Tag: Sister Fern Jones

Planes, Trains And Automobiles

By Anita Garner

New book.  New tour.  We’ll get there.

We just clicked “live” on the new website built to introduce my book, “The Glory Road: A Gospel Gypsy Life.” It’s less than three weeks til release date. I hope you’ll check out anitagarner.com and let me know what you think.  If you read this blog regularly you already know bits of the story, but there’s more over there now and we’ll keep adding. Thanks to Steve Bradford and Authors Guild for their help.

I’m vaccinated and ready to travel if the good Lord’s willing and the crick don’t rise.  I’ve been planning a trip from California to the east coast this fall to combine book appearances and visits with friends in New England.  Rent a car in Boston and ramble around for a few days. I had in mind taking the train one way and then flying home. I pictured me in a little roomette on Amtrak with lots of magazines and coffee and snacks and waving out the window at places I used to live and working when I feel like it. It could be a leisurely and productive and celebratory kind of journey all in one.

Then I learned from Amtrak that wifi isn’t consistent on the train.  They make that clear.  I like my work and with all the connections I need to pursue, wifi is necessary.

My relatives were all train people.  Gramma K migrated from the Deep South to Southern California making several trips by train before enlisting all her Southern relatives to drive cars and trucks in caravans to move her belongings.  She never hired a moving van.  We were the van.  Every fall, she trained back from Glendale, CA to Arkansas to be with her kinfolks during leaf season.  Arkansas trees are spectacular  and worth the trip.  She  came off the train at Union Station in L.A. every time with a list of names and addresses and phone numbers from people she met onboard.

Mother never flew either, even when it would have been expeditious to do so.  We moved to California when she signed a recording contract, then the record company sent her back to Nashville to record with the backup singers and musicians they’d selected.  They said get here as soon as you can. She said, sure, I’ll be right there – on the train.  Later she went out on a tour but got homesick for Daddy, quit part of the way through and cried all the way home – on the train.

Here I sit with my hopes for making this book launch/friend visiting trip, but no set plan for travel yet. No sense buying a super-saver airline ticket months in advance if the savings will disappear due to travel insurance and change fees.

I’ll get there in person one way or the other. Meanwhile there are virtual appearances to plan,  which is how most books have been launched recently. Mother was an early adopter of innovation  (except for airline travel.)  She’d have been the first to understand my wifi dilemma.

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You gotta help somebody.

By Anita Garner

Patsy & Loretta & Kris & Johnny

Music stories touch on the close relationships between Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash.  In each case, one got out in front a bit and reached back to bring another one along, to make a living writing, performing, touring, getting steady work in the music business, maybe getting on The Opry.  Patsy had hits, met Loretta, loved her and looked out for her.  Kris wrote great songs but when he met Johnny, he was a janitor at a recording studio just trying to get someone to hear them.  Johnny listened.

In the 1950’s, Mother (Sister Fern Jones) was writing songs and looking for a recording artist to record one of them.  Her options were limited.  She wrote and performed only gospel. She needed to find  a popular artist who also sang “inspirational” songs now and then.

She handed her packages to my brother and me to take to the post office, packages containing tapes of her singing her songs.  One went to the home of The Singing Governor, Jimmie Davis, in Louisiana, the man with the hit song, “You Are My Sunshine.”

We didn’t know how she got his attention in the first place.  We didn’t ask.  We were young kids, not that curious about our parents’ activities that didn’t concern us.

It could have been Kousin Karl, a country radio deejay, who let everyone know how much he liked the music sung by Sister Fern.  Karl was well connected and he emceed shows all over the place.  It could have been  gospel recording artists appearing on the same bill with her or musicians from all over the South who showed up to accompany the singers.

Did Sister Fern fit into that group of people who reached back to help?  Did she ever promote someone else’s work?  Daddy did.  Helping other people was his job as a preacher, and it was also how he believed, but if Mother helped other people, she never spoke of any such relationships.

We didn’t find out until after she passed.   Going through her files (multiple tall filing cabinets chronicling her life in music) there were audition tapes and rough music manuscripts and head shots and demo records sent to her from strangers from all over the world, hoping she’d connect them with someone else.  I don’t know how those people found her address and phone number, but they reached her in surprising numbers

She kept all the material she received and copies of her responses, handwritten on those self-carboned note papers.  To some, she offered names and addresses of contacts.  By then there were multiple television shows featuring gospel music and she seemed to know all of them.

