Wake up at 5am to the Chuck Wagon Gang and you’re awake. It was my good fortune to share a barracks at Fort Dix, New Jersey with a fellow who was a devoted fan and disciple of gospel music. Every morning we awoke to that familiar salutation, “This is your old neighbor J. Bazzel and Mrs. Mull with your Mull—M-U-L-L—Singing Convention” riding a clear channel 50,000 watt AM signal all the way from Knoxville, Tennessee. Blind from childhood, for over sixty years J. Bazzel and Mrs. Mull played gospel music on the radio and later on television. The Chuck Wagon Gang was a favorite of the Mulls, along with the singing governor of Louisiana, Jimmie Davis. Governor Davis, composer of ‘Keep on the Sunny Side,’ was married to Effie Carter, founding member and alto in the Chuck Wagon Gang.
Rolling out of the bunk to the chord of F on acoustic guitar and the first song of the morning, the Chuck Wagon Gang, always the Chuck Wagon Gang, “Looking for a City.”
Here among the shadows in a lonely land
We’re a band of pilgrims on the move
Burdened down with sorrows, shunned on every hand
Looking for a city built above…..
Their harmony and Effie Carter’s strong, driving alto set a beat in your head that would push you through a pre-dawn five mile run through the Pine Barrens. Pilgrims on the move.
I sang a little gospel in high school, singing harmony in a quartet, sometimes baritone, sometimes tenor. Our pianist was a gospel music fan who would get us invitations to sing in area churches, usually the evening service, occasionally at a gospel sing with several groups performing. Coached and practiced we sang with close harmony, our eyes always on the back pew where the local high school girls would flock, their heads swaying a little to the music, smiling whenever they would make eye contact with one of us on stage, visual flirting across 15 pews and over the heads of their parents, uncles, and aunts. Singing gospel was a great way to meet girls. If we were lucky, they would be standing around out front after the service acting like they weren’t waiting for us to come out, doubly lucky and we might talk for a while. If we were truly blessed the conversation might lead to a coke, a cheeseburger, and a slow drive taking them home. “They say for every boy and girl there’s just one love in this world,” sang the great Sonny James. A nice lyric but in my experience not strictly true. “Young in the sun once only, time let me play and be golden in the mercy of his means,” wrote Dylan Thomas, a sentiment made manifest if you got to drive her home. There are many paths to Heaven brethren, and one might be a dirt road.
We once got an invitation to a gospel sing at Lotts Creek Church in Bulloch County, a beautiful church, lovely setting. Cars were parked bumper to bumper, parked out along road, people streaming in to hear the big name on the bill, the great Hovie Lister and the Statesmen Quartet. The Statesmen came last on the program. We, a mere warm up act, sang first. The Statesmen, with Lister on piano, put out as much music as a rock group with big amps and electric guitars. Hovie’s piano was a match and inspiration for Jerry Lee Lewis in style and flourish. If you don’t get saved listening to ‘Beyond the Gates,’ with Jack Toney on lead, Big Chief Jim Wetherington singing base, Doy Ott baritone, and Rosie Rozell at tenor, well then, you just may not be on that railway to heaven.
We, high school boys and amateurs, were astounded at their singing, their voices were thrilling to everyone in the sanctuary, to the folks standing at the open doors who couldn’t get a seat, and I guess to countless bewildered creatures in the woods beyond the light of the church. On that Sunday night we did not stand out front trying to catch the attention of any of the attending lovelies. I think we felt a little humbled in comparison. Humility, note, is not common to 17-year-old boys. Looking out the car window, speaking to no one in particular, our bass singer and no match for Big Chief Jim Wetherington, was morose. “You know how leaves and stuff gets picked up and follows along behind a fast train?” he says. “That’s what this feels like. We’ve just been rolled off the trestle, boys, blown away by the Seaboard Coastline.”
For a few years forever ago, I worked at a radio station in Athens, Georgia. I was pursing the extended undergraduate program – the ‘no rush till the GI Bill runs out’ plan. The GI Bill, while generous, was not enough to live on so I always had a job. This station featured local preachers on Sunday morning. They would come in, pay cash for half an hour, step in front of a mike and preach. It has sometimes been suggested that radio preachers who end their sermons with an appeal for money are just in it for the money.
This was not the case with the fellows I got to know on Sunday mornings.
They preached small country churches, road side chapels, or rented spaces in vacant store buildings, with congregations rarely able to pay full time for a preacher, much less fund a radio outreach. Most of these fellows had day jobs to support themselves. One was a house painter, another was a car salesman, one sold life insurance, a calling not dissimilar to preaching, a couple worked a circuit, preaching at two or three churches each Sunday. I doubt that the money they received from on-air requests covered the cost of their half-hour.
These preachers often brought LPs of hymn music to mix in with their message and the LPs were most often Southern Gospel. The Florida Boys, the Gaithers, the Cathedral Quartet, Happy Goodman, the Lefevres, the Inspirations, Chuck Wagon Gang, and the Rambos. On the strength of a photo on an album cover I briefly entertained a crush on Reba Rambo, an alliterative name redolent with ripe, bursting grapes and hot summer nights.
One of these fellows preached a church near Carnesville, up in Franklin County. He was a quiet, modest man. I watched through the control room glass during his program, half-an hour of prayer, message, a couple of songs, a thanks for listening and God bless each of you at the end. He spoke quietly into the mike, closed his eyes as he prayed, talking one-on-one to every listener as though he was holding their hands. He invited me to his church for evening services. The church was old, probably mid-19th century, a simple rectangle and gable roof, sitting on dry stacked stone piers, a small belfry and a spire. He shook my hands when I walked in, introduced me as the man who got him on the air every Sunday morning. ‘Pleased to meet you, son, glad you could join us.’
The pianist was a young man with a romping style who played without charts or hymnal. He knew the tunes by heart he said and could play them by ear. The opening song was ‘Life is Like a Mountain Railroad,’ written by Georgia’s own Charlie Tillman.
As you roll across the trestle,
Spanning Jordan’s swelling tide;
You behold the Union Depot
Into which your train will glide.
Amen said the preacher when the singing was over, amen the congregation replied. I wish I remembered that preacher’s name, but so many years have passed. Maybe he’s buried in the graveyard alongside the church. Weary pilgrim, welcome home.
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