1958 Pop and Choral Music

1958  Pop and Choral Music. An end of my Amish friends; swimming in the Salt Creek; beginning Waynedale High School, top forty music on Lloyd Dye’s bus; the Chuck Wagon Gang,  Miller brothers quartet, Maple Grove Mission music; Pleasant View Mennonite midweek service and chorus; high school chorus; Future Farmers of America and Terry Burkhalter; radio and milking; the Cuban Revolution and the Castros; Ruth Ann born on November 29 and enlarging the house.

During the summer of 1958 was a transition of ending relationships with most of my Amish neighbors and friends. I was leaving the Holmesville School where we all attended and heading for Waynedale High School where no Amish students attended. Some of my best friends from school were people such as Melvin Miller (minister and farmer living west of Holmesville), Ben Miller (may he rest in peace), and Eli Y. Hostetler (bishop and patriarch of a large family near Apple Creek). Larry Stallman, a rural farm boy and nephew of our principal, often ran with us too, and I remember that summer we had a summer afternoon picnic and swimming at Salt Creek near where it enters into the Killbuck. I don’t think I realized that it would be the end of an era, but it was. After that year, I had little contact with my Amish friends unless it was an incidental meeting at a store or an auction. We all had our own families, churches and vocations to tend to, and of course by the 70s I ended up over here in Pennsylvania.  

Swimming in Salt Creek was actually a good part of summer recreation. Salt Creek was a shallow creek, hence it only had certain spots where a decent swimming hole could be found, and these spots might wash out from one year to the next. Each summer we would find a place where the water was deep enough for swimming. Salt Creek flowed at the edge of our farm land, and one summer the best hole was up near the Arthur E. Parrot farm where the road heads up the hill where the Pierces used to live; their sons our age Harold and Charles (better known as Fuzz and Chuck) were friends. Another year the hole was at the railroad and traffic bridges at the end of the Rudy Coblentz lane (and some of the brave ones would jump off the bridge). Finally, one summer we swam all the way down near the Route 76 (now 83) bridge. My brothers and I were regulars in these swimming areas in the afternoons and evenings, often meeting some of the town boys and a few of the adventuresome girls who swam there too. It was cool and clear water, and you could see crayfish, minnows, chubs and even an occasional smallmouth bass as you swam under the water.  

The next four years I would get on the bus every morning at Holmesville and Lloyd Dye drove us to Waynedale High School which was located near Apple Creek, a full 40-minute drive away. The whole bus riding was new to me because we had always lived near town and walked to school. The bus ride provided about an hour a day of socializing, and I learned what others ate for breakfast. Most envied was the colorfully wrapped breakfast menu of Twinkies or Hostess cup cakes and a bottle of Coke. I meanwhile had to eat my mother’s fare at home: eggs, bacon, toast or sometimes a week of fried corn mush and applesauce, or other times plain old hot rolled oats with raisins.  

Lloyd Dye had a big radio speaker hanging like a spider web from the bus ceiling in front and I think in back too, and it blasted out the top forty tunes of Canton’s WHLO. This sound was another world for me and totally new music which I had never heard at home. The station throbbed with fast news and weather but mostly a hip disk jockey playing songs such as Connie Francis “Everyone is somebody’s Fool,” Elvis Presley “It’s Now or Never,” and a startling “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.”

Lloyd was young, about thirty, I think, and maybe simply liked this music, and his passengers certainly did; if he changed the station there were howls and groans from the back, and he would switch to it immediately. Anyway, it was good crowd control too; you could not hear anything else except visiting with someone nearby. Actually, we were quite a well behaved bunch of students and the only time I remember problems was one couple who would enter into long, sustained and deep kisses, which I thought might end in fainting. After several minutes Lloyd would see them in the mirror, slam the brakes, and break up the embrace. After all that embarrassment, at least to the rest of us, a day or two later the lovers at it again with fervor. Then Lloyd would slam the brakes; the show was over, and life returned to normal. Probably for most of my cohorts to hear these oldies or classic rock, they remember Ed Sullivan shows, Waynedale sock hops or dances, but for me it all goes to Lloyd Dye’s Waynedale bus.

