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After they built the cinder-block church in Lovelady Community (Rt#2, Stonewall, Oklahoma), around 1947, I attended every service passionately. We were Baptists, who believe that everybody on Earth is born damned to Hell and eternal fire. Fortunately for us Baptists, and only us, we could be "saved" in a brief and painless ritual at the end of Sunday services by just walking to the front and shaking hands with the preacher. I did it five times before I was 14, but the first one was when I was nine.
I was unsaved only a week or so later. We were sitting on a large granite rock on the hill behind our one-room "little red" country schoolhouse. The boys liked to eat their sandwiches up there, away from all grownups, where they could, among other things, practice their profanity. Several of the bigger kids were sharing the worst word anybody could possibly ever say when, suddenly, my best friend and jealous rival, whose parents had refused to let him be saved when I was, fearing he was too young, even though he was six months older than I, said to me, "I never hear you say it."
"Oh, I say it," I lied while staring over his head and into the woods with my traitorous eyes already beginning to mist. "Well, let us hear you say it now, then," he challenged me. I was outsmarted and undone.
"Fuck," I croaked, and was once again damned to Hell.
I learned a lot of things in church, but nearly all of it was wrong, ugly and hurtful. The big exception was the music. Baptists sing their hearts out. Lucky for me, we also attended a few Holiness revivals and gospel quartet contests there in the Oklahoma Bible Belt.
The song leader in our little rural church often stopped the singing and yelled, "You can sing louder than that, come on now!" Then he would resume and I screamed those songs at the top of my little voice. "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord," they would say, and I did, even though I might not always be singing the same lyrics as everyone else. My older brother had taught me, "At the Bar, at the Bar, where I smoked my first cigar/ And my nickles and my dimes rolled away (rolled away)/ It was there by chance that I ripped my Sunday pants/ And now I am wearing them every day." In the hymns, I often changed "Him" to "Her." Maybe it's because I was a Mama's Baby, but it just sounded better. Talk about an egotistic little fellow: I sometimes changed "Jesus" to "Gino" as in "Gino loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so..."
Singing, especially singing with a group, is a strong emotional experience that brings people together and leaves them relaxed and happy. Everybody who hopes to affect people in groups needs to know that. If you can't lead group singing, find a collaborator who can.
I never became a good singer, as you can see from my Youtube channel, but I always sing loud, and I'll always be grateful to the Baptists for that.
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