“The Sweetest Gift, A Mother’s Smile” was written by James B. Coats, a Mississippi schoolteacher and singing-school leader who also wrote “Where Could I Go But to the Lord.” The lyric tells of a mother who travels to a prison to see her son. She brings no money and no gift, only her smile, and the song holds that up as the sweetest gift he could receive. It was first recorded in 1946 by James and Martha Carson, the Atlanta radio duo billed as the Barn Dance Sweethearts, on a White Church single backed with “The Man of Galilee.” The Blue Sky Boys cut it for RCA Victor in 1949 and kept it in their broadcast repertoire, and Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard sang it as a duet on Hazel & Alice (1973).