Once in a while today we hear a right-place-at-the-right-time story, but not as often as we used to.  Back then, without any apparent expectation of reciprocity, country and gospel performers helped each other.  It’s how things worked.

I hear Daddy saying from the pulpit, “You gotta help somebody,” and then I have to go listen to this song.

Billy Eckstine, “If I Can Help Somebody” (Nat King Cole show, 1957)

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Polyester kids in a cotton world. Dressing to impress on The Glory Road

By Anita Garner

This is one of our good Sundays.  Preacher’s son in a respectable suit.  Preacher’s daughter in a cotton print.  New baby…they’ll get to her soon.

Here comes summer in the Deep South, early 1950’s.  Daddy in white dress shirt and tie, double-breasted seersucker suit.  Panama hat.  Polished shoes. Leslie Ray wanting nothing more than one of those suits for himself.  He was still in his old gabardine. He liked dressing up and wasn’t interested in everyday clothes.

Cotton was what kids in our town wore to school.  Nicely faded shirts on farm boys, girls in prints, some made from flour sacks, others from the yard goods store in Courthouse Square.  Everybody looked alike.  We started out fine in our new school and then Mother got restless.

She was a creative insomniac.  At night she wrote songs.  She painted.  She baked risin’ bread and clover leaf rolls.  She sewed. After she invented her famous plastic and nylon net corsages and sewed up all the clingy jersey dresses her closet could hold, she turned her attention to us.  We’d been down this road before, roped into her projects, protesting all the way.  Daddy was exempt because a Southern Preacher dressed a certain way and that was that.

Mother announced she’d bought some McCall’s patterns for boys’ shirts and girls’ dresses.  She put them together with slippery, man-made fabric in big flowered prints and sent us off to school, me wearing an unusual dress with loads of trim and my brother in a short-sleeved flowered shirt with fancy shaped pockets. We hated those clothes. We didn’t want to be polyester kids in an all-cotton world.

My brother was quick with a solution. His new shirt didn’t remain intact even one full day.  He came home with both pockets dangling and some flimsy (to my ear) story about how it happened.  I was jealous I hadn’t thought of a way to injure my new dress. Playing tag at school soon did it. One sash pulled right out of the back and before going home, I helped the other one rip. I put on a sad face when I revealed the damage.  Mother said,

“You won’t be getting any more pretty dresses like that one, missy.”

And to my brother,

“What were you thinking, playing rough like that in your good shirt?”

Our reprieve came when we learned we were getting us a baby. Gramma K came back down South from California to stay a while.  She was an expert seamstress, with her own peculiar tastes in children’s clothes. The baby arrived and immediately Sister Fern and Gramma K started their competitive back and forth about what the baby would wear. Though  both designed original garments, their output was nothing you’d want to see on an infant. Here’s a scene from The Glory Road:      

       Mother was confined to bed. Church people immediately adopted our baby as their own. The Women’s Missionary Council made baby blankets and quilts with thousands of tiny stitches.  They chose pink and jonquil colored flannel and sewed it into soft gowns and they prepared the baby for her attendance at future church services by trimming the smallest dresses I had ever seen with embroidery and crocheted edgings.    

        These women who looked after their own husbands and families and kept clean houses and cooked three meals a day and worked in the garden too, also produced exquisite handwork and with their investment of time, they rendered the start of a new life profound. 

       Their work was so delicate, it was like Cinderella’s ball gown in the movie. Disney creatures brought Cinderella’s dress to life, all of it removed from reality, with fantasy embellishments drifting into place.  That’s how beautiful our baby’s new wardrobe was.        

      Churchwomen came over and stayed to talk with Gramma K , who appeared at the kitchen table wearing full makeup and flashy jewelry and her California clothes.  Sister Coker was the voice for all the other churchwomen, and she enjoyed a special relationship with Mother.  Nothing Mother did or said seemed to bother her, and vice versa. Sister Coker assured Gramma the Jones baby would want for nothing. 

       In our church, babies were dedicated, but not sprinkled. The water was saved for later. By age 12, which was considered the Age of Reason, there would be full-immersion baptizing in a nearby creek.

      There was talk of the women making a special dress for the dedication. Gramma got her dander up. 