Although we had a radio in our house, we very seldom had it on, nor do I remember much listening to the radio—except in the barn. Maybe it was that we were a family of talkers, and everyone had something to say, and you needed all the volume or drama possible to get listeners. Paul was a good storyteller, and over meals we enjoyed listening to him describe personalities and happenings, whether two Ott brothers’ exploits in industrial arts class at Waynedale High School or a Bob’s eccentricities on Jacob Miller’s carpentry crew. I never met these people in person, but they might as well have been vivid oversized members of our family table stories.

Our family did have a few phonograph records for music, and the main time we listened to them was at bed time. The ones which I remember during the fifties were the close harmony singers such as the Louvin Brothers and especially a mixed quartet called the Chuck Wagon Gang. Simply accompanied by a guitar, they would sing in an unadorned voice gospel hymns and songs out of the shaped note singing school tradition such as “We are Climbing [Jacob’s Golden Ladder]” and “After the Sunrise.” You could hear the four clear voices with an amazing plaintive alto singer, and at the same time you heard the total blended harmony. Many a night I went to sleep with the comforting harmonies of “Amazing Grace,” “Come Unto Me,” or “Angels Rock Me to Sleep” on the record player. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night with the player’s needle still grinding in the middle of the record.

I later read a book on close harmony southern gospel music and this group consisted of members of the Dave and Carrie Parker Carter family (not to be confused with the more famous A.P., Sara, and Maybelle Carter) which found its way out of poverty by singing for a large Ft. Worth, Texas, radio station. Already discovered by CBS in the thirties and singing up to the fifties, their records were readily available on little 45 records and later on 33 long plays, as they still are today on CDs.  Originally, they also sang western ballads and folk songs, but it was their gospel songs which drew the most popular response. 

Although their Chuck Wagon Gang name (inherited from their flour and biscuit company sponsor) sounded Western cowboy, their music was clearly out of the shaped note singing school tradition. I know a lot of Mennonite families had recordings of choral music by church and college groups and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but somehow this kind of European formal music did not register as strongly with our family. As Dave Carter said the secret to his family’s musical success was its simplicity and that with some practice, you could emulate it.  

Well, emulate we did and about this time we began singing as the Miller brothers quartet. Male quartets were popular for hymn singings at our local Mennonite churches, and southern gospel men’s quartets would occasionally visit our area. I think the first one I heard was called the Rebels Quartet which sang their harmonies at a Foursquare Gospel Church in Wooster. Our family went and I had never heard a tenor so high and a bass so low, each with his own microphone. The thin tall bass singer London Parris led out on a song about the three Hebrews in Babylon: “They wouldn’t bend, they wouldn’t bow, they wouldn’t burn.” His low voice went so far down I thought I was hearing gravel stones at the bottom of a well, but he appeared so earnest and kind, my mother Mattie even forgave him when we spotted him puffing cigarettes behind the quartet’s big bus after the concert. 

Our Miller brothers quartet was somehow discovered by a local promoter Harry Weaver of Fredricksburg who was sponsoring Sunday afternoon gospel singings in the  area. Weaver would rent a school auditorium such as Mt. Eaton or Winesburg and headline the program with the Slabach Sisters of Dalton, Ohio. It turned out that the Slabach Sisters were actually second cousins (Andy Jake our Grandfather Martin Miller freundschaft, they were daughters of Roman and Annie Yoder Slabach). I later discovered Bonnie had married my Waynedale classmate Norman Lowe. They had records, and I believe sang on a radio program, in other words had some claims to fame. 

Our quartet branding may have been that we were brothers and had good harmony. My voice had just changed, and I could sing the melody, Roy sang a tenor baritone, Paul  bass, and David first tenor, or at least a first tenor equivalent. David still had his octive-high child’s voice and sang the alto women’s notes.

Paul would do the public talking and Roy handled the music, and we got a number of invitations to sing at churches, clubs, and banquets. It was all worship and small-time entertainment and went on for several years until Paul and Roy left home for college and voluntary service—and David’s voice changed. Our signature song was “How Great Thou Art,” which was relatively popular among Christians during those years. We also sang a novelty number called the “Hornet Song” with musical stories of unwilling subjects such as Cannanites and Jonah getting divine urges, hence becoming “willing to go.” My own favorite was the seafaring ballad called “Jesus Savior Pilot Me.”    

