Sarah McCombie has an heirloom heart. As one half of the North Carolina roots duo the Chatham Rabbits, she pays homage to a wagon-wheel-worn, red-dirt-stamped music genre with her clawhammer banjo and lilting voice that gives shades of folk heroine Nanci Griffith. She wears handmade skirts and sweaters fished from the closets of grandmothers and great aunts. She even shares a 450-square-foot restored farmhouse with her husband and bandmate, Austin, on a plot of land in Guilford County that’s been in her family since 1753. There, when not tending to a menagerie that includes horses, goats, and a fan-favorite turkey named Cornbread, she’s dragging a metal detector across the earth and digging out arrowheads, centuries-old potsherds, and 1920s TootsieToys. “My great grandfather would have been ten years old,” she says, holding up a weathered matchbox car to the Zoom screen. “I like to imagine he was the one who played with it.”
Her fascination with history is hard-wired, she says. “I am naturally a very sentimental person and was always saving things when I was little, journaling a lot, taking photos with my little kids’ Polaroid. I’ve always been, for better or worse, obsessed with the past.”
That obsession extends to handwritten recipes, the most prized in her collection being a lemon chess pie “from the kitchen of Elizabeth Osborne”—her mother. As far as McCombie knows, the recipe originated in a 1950s newsletter from the Greensboro-based Jefferson Life Insurance Company. But Osborne made it her own by serving it at just about every family gathering. “Once when I was fifteen, we were celebrating my birthday in D.C., and my mom surprised me by bringing all the components to make it in the hotel room,” McCombie recalls. “She made it in the little toaster oven.”
Fresh off the release of the Chatham Rabbits’ fourth album, Be Real With Me, on February 14, McCombie shared the recipe with G&G. Not that it’s much of a secret. Her mother bought lemon-printed index cards for the express purpose of disseminating it—a sign, perhaps, that her daughter comes by her sentimentality honestly.
“Having that recipe to go back to is so similar to having a song that time-stamps something in your life,” McCombie says. “I can listen to ‘Hallelujah’ by Jeff Buckley and remember lying on the bed with my best friends when I was fourteen and being like, My gosh, we’re so old and mature. It’s the same thing with food—you can remember where you were when you had it and the imagery that conjures up.”
The Jeff Buckley memory, it should be noted, gets a shoutout in Be Real With Me, in a wistful track titled “Childhood Friends.” McCombie may be an old soul, but the new album telegraphs a pointed nostalgia for fleeting youth. The song “Collateral Damage,” for example, speaks to McCombie’s conflicting desire to start a family yet hold on to her freedom, while “Pool Shark’s Table” refuses to apologize for poor decision making. (“This time I was in New Orleans tryin’ to do it right, but those juicy hazy IPAs, they get me every time,” she croons.)
“For all the things I love about the past and revere in people in my ancestry, there is a point, maybe just naturally, where it shifts to, okay, I need to live out some things so the person that comes after me has stories about me,” she explains.
Just as long as some of those stories include pie.
Get the recipe below, and view the Chatham Rabbits’ upcoming tour dates here.
