Alice Marie Webb Choate — known universally as "Aunt Ree," and called "Mum" by Jim himself — was Jim Quessenberry's mother-in-law and one of the great quiet forces behind the family's traditions. She hosted the Webb family reunions in Floyd, Arkansas that kept the extended family tethered across generations.
Those reunions were the kind of all-day affairs that the Delta produces: long tables, generations of cousins, food cooked from memory rather than recipe. Jim participated in and valued those gatherings deeply — they were cut from the same cloth as the all-night pit fires and 4th of July goat cooks he grew up watching in Birdeye.
Her influence on the family's sense of gathering, feeding people, and honoring tradition ran parallel to the competitive BBQ world Jim built — both rooted in the same conviction that food is how you hold people together.