Can’t wait to run up those crystal stairs
And down that ivory hall.
Can’t wait to shout . . . Hallelujah!
At last my trials are over
’Cause Sweet King Jesus will be there!
When she hit the final E-flat at the end of the song and held it, many people in the room heard the ice in their glasses crack. Some singers sing at the top of a note, some at the bottom, but Minnie Oatman had perfect pitch and always hit the note dead center with the accuracy of a silver bullet. More than a few in the audience still had a ringing in their ears long after the curtain closed.
The Oatmans Are Coming
IT HAD BEEN a lively show, to say the least. When it was over Doc commented to the man next to him, “I’ll say this for them: I never saw folks look more forward to dying in all my life.” But Dorothy had thoroughly enjoyed the show. She had heard gospel music before but she had certainly never heard it sung like this. What the Oatmans may have lacked in polish and style they certainly made up for in enthusiasm. She and Doc were not particularly fans of gospel but she knew that a lot of her listening audience out on the farms loved it. While most of the other banquet attendees began stumbling out of the room in a daze, headed for the bar, not really sure what they had seen and heard, Dorothy headed backstage to find the Oatmans and compliment them on their performance.
When she finally found her way backstage they were still packing up their sound equipment. She walked over and introduced herself to Minnie Oatman and told her how she had so enjoyed their singing and said if they were ever in the vicinity of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, she would love to have them on her radio show. Minnie, who had worked up quite a sweat, was dabbing her face with a big white handkerchief. She said, “Well, bless your heart,” then turned and called out, “Ferris, ain’t we doing a revival somewhere in Missouri this year . . . or is it Arkansas? Look it up in the book. This nice lady wants us on her radio show.” She apologized to Dorothy. “We hit so many places, honey, I can’t keep up.” Ferris Oatman, who weighed a hundred pounds more than his wife, struggled to pull a long thin black book from his inside coat pocket. After he looked through it he said, “We’re booked at the Highway 78 Church of Christ outside of Ash Hill, Missouri, first week in July.” Minnie turned to Dorothy. “Is that anywheres near you, honey?”
Dorothy said, “Yes, I know Ash Hill; it’s not that far away from us. I’ll be happy to have somebody come and pick you up—and bring you back. Where will you be staying?”
Minnie laughed. “Oh Lord, honey, we never know till we get there. We stay with whoever can put us up. The church usually finds us a place. There’s six of us including Floyd—he’s out in the car waiting, he don’t work banquets, just churches and revivals, so if you know of a family willing to put one or two of us up for a week, let us know. You don’t happen to have an extra bed or sofa, do you?”
Dorothy was put on the spot because the woman had just agreed to appear on her radio show. She glanced over at the young girl in the group, who looked to be about fifteen or sixteen, and said, “Ahh . . . well, as a matter of fact, Mrs. Oatman, we have a girl just about your daughter’s age and I’m sure she would be just tickled pink to have her stay with us.”
Minnie looked up to the ceiling and sang out, “PRAISE JESUS!” and looked back at Dorothy and said, “I tell you, Mrs. Smith, the Lord just drops good people right in our path every day.” She sang out again in a loud voice, “THANK YOU, SWEET JESUS!” Dorothy was a little taken aback at this display and quickly added, “But now, Mrs. Oatman, just so you know, we’re not members of the Church of Christ and I don’t know if that matters but—”
Minnie waved her hand and dismissed the idea.
“Oh honey, that don’t matter a whit just as long as you’re Christian and don’t drink alcohol or smoke or gamble.” Before Dorothy could say anything one way or another Minnie yelled, “Ferris, we already got one placed in Ash Hill,” and then turned back to Dorothy. “That’s real kind of you, and of all of us, she’s the leastest trouble, hardly eats a thing, you won’t even know she’s there.” She waved the long white handkerchief at her daughter. “Betty Raye, come over here. This nice lady wants you to stay with her when we’re over there in Missouri.” Betty Raye, a pale thin girl with light brown hair and brown eyes, wearing a lavender dress exactly like her mother’s, came over somewhat reluctantly.
Dorothy smiled at her. “Hello, Betty Raye. We’re looking forward to having you with us. We have a daughter about your age and I know she’s going to be very happy you are coming.”
Minnie nudged Betty Raye. “Tell the lady thank you.” The girl blushed and said something but she spoke so softly Dorothy could not hear what she said.
Later, after Dorothy returned to the table and realized what she had just done, she said to Doc, “Anna Lee is going to kill me.”
Dinner on the Ground
THE OATMAN FAMILY was just one of the many white gospel groups traveling all over the South and Midwest that year. Groups like the Spear Family, the Happy Goodman Family, the Statesmen, the Harmony Boys, the Weatherfords, the LeFevres, the Dixie Four, the Tennessee Valley Boys, and the Melody Masters made their living by traveling and appearing at small churches, singing conventions, revivals, all-day sings, and dinner-on-the-ground events. The roots of what was now called southern gospel music had actually started in New England in the 1700s, when early colonists brought hymnbooks from the Old World. Gospel was the dominant musical style in America for a long time and was very popular at churches and camp meetings all over the country. However, after the Civil War the style of singing known as Sacred Harp or shape-note music lost its popularity in the North but was kept alive in the rural churches of the Deep South. In 1910 a man named James D. Vaughan published his first songbook, Gospel Chimes. To promote it he sent out the Vaughan Quartet, the first all-male southern gospel group in America. Eventually, he started the Vaughan School of Music in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. Soon other schools opened, and by the 1930s southern gospel groups featuring men and women and children were springing up everywhere and crisscrossing the South, Midwest, and as far north as Iowa. The more successful gospel groups began to appear and thereby advertise over the radio and were able to promote a good crowd at their appearances.
But in 1946 radio appearances were a fairly new thing for the Oatmans. Ferris and his brothers, Floyd and Le Roy, had all been raised on a hardscrabble dirt farm in northern Alabama by strict Pentecostal parents. Because of his upbringing Ferris believed that just listening to the radio, much less singing and preaching over it, was a sin. As Minnie put it, “Ferris is bad to think the devil is behind everything.” However, in 1945, after seeing how the other groups were attracting so many people to their appearances by using broadcasts to tell people where they would “be at,” he prayed about it. A week later he said, “Minnie, the Lord spoke to me and said he wants us to go on the radio,” and so it was settled.
Minnie Varner, the fourth child of an Assembly of God preacher, was born outside of Shiloh, Georgia. The Varners were a musical family and Minnie was playing piano in church by age nine. She met Ferris Oatman when she was twelve and he was twenty-four. She had been at an all-day sing and dinner on the ground playing for the Harmonettes, an all-girl gospel group from Birmingham. That day Minnie saw Ferris, with all that black curly hair, she fell in love. Ferris must have felt the same. That night he told his brother Le Roy, “I just met my wife today.” Two years later, when she was fourteen, she ran off with him, ignoring the warnings of her parents and older brothers about marrying into a traveling gospel group. They said if she did she would be living in the back of a car hawking songbooks out of the trunk all her life. So far they had been right. But Ferris Oatman, who had worked picking cotton to send himself through the Stamps-Baxter School of Gospel Music in Dallas, felt he had a real calling. From the age of six all he ever wanted to be in life was a gospel quartet man. All Minnie wanted from age twelve was to be his wife and so she joined the group and went on the road.