Maple Grove Mission which my father was now promoting as “your friendly church” had eclectic music selections tending toward an increasing flavor of American revivalist songs such as those written by the blind hymn writer Francis (Fanny) Crosby (“Blessed Assurance, Jesus is Mine” and “To God be the Glory”). And sometimes the music even left the religious fields altogether. An eccentric Holmesville hermit and poet Amos Olinger often played the piano during offerings, and Olinger was as likely to play “She’ll be coming round the mountain” as “Shall we gather at the river.”   

The English four-part a capella hymn singing most Mennonite congregations used from the Church Hymnal (1927) was somewhat marginal to my growing up. My father used to say these hymns were too depressing; who wants to sing “Before Jehovah’s Aweful Throne,” the emphasis on awful as terrible and bad. The exception about this time came when my brother Paul got a driver’s license, and we started going to the Pleasant View Mennonite Church’s monthly hymn sings on Sunday evenings and also the mid-week service. Paul and Roy sang in the Pleasant View chorus and soon took me along, and I think it was also encouraged by my parents in hopes that we would socialize with other Mennonite young people. 

This mid-week service would consist of brief opening, all singing together, a brief Scripture reading, then we would go to prayer groups based on age levels and gender. I would go into the boys groups which would be led by Albert Coblentz or Paul Yoder. Albert was about fifteen years older than the rest of us and a good role model, and Paul Yoder had the benefit of a year of study at Eastern Mennonite College. Albert was also my eighth grade summer Bible School teacher at Pleasant view and always a good friend.

Albert or Bert would solicit and mention prayer requests which included an alcoholic father whose poor wife and children came to church, Emmanuel Erb in PAX service in Paraguay (building the Trans-Chaco Highway), and then accidents, missionaries, and various sick people. Then Albert would look for volunteers who would pray for one specific request. We would kneel down and after our fairly short individual prayers, Albert would end with a long prayer, reviewing the requests and adding some items of his own, all in a fairly earnest fashion. 

But there were dissenters to these sessions where presumably everyone had his eyes closed in prayer. One would hear punctuations of loud flatulence, either by someone cupping his hand under his elbow, making kind of a bellow, or by the real deal of cutting cheese. By the smell or by peeking one could generally trace the origins to a minister’s son and his best friend. Meanwhile, Albert would go right on praying with sacred decorum, now amid some tittering of laughter. If Allen Miller or Aden Kauffman should read this, all forgiven, amigos; in retrospect your sounds and scents provided an earthly grounding to our heavenly pleading.

But as noted, Paul Yoder and his sister Anna, with a year or two of Eastern Mennonite College in Virginia, had picked up good choral music tastes, and also Paul was an outstanding first tenor. So our mid-week Pleasant View Church evenings ended with the young people going up to the balcony and singing choral songs, especially using the hymnal called Songs of the Church. These were slightly more challenging than our Mennonite Church Hymnal. We would stand or sit in parts such as the tenors or basses and it was good practice in sight reading the shaped notes. The chorus leader was generally a friendly young minister called Levi Hershberger; but we all called him Junior. 

Beyond these practice sessions, the Pleasant View chorus sometimes sang at hymn sings or at special occasions and only the best singers were selected; Paul and Roy would sing, but I generally did not make the cut. Still, I greatly benefitted from those singing sessions and learning to sight read the tenor and bass notes. When I got to Waynedale High School, I felt like some opera singer in my ability to sight read and harmonize compared to most of my peers, especially the boys, many of whom could barely sing the melody, let alone read sheet music.

One night our Waynedale High School chorus directed by Frank Sessions sang at the Parent Teacher Association meeting (this was actually in 1961), and a Grace Burkhalter (mother of Sheldon and Terry) got up to the podium and said she was going to introduce the pastor of her church which turned out to be Kidron Mennonite Church. So pastor Bill Detweiler, the speaker of a radio broadcast the Calvary Hour gave an inspirational little speech on teaching and learning with a sprinkling of biblical and American cultural wisdom. I mention this because it was the first that I saw Mennonites in public life in quite this way. Although I knew the Mennonites and Amish ran eastern Holmes County, up in Holmesville, we were pretty sectarian and kept to ourselves. 

