Lighter Moments from Gospel Groups

The Lord’s work is serious business, most of the time

YOU MIGHT THINK that the lives of gospel singers are all serious business. After all, they’re doing the Lord’s work. But they do have their lighter moments. Just ask them.

We asked Don Elrod to ask them for us. Elrod sang with Southern gospel groups for thirty-five years, eight with the Singing Deacons of Central Baptist Church in Gainesville, Georgia; twelve with the First Corinthians; and the last fifteen years with Georgia, a trio from Gainesville. So he knows a lot of gospel singers and is not bashful about asking them about funny incidents.

Here’s one that happened to Elrod himself:

Georgia was singing for Apple Savage at Carver’s Chapel Baptist Church in Rabun County. Apple oversaw the service, and after he introduced us, we began to sing. Well, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, and many were raising their hands and shouting “Amen.” After we had sung for about thirty minutes, Apple stood up and announced, “Prayer time. Anyone that wants prayer should come to the altar.”

One dear old gentleman came forward and said he had cancer and he requested prayer. We’re still standing on the platform, so Apple turns to me and says, “Don, will you come down and anoint ‘Brother Jones’ with oil and pray for him?”

I had noticed a bottle of anointing oil in the pulpit earlier in the service, so at this point I turned to Terry Dale, our tenor singer, and asked him to give me some oil. If you’ve never been in a service where folks are anointed with oil, let me explain that you can anoint a good-size congregation with just a few drops of oil. Keep in mind there was one man waiting in the altar to be anointed.

Now my microphone is in my left hand, and I hold out my right hand, expecting Terry to give me one or two drops of oil. Apparently, the boy had no previous experience with this procedure, so I got a handful of oil. I mean it was running over. Let me digress and explain that this dear man, who was on his knees in the altar, had undergone chemotherapy and had lost all his hair. I immediately began to pray and spread the oil on this sweet man’s head at the same time. When I thought I had disposed of as much of that oil as I could, I closed the prayer and went back to the stage, and we continued to sing.

I thought the worst of this entire experience was behind me, but I quickly realized I couldn’t hold the microphone in the hand that had held the oil; it kept sliding down. And apparently, without realizing it, I had gotten enough of the slippery substance on the other hand to cause the same problem there. Luckily, we had mic stands onstage, and so I finished the concert with my mic on the stand.

Unfortunately, “Brother Jones” was having a problem, too. He was sitting on the front pew where we couldn’t help but see what was happening. With all that oil on his head, it had to go somewhere, and it began by running down his forehead; he wiped there. Then it began running down his temples and behind his ears; he wiped there. Finally, it must have run down the back of his head and neck, because he was using his handkerchief there, too.

Now, here is the rest of the story. We went back to the same church four or five years later, and “Brother Jones” was there, and he told us how the Lord had healed him of cancer.

True story, you couldn’t make this up.

Here’s a story from Judy Clapsaddle of Soul Purpose Quartet:

We were singing at a beautiful church with a very long middle aisle. Everything was going along fine. Shortly after the service had started, the church bus carrying many people from a nearby extended-care facility had arrived. A sweet gentleman using a walker entered the main aisle of the sanctuary.

Evidently, he didn’t feel he was moving fast enough and decided to pick up his walker and carry it. As he continued up the aisle, we noticed, as did others, his pants started sliding to his knees. He must have felt a draft, because he stopped quickly, pulled up his pants, lifted his walker, and kept right on coming up the aisle.

Now remember, we’re still on the platform trying to sing while all this was happening. People would watch him, and then watch our reaction. We smiled a lot, but we kept our composure. The gentleman finally made it all the way to the second row to sit down. Bless his heart.

We had my husband’s eighty-year-old mother with us that day. After the service, she said to us: “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever come to church and was mooned.”

Robbie Maxwell of New Ground offers this story:

On a hot Sunday night in July, we were singing in a church in Alabama. We were singing a song entitled “He’ll Hold My Hand.” The main line in the songs says, “He’ll hold my hand no matter what comes my way.” We were getting ready to go into the second verse, and we hear a lady scream.

Now, having been raised in a Holiness church, that was nothing unusual for us, so we just kept singing. In a split second, another one screams, and about that time two grown ladies in the church are duking it out. They are pulling hair, they are hitting each other in the face; it was an all-out brawl.

We never let up singing. Just kept bellowing out those lyrics like nothing was going on. The pastor, his wife, and mother-in-law jumped up between the two ladies and separated them, leading them outside to try to defuse the situation. We could see them through the windows on the front door as we were facing the doors. The pastor would talk, then the wife and mother-in-law would talk, and finally the two ladies had a few more words to say and went on their way.

