Alabama Stories, Part Two: The Southern Gospel Journey into the Heart of Darkness
Live Not by Lies
I was 13 and about as awkward as a one-legged man on a unicycle.
I had on a stiflingly hot suit and sat on the side of the pew closest to the church aisle — you know, the one people walk down in little country churches when they are ready to repent of their sins and start a new life in Christ — or at least profess for the 47th time they are, indeed, a Christian.
This was a nervous place to land, but I was the youngest member of our Southern gospel group and wandered into the little country church behind my brothers and the rest of our entourage. OK, we didn’t have an entourage; there might have been a girlfriend or two tagging along with some of the older members of the group. I didn’t have a girlfriend and nor would I find one in places like this. You’ve probably heard the expression, “The ladies always go for the drummer.” I was in the unfortunate state that the “ladies” were mostly blue-haired grannies who had stock in denture cream. So I tagged along, remaining toward the back of our group as we entered the church and walked down the center aisle about mid-way down to find a pew that could hold all of us.
I should have saw that my timidity was actually placing me in vulnerable situations, but I was too young to connect the dots. I sat on the outside end of the row and the service began. We were scheduled to sing after the preaching ended and the plates of fried chicken, green bean casserole and banana pudding made their rounds and eventually found their remnants in the shallow, overstuffed graves of Rubbermaid trash bins. I always felt sorry for the clean-up crews at Southern fellowship halls. I pray one day God will grant them an extra crown.
We were a ragtag group of three brothers, a cousin and two other unrelated brothers and a rogue guitar player; we played all of our own songs with our own fingers and toes, and we wrote many of our own originals. There are five tapes floating around, trapped somewhere in the ether of time and space that proves this as a certainty. We didn’t travel in the tape-deck circles. That wasn’t real music. We were a real band, I clicked off songs, the piano, bass, guitars and drums locked in to form the sonic backdrop and helped support the four-part harmonies that the boys sang. We were one of the rare Southern gospel groups that slipped in a drum solo on one song.
The two brothers who were unrelated to my two brothers and myself grew up in the Pentecostal church; they played southern Gospel music, but added a measure of soul our group needed. These brothers passed around instruments, handing off the Fender Jazz bass over to replace it with a Telecaster. We were Southern Gospel enough that the older crowd loved us, but we could have also played at a bar and a group of drunks would have missed the parts about walking streets of gold and “Then sings my soul.” Or maybe they would have heard those lines and, spilling their tears in their beers, would have actually bore the fruit we supposedly desired and we would have seen some folks repent and plead for forgiveness. God, after all, said he came for the sick, not those who have no need of a physician.
We did play at a well-loved principal’s retirement party once. The sound guy doubled as the leader of his country-western and rock ‘n’ roll band that opened for us. Or maybe we opened for them. It’s hard to remember. We needed a bass player that evening and he threw down. I kept time, and for a moment it felt like my book of funk drumming lessons I worked through finally payed off. I never knew the drum riff from “Funky Drummer” could find a home in a gospel song, but we made it work.
Back at the little Alabama church, the service started and the crowd settled restlessly in their seats. The smells of country cooking and those overdone crockpot barbecue smoky meat fingers lingered through the crowd like an evil spirit, tempting the crowd to tune out until the final prayer was uttered. Those smoky fingers were the LSD of the church crowd and they knew it.
The service was typical, lots of announcements ate up a great part of the front end of the service. I never understood why someone in these churches spent half their week preparing a “bulletin” with all the church announcements neatly arranged only to have a youth pastor or a worship leader or, worse yet, a layman with a speech impediment, get up and read the darn thing verbatim.
With the announcements concluded, we knew the upcoming church softball schedule; we were also informed rather sternly that no cussing or beer drinking would be tolerated; of course, we were assured from the pulpit, “We knew none of you would be guilty of such sins, but if you see something, say something.” We knew the ladies were collecting items for an upcoming silent auction, and we knew the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering was already gracing the announcements even though it was only August.
We were instructed to stand and sing a few old hymns, a prayer was lifted and the evangelist who was wrapping up the week-long revival at the little country church came to the pulpit and began his mission of picking apart single verses of scripture, deconstructing them and therefore making them meaningless and then doing his best to spew his anger and uneducated drivel all over the crowd.
