Lady Muleskinner Press

Darwin Lee Hill, 2007

Darwin Lee Hill is the host of “Darwin Lee’s Real Hillbilly Music Hour,” a vintage country show on AM radio station WHVW in Poughkeepsie, New York.  He has hosted the Sunday afternoon show for over fourteen years.  He has been a country music collector almost all his life.

WHVW is locally owned and operated, profoundly original, and, in an era of corporate ownership and formula programming, entirely unlikely.  Since its sale in 1992 to “Pirate” Joe Ferraro, this self-proclaimed “hip spot on your dial” and “best station in the nation” features a line-up of American roots music rarely heard elsewhere, much of it spun from old 78-rpm recordings.  The Real Hillbilly Music Hour fits nicely into the station’s eclectic mix of early rock and roll, classic R&B, doo-wop, gospel, and country. Darwin Lee is himself contemptuous of “what passes for country music” these days, let alone what passes for country radio.  His show, like WHVW itself, is a last stand against musical homogenization, a bittersweet reminder of days when radio might be idiosyncratic, spontaneous, intensely local, and, even, sometimes, downright strange.

Darwin Lee still lives in the house in which he grew up; today he occupies the upper level, his mother the downstairs.  “You’ll get a kick out of this place,” he says: “it’s a regular little hillbilly museum.”  And it is.  One wall is covered with 8-by-10 framed glossy photos of classic country music stars (Little Jimmy Dickens, George Jones), many of the photos signed.  Although you couldn’t tell by looking, most of the photos are digital reproductions; the originals are stored away in scrapbooks to avoid exposure to sunlight or other damaging elements.  There is a Jimmie Rodgers corner, crammed with songbooks and framed photos of the country-music legend; there’s a Hank Williams section, a Jimmy Martin section.  (A favorite Hank shot: Williams shaking hands with a young, beaming, cowboy-suited boy whose first name, coincidentally, was Darwin.)  Rebel flags hang over radiator units.  Both the double doors which open into the den from the bedroom are covered with old songbooks from Ernest Tubb and others.  In one corner of the room there’s a typewriter.  In several places there are racks and leaning stacks of CDs.

There’s a large space devoted to Elvis, and in the back room an impressive chunk of Darwin Lee’s record collection.  Records are arranged by genre (Western Swing, Brother Duets) and in some places by subject matter (Drinking Songs, Trucking, Broken Hearts).

For several years Darwin Lee made his living driving a truck; now he’s a courier for an area health system.  His evenings are often spent putting together the coming Sunday’s show.  (The radio work is all volunteer.)  For a number of years now, he has been interviewing for the program old-timers from the country trenches, dusty names most of the world has forgotten: Chester Smith; Norma Jean; Yodeling Kenny Robertson; Red Simpson; Braxton Shuffert; Slim Bryant.  He has coaxed remarkable interviews from the legendarily closed-lipped Bill Bollick (half of the classic brother-duo the Blue Sky Boys) and Big Bill Lister (a Hank Williams compatriot and one of the great performers of country beer songs).

Darwin Lee Hill is a wild, breathing encyclopedia of country music esoterica, his three hours on Sunday a refreshing reminder of what radio can be.  The interview below was conducted in 2002. In 2009, he is still going strong behind the mic.

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I’m from Poughkeepsie.  My band used to do–are you familiar with the song, “Are You From Dixie?”–we used to do “Are You From Poughkeepsie?”  Complete with mentioning local bums and everything in it.  But, yeah, I’m from Poughkeepsie: born and raised here, went to public schools here, graduated in ‘77 from Poughkeepsie High School.  Didn’t wind up going to college, just–well, I was working.  I worked semi-fulltime when I was in high school, so … there really wasn’t money for it, and I never applied myself to school enough to get a scholarship at anything, and I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do, anyway–I was seventeen.  So I went to work for the local newspaper, loading trucks at night and things like that-that lasted long enough till I rode a bicycle through the press room when they were running the newspaper off one evening, and I got fired.  It worked out well, though, because a couple weeks later I went to work at a local record store chain called the Book and Record, down on Main Street.  Number 315 Main Street.  It’s right across the street from where WHVW is now, so I’ve come full cycle. 

My dad worked for the wholesaler that used to stock those stores; he was the record buyer for them.  So it was kind of neat, I could get my stuff wholesale.  When albums were $6.98, they cost me about three and a quarter.  That works pretty good when you’re working for a step up above minimum wage.

