She set aside the fiddle to raise nine children. At 99, she made her Opry debut.

Growing up, she watched as her father carved fiddles with a hatchet and knife, shaping pieces of maple or pine he gathered near their home in the Arkansas woods. He had made his first fiddle when he was 14, in 1888. And while he had no formal training, he had gotten so good that neighbors would trade him a wagon, a bed or a cow for one of his fiddles. “With a little thinking and a little common sense,” he liked to say, “you can just about figure out how anything’s done.”