I’ll just say it. This guy was a punk. He was a large, loud man who pounded his fists on the pulpit. He’d wag his finger at the congregants. He’d call them out, exposing sins he had no idea about. He was loud and abrasive and had the command of the room, so, basically, he could get away with anything.
His vitriol turned toward the traveling singing group that arrived just in time for the service. He chided us for not being present during the previous five nights’ revival meetings. My thought: sorry, pal, this kind of life doesn’t pay that well and those were school nights. I guess he was also incapable of reading maps and was unaware we lived two hours away. We were there as guests, but treated like looters who were there to unravel the very detailed knot of everything he attempted to tie together leading up to his Sunday grand finale.
The intensity got really high when he decided to start his preaching rant by pacing up and down the aisles. Did I mention my vulnerable position there at the end of the pew, nothing separating me from the aisle except the craftsman’s work of a round-over cut along the edge of the thick wooden pew end?
I was a skinny, awkward 13-year-old, and for once I wish I was even smaller. I wish I could have completely disappeared. His sermon, which was more of a rant about the fear of ongoing sin and how it was proof you weren’t saved landed in the aisle right outside my pew. Like a construction worker dumping over a wheel-barrow load of rip-rap, the preacher stopped just outside my pew and decided he would use me as an example of what God’s wrath could look like so long as you didn’t truly repent, and try really hard to prove to God that you had indeed repented, and rinse, wash, repeat the entire process as often as possible.
He took me by the shoulders and shook me violently, his red face and bulging eyes ready to explode as he tangled his stream of consciousness sermon like a noose around my neck. After a few brief, violent, shakes, he let me down and moved on, continuing his tirade. I’m now much older and I am always slow to judge, but based on what this man did, it’s hard to square up that he was a man of God.
Our dad almost always went with us on these trips, especially on the longer ones. He was like the road manager, the driver, the communicator and liaison between the event organizers and us. He gave us space to set up our equipment and prepare for our concerts. His shoes were unfillable.
For some reason, he didn’t come along with us this particular Sunday. When we got home and my brothers, bless their hearts, explained what happened, he went into full-on Papa Bear mode. He made a couple phone calls and somehow got the number of that “evangelist.” Remember, I was 13, so this was probably somewhere in the summer of 1993. If you did have a cell phone it looked like one those backpack phones the troops used in Vietnam and the signal was always terrible. We didn’t have one. My dad was on a fact-finding mission to defend his little boy and using skills unbeknownst to my brothers and I, he found who he was looking for.
I’ve been proud of my dad a lot over the years, but I can’t think of a time I was more in awe of his fearlessness. He ripped that guy up one side and down the other. He informed him he would never treat a kid, or any other person that way again, if he had anything to do with it. I don’t know what the preacher said, but from the number of words my dad used, and the lack of silence, I doubt he said very much. I sat in my dad’s recliner in the next room and felt safe and at peace. I didn’t feel bad for the verbal beatdown the preacher received. He, after all, was a scoundrel. My dad, in a Christ-like manner, overturned the money changers and drove out the liars and thieves.
I didn’t lose my faith that day, or at least not my faith in God. I did lose faith in some people who wielded power like a Tommy gun. I lost faith in people like that poor excuse of a preacher who, with radar-like precision, honed in on the most vulnerable person he could find and then pounced. I could go on my own rant about how so many people in power do the same thing everyday in some manner in their handling of the weak. You know their type.
I’ve never had much use for people who promise the world but fail to deliver the goods. I rather think the silent types who surprise you with their efforts are the ones we should most emulate.
Over the course of several years, we travelled around the southeast, playing songs in churches, in municipal buildings, at fairs and other random places. There were a lot of weird experiences, but none so traumatic as that one.
Heck, once we were returning from a concert and my dad and I were the only ones in the van pulling our equipment trailer. We both smelled smoke. I opened the glove box to discover a small fire. I don’t remember how I put out the fire, but if registration and proof of insurance was ever needed, a raincheck would have been required.