DESCRIPTION:
Minnie Pearl, a member of the Grand Ole Opry cast from 1940 until her death in 1996, was country music's preeminent comedian and one of the most widely recognized comic performers American culture has ever produced. With her straw hat and its dangling $1.98 price tag, her representation of herself as a man-chasing spinster in the small town of Grinder's Switch, TN, and her great-hearted holler of "How-DEE! I'm just so proud to be here" as she took to the Opry stage, Pearl became an icon of rural America even as she lovingly satirized its ways.

She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1975. Pearl was still a television fixture in the 1980s, when she appeared on TNN's Nashville Now. She also toured the country for much of her career and made a number of recordings. Performing into the 1990s, Pearl suffered a stroke in 1991 and died five years later at the age of 83.

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I've found this poem listed under several different names but I titled it "Mother's Thimble"because it was the title I found most often. I also found an anonymous poem in an old scrapbook published in 1899 that matched nearly word for word - the only difference was a few words and phrases that were modernized. The poem may possibly be by a poet named John W. Holland, but I've not been able to conclusively determine this.

Mother's Thimble

I've been rummaging through a basket
Filled with relics of the past
One by one, I turned them idly
Until I found at last
wrapped in a piece of homespun
and laid away with care
the dingy old steel thimble
that my mother used to wear

O, what a flood of memories
sweeps in upon my soul
as the coarse and faded covering,
I carefully unroll
And dim with dust of useless years,
I see before me there
the battered old steel thimble
that my mother used to wear

Rough with the toil of mother love
in cheerless days of yore,
it is the only ornament
those dear hands ever wore
and I tenderly caress it as a treasure rich and rare,
this precious old steel thimble
that my mother used to wear

Companion of her widowhood,
her faithful friend for years,
made sacred by her patient toil
and sanctified by tears
No costly gem that sparkles
on the hand of lady fair
could buy the old steel thimble
that my mother used to wear

In a quiet little churchyard
she has slumbered many a year,
yet in this holy hour
I seem to feel her presence near
and hear her tender benediction
as I bow in grateful prayer
and kiss the old steel thimble
that my mother used to wear

The memory of my mother
shall be a beacon light,
to guide my wayward footsteps
in the path of truth and right,
and the key that opens heaven's door,
if I ever enter there,
will be the old steel thimble
that my mother used to wear