I first met Terry Burkhalter when he was president of our Future Farmers of America (FFA) chapter. I enjoyed my vocational agriculture class which went for two periods, and was an excellent transition between my rural farm life and Waynedale’s more worldly high school culture. For those two periods we were together as farm boys discussing hogs, dairying, crops and parliamentary procedure. My parents allowed me to buy a blue and gold jacket with my name and the FFA logo on back, and I had a little sign put on the end of our lane: “A future farmer lives here.”  Our teacher William Boyer took us on field trips to the Ohio Agriculture Experiment station (now OARDC), and we visited each other’s farms to see our operations.

One of my first FFA trips was to a convention in Columbus where we saw our own Terry Burkhalter up on the podium being named state farmer of the year. Terry also had one of the largest yields of corn of our area, about 150 bushels per acre, and the DeKalb folks gave him a nice award. The Burkhalters had a farm not far from Kidron, and Terry seemed to excel in everything FFA. In addition, Terry’s father Lester was once named an Ohio Farmer of the Year but what really made him a small-town legend was for having chased an agricultural agent off of his farm with a pitch fork. Forty years later, Terry explained to me that the Burkhalter farm was well within its legal wheat or corn allotment, but on principle his father was not going to have the government regulator tromp around on his land. 

At home both Roy and Paul were now working away from home, and I was the farmer, doing the morning and evening milking. We had bought Surge milkers for our small herd, and we milked with the sucking sounds of the cups on the cow teats while the radio was on Wooster’s WWST which in the mornings was strong in the farm market reports, the news on the hour, and one gospel song, often by the baritone bass Tennessee Ernie Ford. We still sold hogs, and I listened for the hog and cattle prices for the various farm auctions which were given from the preceding day. And there was the national and international news, which I was just beginning to take an interest in about this time.

We also were beginning to get the Wooster Daily Record which carried UPI reports on an island in the Caribbean Sea having a change of government led by young guerilla commanders named Fidel and Raul Castro. The Castro brothers and an Argentine doctor turned revolutionary Che Guevara had led two years of fighting in the Sierra Madre Mountains to gain popular support with promises to do away with the dictatorship, corruption and to set up representative government. 

By the summer of 1958 they were gaining increasing support and winning battles town by town so that by year-end the dictator Fulgencio Batista was fleeing the island, and eight days later the Castro armies entered the capital city of Havana in triumph. The American government recognized a new provisional government within days, and newspaper reports had the crowds welcoming the new leaders with jubilation in the streets and auto horns honking. However, corrupt the Batista regime, most of those crowds probably did not expect that over fifty years later as I write this the Castro brothers would still be ruling the island with few freedoms and  much equality of poverty. 

I of course did not follow all the details of these changes in Cuba, but I became aware of Castro soon when it became apparent that he was introducing a one-party government led by the Communist Party and heavily supported by the Soviet Union. The other thing about Fidel Castro was his familiar photo in the Wooster Daily Record; he had a beard and mustache and looked like a young Holderman Mennonite bishop.

Meanwhile, closer to home our family was growing, and by November 29 Mattie gave birth to her eighth child and youngest daughter Ruth Ann. Mother and daughter went to live with grandparents Levi L. and Susan Schlabachs for a few weeks because we had whooping cough. We had spent the summer and fall building an addition to our house, both in a big full basement room where we boys could take showers and our mother could do laundry. 

On the main floor we added an ample living room with a big double-pane picture window toward the front lawn and road and a master bedroom. We had earlier turned the little parental bedroom into a bathroom, our first one indoors. Our employer Jacob Miller helped with the plans and some of the work, and my uncle Melvin on leave from one of his military tours, came up and helped too. My father Andrew was still on the mend from his broken vertebrae. Most of the work was done by brothers Roy and Paul.   

Most of this chapter comes from memory and conversations with the immediate family. Background on the Chuck Wagon Gang comes from James R. Goff, Jr., Close Harmony, a history of Southern Gospel (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002, pages 131-135).  My brother David found a 1960-62 live recording of our Miller Brothers Quartet singing at one of  Harry Weaver’s Sunday afternoon singings with the songs: “How Great Thou Art,” “New Name in Glory” and “Jesus Savior Pilot Me.”  Some of the Burkhalter information comes from a February 2, 2011, telephone conversation with Terry Burkhalter of Harrisonburg, Virginia.