The pastor, his wife, and mother-in-law came back into the building, and we acted as if nothing had happened. We never let up singing. We continued with our program, and I’ll have to commend the other church members: I think they were caught a little off guard, but they continued to encourage us to “just keep singing.”

We learned later that the two ladies had a little bad blood between them. And when one of them laid her arm on the back of the seat, she apparently pulled the hair of the other. That was all it took. The fight broke out. We have been back to this church many times, and we still remember that event as if it were yesterday. We just always have this understanding: No hair pulling allowed in this church.

And from Charlie Sexton:

Back in the 1980s, I played piano for the Saxon Family, a very popular Pentecostal singing family from Gainesville, Georgia. We were privileged to sing in many camp meetings all over the eastern United States. One year, we were also in charge of the combined choir music for a camp meeting in North Carolina. We had chosen some high-energy tunes that were sure to get everyone on shoutin’ ground.

The first night, after about the third song, someone hollered out, “Let Brother Parton sing one!”

They called for him to come to the podium, and this gentle, little man, about eighty-five years old, slowly made his way up to the microphone. I knew we were in for a heaven-sent revival.

I was at the piano, and he turned to me and said, “Page seventy-one, sonny boy.” Anyone even remotely familiar with the old red-back Church of God church hymnal knows that page seventy-one is “Sweet Hour of Prayer.” Slightly bewildered, I kicked it off, and here we went. I’ve never seen a slow song move an audience like that before. They were shoutin’ and runnin’ and fallin’ out, and, brother, did the Glory forevermore come down!

At the end of the second verse, Brother Parton stopped me and sweetly and tearfully said, “You know, children, sometimes I just wanna humble myself down, and just wave my hankie before the Lord.” He reached in the back pocket of his Duckhead bib overalls and pulled out a perfectly pressed silk hankie and flew it high above his head. I tell you, there was not a dry eye in the place. It was precious.

The next night, about the third song, the same thing took place. The next night, it happened again. By Friday night, there were about two thousand people in attendance, the biggest crowd of the entire series of meetings. A few moments into the service, somebody called out, “Let Brother Parton sing one!” Just as every night before, this precious old man went through the same repartee.

But this night was slightly different. He stopped me at the beginning of the second verse and started into his now-familiar speech. “You know, children, sometimes I just wanna humble myself and wave my hankie before the Lord, just wave my hankie for the Lord.”

This time, however, when he reached into his back pocket, instead of his silk hankie, he produced a pair of white Fruit of the Loom underwear and began waving them high over his head, saying, “Come on, children, don’t be shy. Wave ’em high before the Lord!”

Everyone totally cracked up, and we never made it through the next verse of “Sweet Hour of Prayer.”

And Judy Clapsaddle remembers a special day at a church in Indiana:

We were singing near Kokomo. Shortly after we arrived, we lost the electricity in the sanctuary and half of the church. It was ninety-five degrees outside, and as the day progressed, the temperature kept rising. We ended up running a heavy-duty extension cord from one side of the church to our sound equipment. It worked.

People were arriving, and we tried to make the most of it. Out came the handheld fans for everyone; out came the beautiful Christmas candles that were placed at the stained-glass windows and various other places; off came our jackets; off came the shoes. It looked like a Christmas Candlelight Concert with the McKameys. We asked everyone in attendance to hold their fans up, point them at us, and wave them fast. Boy, that felt good!

L. David Young, who was part of a number of groups, including the Prophets Quartet, tells this story himself:

I was pianist for the Prophets Quartet in early summer of 1961, until being inducted into the US Army in December. The members then were Lou Garrison, tenor; Charles Yates, lead; Ed Hill, baritone; and Jim Boatman, bass.

On a trip up north, I was put in a motel room with Lou. He weighed 350 pounds (a low estimate). We had two double beds and his was nearest the bathroom. He had already taken his turn and was laying in his bed. When I got up to go, he jumped in front of me and blocked my way in. This happened three or four times, and I gave up and laid down. About two a.m., I jumped up, beat him inside the bathroom, and then locked the door. I figured, well, I’ll fix him. Looking out the bathroom window, I could see the ground outside. I got on the commode seat, let myself out the window, and dropped. All the way down to the concrete at the next level.

There was an invisible ramp I landed on, but all I could see from the bathroom window was the ground. Stunned and not able to walk, I had to crawl, in nothing but my jockey shorts, and in the dark, all the way around the motel and back down to our room.

I went to doctors, but had no broken bones, and everybody was giving me these electric foot-bath machines.

Lou kept saying, “He’s all right—he’s just stove up.” However, in doing concerts in Ohio; West Virginia; Washington, DC; and Toronto, Canada, to the Peoples Church where Oswald Smith was pastor, I had to be carried and placed on the piano stool.

It was definitely embarrassing and not funny at the time. But in later years, as Charles, Ed, and I talked about it…well, it was funny.