A special celebration was held for a 91-year-old member of the Winterville, Ga., Methodist Church, stepping down after 75 years as piano player, members said.

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The long-time congregant was honored by a special Sunday service and celebration lunch at the Winterville United Methodist Church as part of "Mary Whitehead Day," the Athens (Ga.) Banner-Herald reported.

"I think it's awful nice of them to put on a special day for me, and I am going to miss playing the piano every Sunday, but I'm 91 years old," Whitehead said. "It's not so easy for me to get around as it used to be."

Whitehead began playing piano in church in 1935 when she was 15, traveling on alternate Sundays between the preacher-sharing Winterville and the Tuckston United Methodist Church.

She and husband Wesley worked in the Savannah shipyards during World War II but Mary kept up playing the piano in their local community worship center, the Banner-Herald said.

The couple settled in Winterville after the war where they lived until Wesley's death in 1999.

Mary plays by ear and can launch into anything from church hymns to Dixieland, but please don't ask her to do one thing:

"I don't like to practice. If I can't play it by ear in a few minutes, then I don't want to play it," she said. "I've got to feel it to play it."

It wasn't only church that got the benefit of Mary's playing: In the 1980s and 1990s she played piano at retirement centers and for inmates at the Clarke County Jail.

"I loved going to that prison. It did me more good than it did them," Whitehead said.

"They taught me a lot doing that prison ministry. I realized going there that Jesus Christ shares just as much blood for any one of us as he did for any of the men who committed the sins that got them in there."