berries, green apples, peaches or whatever was in season. We could always find a snack of something in the fields or woods.