Watermelon Wine by Frye Gaillard

Author:Frye Gaillard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Johnny Cash, country music, Peter Cooper, NewSouth Books, Watermelon Wine, Frye Gaillard, music, Grand Ole Opry, Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams
ISBN: 9781603063494
Publisher: NewSouth Inc.
Published: 2005-11-17T22:00:00+00:00

8

God, the Gospel, & Country Music

Lord, it’s a strange place to pray . . .

—Shel Silverstein

It was a wilting July weekend in South Carolina, just outside the booming little town of Rock Hill. The crowd of more than ten thousand had begun arriving early in the week; there were farmers and plumbers and preachers and salesmen, the hard-core folk from the back country, settling in at the Carowinds Amphitheater for a reverent, week-long festival of gospel music.

Some of the biggest names in the business were there—like the LeFevres, the Kingsmen, and Coy Cook and the Premiers. And while it may be true that none of them would produce much awe outside of gospel circles, for the avid and the faithful it was roughly equivalent to seeing Elvis Presley, Elton John, and one or two of the Beatles all in the same week.

“It’s entertainment and it’s inspiration,” explained Harold Pigford, a strapping South Carolina fan with sweat beads popping out on his sun-reddened forehead. “We go to shows like this whenever we can.”

For Pigford and thousands like him the appeal of gospel music is simple and direct. Its message is unfailingly reassuring—an optimistic New Testament fundamentalism, nearly devoid of fire and brimstone terror, with Jesus the omnipresent soother of everyday travail. “My boat shall sail safely though the waves splash high,” the LeFevres sing onstage, belting it out with a kind of high-pitched, hard-driving harmony that sets hands to clapping and shoes to tapping.

All of it is backed by the warbling melodrama of country steel guitars, and faint smiles of mellow satisfaction settle on the work-lined faces in the crowd. Even the restless, berry-brown children, tugging at the strings of their Carowinds balloons, can’t quite tear themselves away.

“It’s a time when people find themselves getting back to the basics,” says Jim Hamill, settling his two-hundred-plus pounds into a padded backstage chair, as the sweat trickled down from his close-cropped sideburns. “I think people are tired of put-ons and con jobs, and I’m talking about the whole overall picture, the feeling, the vibes you sometimes get in this country. I think people want something real, and that’s what this is—pure gospel.”

Hamill, a gruff and sincere musician from the foothills town of Hendersonville, North Carolina, is the lead singer for the Kingsmen, an Asheville group that won one of gospel music’s top awards in 1974 for its song, “When I Wake Up To Sleep No More.”

He is heartened, he says, by the growing commercial success of gospel music, and he attributes it to the fact that most Americans, beleaguered as they have been by problems ranging from war to Watergate, are searching for escape. He admits, of course, that there is a simpler factor as well: The people who listen to him most—the sturdy churchgoers of Bonifay, Florida, or Dalton, Georgia, or Cookville, Tennessee—have been the beneficiaries in recent decades of the inexorable, amoebalike expansion of the American middle class. They have more money now to spend on records.

But Hamill also believes that

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