       “I believe I’m capable of making what my grandbaby will wear.”

       Sister Coker, experienced with the opinions of strong women, put on her most reasonable tone.

       “Oh Miz Kalbaugh, we thought with all you have to do…”

       “Yes, I am busy…”

       Gramma was in charge now. 

        “…so I guess we could put our heads together and come up with something…”

       “Oh having your help will be such a blessing!”  Sister Coker beamed as if she had all the time in the world and nothing would give her greater pleasure than to come over to our house and soothe the two high-strung women in residence.

       Daddy would say the prayers of dedication over his infant, and Mother, when she got well enough, would stand in front of the congregation holding our new baby, the way it had been done forever.  Sister Booty said,

       “Maybe we should wait on the dedication until Sister Fern feels better and let her decide about the dress.  Lord knows she’s so artistic, she might already have something in mind.”

      Mother sent word out from the bedroom that she would be happy for the church’s assistance with the dedication dress. She did have a preference. She wanted the dress made of dotted swiss, the softest they could find, on a pastel colored background.  If the yard goods store had only the stiffer kind of dotted swiss, would the women please soak it in Ivory Snow first to soften it?  And could they make a little slip of lawn to wear underneath, and trim it with grosgrain ribbon to match the dotted swiss?  No sooner were her wishes expressed than the women were on their way to turning them into reality.

From her bedroom and with the help of the women in our congregation, Mother began designing clothes for the baby like nothing she’d made before.  They were beautiful and appropriate.  Our baby had a few years ahead of looking good until Sister Fern regained her full strength.

Whispering Hope on The Glory Road

By Anita Garner

Here’s Mother’s new pastor’s wife costume. At Daddy’s request, she’d already raised her plunging necklines and toned down the amount of cling in her skirts, but this was as far as she was willing to go.  She left honky tonks behind to follow him, but she never renounced her fondness for clothes that were shiny.

My brother and I heard Daddy’s carefully chosen words about the proper apparel for each church occasion and when Mother stepped outside the parsonage to go to the funeral that day, we caught a glimpse of his expression in the second it took him to hide his surprise with a compliment. He told her she looked so beautiful he should take a picture.  She beamed.  He clicked this one and off we went.

It was a summer funeral on a day hot enough to require the use of the paper fans provided by the funeral home.

Past rows and rows of men in dark suits and church women wearing black and brown and navy, Sister Fern, a beacon glowing in satin and perspiration,  stepped near the coffin to sing.

One of the songs requested often for funerals during the 1950’s in the Deep South was “Whispering Hope.”  Mother loved a church organ, but not many of our churches had one, and when she recorded her first album this is the only song she  recorded with an organ.

Here’s “Whispering Hope,” written in the early 1900’s and interpreted here in the 1950’s by Sister Fern Jones with The Revelators Quartet.

 

On the Glory Road – Harmony In The Car

My brother and I were not happy little harmonizers on The Glory Road.   Daddy was following his calling to preach, Mother followed her calling to sing, but we two believed our true calling was to amble down a country road somewhere that led to a house of our own, a school we’d go to every day, and friends who’d know us from one year to the next. Just because you can sing harmony, that doesn’t mean you always want to.

We were on the tent revival circuit, booked for months in advance and from time to time the family needed to refresh our presentation. Daddy said we’d best practice before we get to Amarillo. He enticed us into learning our parts by singing songs we liked on the radio. We started off with The Sons Of The Pioneers’ Tumbling Tumbleweeds and when we had our parts down on that one, he switched to What A Friend We Have In Jesus in the same key.

Long stretches of Route 66 through the Deep South offered nothing to look at except tumbleweeds, giant puffs of them rolling free on the highway or stuck to a fence.  Daddy played a game with them.

A huge tumbleweed clump was minding its own business somewhere in Texas and as we got closer it loomed about half-a-car size. The motion of our big old sedan invited it to dance.  It floated up and plopped on the windshield, covering the view.  Leslie Ray said, Daddy you better stop but Daddy said, watch this.

Instead of stopping and freeing the thing, his game was to keep driving and speed up, then brake quickly trying to get it to release itself.  Man against nature.  It wasn’t safe, but not much about car travel was back then.

Here are The Sons Of The Pioneers helping two young Gospel Gypsies learn harmony.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzxz0M7Wws0