Zither And Yon
Today we remember — as best we bloody can — the musical mother of all string pickers, Mother Maybelle Carter of The Carter Family™, born on this day, May 10, 1909 in Nickelsville, Virginia. Now if you’re thinking that “Mother” Maybelle was more famously a “Mother-In-Law” — to one John R. “Johnny” Cash — you’d only be partly right, for while she was, indeed, a relation to the pill-popping Man in Black, and mother to his wife Virginia June Carter Cash, Mother Maybelle was famous in her own right. Widely respected as a gee-tar player and banjo plucker of prowess by the Grand Ole Opryland Casino & Amusement Center®, Mother Maybelle was the matriarch of the Nashville scene long before her sonny-in-law entered it. What’s more, Mother Maybelle “gave birth” to a style of chorded-zither strumming — cradling the instrument in her arms, up about her shoulder as though she were burping a gassy baby child — a style that continues to be embraced by today’s generation of jam-banding zitherists, such as Marcus Mumford and Yngwie J. Malmsteen. Before Maybelle’s time, zithers and autoharps were played in one’s lap or atop a table, but Maybelle's maternal instincts caused her to pull the stringed sound box up into her arms one night and she commenced to play more lovingly after that. Later in life, Mother Maybelle grew frightfully possessive of her beloved zither and was rarely seen without the instrument, carrying it with her to the supermarket, the sodie shop or the big-tent church services popular among concealed-carry gun toters in the southern U.S. Her family and friends dismissed the matter — “Oh, Mother's just cookin' up the chord structure to another ‘Wildwood Rose’,” they’d say publicly — but in the semi-privacy of their own home, surrounded by F.B.I wiretaps, their concerns were more pronounced. “Mother, put down that goddamned zither and eat your apple sauce!” Johnny would exclaim in a fit of lost patience after another fall off the wagon. Ahh, but did she not leave us with a treasure trove of sweet, intricate folk and country tunes as a result of her obsession? (Don’t ask me, I only know the one bloody song, haha!) In any event, we’re lighting a candle atop the station house crumb cake today in honor of Maybelle Carter of the Carter Family. Well done, Mother!
