COVER STORY
Around the Opry Table
A feast of stories and recipes from the Grand Ole Opry
If you’re on Jeannie Seely’s Christmas list, you might want to turn on your oven and get out the cookie sheets. Home-baked goodies are always a popular gift this time of year, but Jeannie likes to think of the exchange as a partnership. “One year at Christmas time, I was thinking of how these days, we have to do so much on our own, from ATM machines for banking to self-service gasoline pumps. So, I got some of those Toll House ready-to-bake cookie square packages, put them in holiday boxes from the Dollar General Store and attached this note: ‘These days, I have to pump my own gas and sack my own groceries, so you can bake your own Christmas cookies.’”
Jeannie’s touching tale is just one of the dozens told to me over the course of the year I spent backstage at the Grand Ole Opry stalking members for stories and recipes to include in the recently published Around The Opry Table.
The idea for a Grand Ole Opry cookbook was first proposed at a conference table in the Gaylord office on the Opryland property in the middle of a very hot summer. As the idea developed that fall, the concept was expanded from a compilation of recipes into a collection of stories from Opry members about food, with a recipe to accompany each story. The project began picking up steam just as the 2005 holiday season rolled around, which turned out to be a great time to begin a discussion of food.
Jeannie Seely is called Seely around the Opry, a habit that began, she explains, as a way to distinguish Jeannie-Jeanne-Jean from one another. “There was me, Jeanne Pruett and Jean Shepard all at the same time, so people just began calling us by our last names.” Seely had invited me to her home not far from the Grand Ole Opry House in Donelson to talk about food, warning me first that cooking was not one of her top five talents. She joked that when she was married to Hank Cochran and feeding his three sons, the nearby Tastee-Freeze was kept very busy. As we sat in her cozy kitchen, she took something off the wall and handed it to me. Preserved in a wooden frame was the original copy of her great-great grandmother’s recipe for Gingerbread, handwritten on page 119 of a school composition book. The creased and stained piece of paper was actually written by Jeannie’s mother, who noted that at that time, the recipe was over one hundred years old. When I asked her if she made the gingerbread for Christmas, she laughed and told me the story about the bake-your-own cookies. The next year, she didn’t even bother with the dough; she just added a coupon to a holiday painted plate!
On the other hand, Jeanne Pruett was most often mentioned by other members as the Opry’s best cook, and when I spoke with her, she confirmed that cooking, entertaining and keeping house are what she does best and loves most. The youngest of ten children raised in Pell City, Alabama, Jeanne learned to cook in the kitchen of her family farmhouse, watching her mother and four older sisters. Though she notes that they never cooked from a recipe, as Jeanne began keeping her own house, she began writing down the old family recipes. “The hardest part was figuring out the measurements,” she told me. Many of those recipes were used in the series of cookbooks she published called Feedin’ Friends, the success of which led to Gaylord Entertainment asking her to turn an unused building on the grounds of the Opryland Park into a restaurant. She jumped at the chance, and Feedin’ Friends restaurant became as much of an attraction as a ride on the Wabash Cannonball or one of the live shows that distinguished Opryland from other theme parks. It wasn’t just tourists to Nashville who lined up for good ole’ southern cooking at Feedin’ Friends; the restaurant had a loyal clientele of senior citizens who lived nearby and bought season passes to the park, which they enjoyed for its beautiful landscaping and walking paths. One of the most popular dishes, she told me, was white beans and fried corn bread, which she would go in and fry up herself. That recipe, along with one for Hot Chicken Legs and Russian Fruit Tea Tennessee Style, is in her chapter. In Marty Robbins chapter, Jeanne tells of his love for her carrot cake (recipe included!) and later reveals Dolly Parton’s love of her fried potatoes and onions, which Jeanne dubbed Goll-y, Doll-ys. “Dolly and I can eat our weight in these!” she vows.
Every December, Opry members look forward to the annual holiday spread set out by Jean Shepard and her band, The Second Fiddles. When the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes take over the Opry House every holiday season, the Grand Ole Opry moves back to its home of 41 years, The Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville. No member of the Opry is happier about that than Jean Shepard, who cried onstage during the final performance at the Ryman March 15th, 1974. Her holiday party celebrates several special events that take place in November----her birthday, her wedding anniversary and her Opry induction anniversary—and the Ryman is the perfect venue for that. Shepard, Second Fiddles and other Opry members arrived for that Saturday night’s show toting dishes that were placed in a production room stage left. Shepard told me that before the Ryman was refurbished, this room had been the tiny ladies restroom/women’s dressing room, where she, Pruett, Seeley, Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline and Minnie Pearl had once jostled elbows for mirror position. On this particular night, sausage balls, ham and biscuits, deviled eggs, cheese balls, Christmas cookies and pecan pies were claiming shelf space. As Opry members passed the room, paused at the door, waiting for the go sign from Pruett. Finally, when Hal Ketchum poked his head in and with puppy dog eyes pleaded, “I’ll trade a fiddle for a biscuit!” Shepard relented and pointed him to the stack of paper plates, a signal that was somehow silently transmitted to every singer, fiddle player, buck dancer, stage hand and announcer within 100 yards of the tasty buffet. Shepard herself had made 300 sausage balls the night before, and all of the ham and biscuits, but it is her drummer Gregg Hutchins who is the celebrated cook in the crew, having published his own cookbook, Cooking With Gregg. On this frosty winter night, he brought two kinds of cookies, but his boss requested his Aunt Floy’s Butterscotch Pie recipe be the one included in her chapter, and so it is.
Many Opry members reached out to others for recipes that meant much to them: Bill Anderson asked the president of his Maryland fan club chapter for the recipe for the sugar cookies that he and his band look forward to each time they are in her part of the country, and which my children and their friends promise are just as good as he said they were. The highlight of Brad Paisley’s visits to Faye and Dub Smith’s house in Alabama is not just the fishing in their pond, but Faye’s Fried Pork Chops and Gravy. A decades-long friendship between Ricky Skaggs and an Oregon couple who were devoted fans of his began over a pear pie Susan Adams brought to a concert. Lorrie Morgan went to her Grandmother Ethel Morgan’s recipe box for Chicken and Dumplin’s, and her mother Anna’s for her strawberry shortcake that was a favorite of father George Morgan’s fellow Opry members.
Fans might be surprised by some of the Opry’s menfolk who aren’t afraid to tie on an apron: Jim Ed Brown offers two of the more sophisticated recipes---Sautéed Duck in Vinegar Sauce, and Duck Soup with Wild Mushrooms. Steve Wariner was so concerned that his Luscious Cherry Pie be made correctly that he sent along a diagram for constructing the lattice crust. Alan Jackson was slightly more laid back with his instructions for making pimento cheese---it is all of three ingredients, four if you add the optional black pepper. And I was blessed indeed to spend an afternoon with Porter Wagoner at his Donelson home, where daughter Debra Jean prodded him into giving me a handwritten copy of Porter’s Family Night Dinner Spaghetti Sauce. He told me that was his specialty, along with his chocolate fudge, which his mother taught him to make when he was just a little boy.
Of course, there were revered Opry members I was not fortunate enough to speak with, but thanks to the marvelous Country Music Hall of Fame library, I was able to uncover recipes from Roy Acuff, Pee Wee King, Curley Fox and Texas Ruby, Whitey Ford, Ernest Tubb and The Cackle Sisters, all of them originally published in Minnie Pearl’s Grinder’s Switch Gazette. The recipes in Minnie’s chapter came from her cookbook, Minnie Pearl Cooks. While she may have played an unsophisticated country girl on the Opry, in real life, Sarah Cannon was an accomplished cook and gracious hostess. She was one of the few members of the Opry who was as comfortable among entertainers as she was among Nashville bluebloods.
Around The Opry Table is not technically a history of the Grand Ole Opry, but it does chronicle the relationship between Opry members and family, friends and fans, which was frequently expressed through food. From first member Uncle Dave Macon through Dierks Bentley, who until Josh Turner’s recent induction, was the Opry’s newest member, I hope that Around The Opry Table gives Opry fans a generous buffet of stories and recipes they will want to return to again and again.
--by Kay West