I’d been collecting records long before that.  I started when I was maybe twelve or thirteen, something like that.  I can remember–in fact, I told Merle Haggard this when I met him, and I didn’t make it up, either.  That lawnmower outside reminds me of it.  That girl’s over there mowing my next-door neighbor’s lawn; I used to do that for the people that owned that house.  I did that, and I used to do it for the people across the street, and the doctor that lived way over there …  I saved up the money and I’d get the new Merle Haggard album or something.  We’re talking probably 1970, 1971.  They were three or four bucks.  But it meant something to me, and it also taught me to take care of records.  Worst thing you can do is scratch one and have to buy it over–that meant mowing two lawns to get one record.

With Merle Haggard on Haggard's tour bus; Long Island, 1991

I’m more of a music collector than I am a record collector.  I’m not always choosey, you know.  Say it’s a choice between the 78 or CD, well, I’d like to have both but, you know: whichever it’s easier to get at the time.

When did you get your first 78s?

I started picking them up at flea markets and stuff like that.  I used to have a little battery-operated record player to play em on.  I was probably thirteen, fourteen–no, maybe even closer to fifteen when I started buying 78s.  I’d pick em up here and there.  And what got me into 78s and 45s in particular was: I don’t remember what artist it was, but it was somebody that only made a handful of albums and so I got em all.  I was like, “Yay.  I finally got the whole collection on him.”  Dad says, “What about the B-sides?” 

“Huh?” 

“Oh, well, there’s B-sides, there’s probably some special promotional interviews they put out-you don’t have it all!“  So that got me curious into all the other stuff.

Then I started buying 78s here and there, and then–the turning point with the 78s, what got me going on them, I can tell you.  It was the spring of 1976.  It was an ad I caught on the radio.  One of our local stations had a thing where you could call if you had stuff for sale.  And this lady, I can still remember her name: Frances Bruin, and she lived in New Windsor, and she had 78s for sale she wanted to get rid of.  She had about, oh, probably seven or eight hundred all together.  So I went over to look at em, and it was mostly big band and pop stuff-a lot of stuff that if I’d bought, to this day I probably never would’ve done anything with or bothered with, you know.  And there was a definite year range there.  She started buying em about 1938 or ‘39, and stopped about 1952.  But.  They were all in their original sleeves, not one of em even had a fingerprint on it.  Some of them might be worn, but none of them were scratched or cracked.  Every one had been taken perfect care of properly, the way they should have been.  If a record like, for instance “Cattle Call” by Eddy Arnold, got to be a bit worn-buy another copy.  Or, if it’s a record that she knew she was gonna put some wear on, she’d buy two, or maybe three of them.  So, no matter what, there was always at least one copy in there that was clean as a whistle.

I went and looked at em, figured out what the country stuff was.  It was a little over 200 of em.  She said, “Well, make me an offer.”  I offered her 50 bucks and almost got thrown out of her house.  I wound up giving her–what the hell did I give her?–a hundred.  For about 220 of em, 230 of em, something like that.  About a week later she called me up and she goes, “Wait a minute.  I found more country records out in my garage.  The price includes them, too, just come out and get em.”  This was the 78 album sets, like Bob Wills, and all that cool stuff.  In there was a nice run of Hank Williams on MGM.  You never find Hank Williams records clean; these were like brand new.  Lots of Bluebird stuff, lots of Elton Britt; there was Delmore Brothers, Blue Sky Blues, plus Eddy Arnold, tons of Roy Acuff … I always refer to that as: “That was my 78 starter kit.”  Because now I had 250 there, plus probably 50 or so I already had.  I said, “All right, let’s get to town.  Let’s see how many more…”  Cause now I had something to build around.  I had a real nice helping of ’40s stuff, early ’50s stuff, a smattering of ’30s stuff.  Ok, let’s go backwards; let’s get some of this stuff from the ’20s.

In fact, I can remember-you’ll get a kick out of this; it’s a good story, too-Eck Robertson, “Sally Gooden.”  1922, Victor.  I found that at the Maybrook Flea Market for fifty cents.  I must have went through a thousand records–I was like, “Well, if that’s there, what else is in there?”  And there wasn’t another record in there that was worth bringing home!  But that’s the first-recorded country record.  Fiddlin’ John Carson’s was the first one released, but Eck’s was the first one actually recorded.  And I found it for fifty cents, in the original Victor sleeve, and everything.

On Hank Snow's tour bus, August 14, 1976: "two days before my eighteenth birthday."

My collection’s spread all over this house.  There’s some of my rock collection in a special basement room with a dehumidifier so nothing happens to it, I’ve got stuff down in my mother’s apartment, I’ve got stuff here–I don’t have anything in the attic, but–.  And I don’t really have any idea how many records I actually have, either.  

Yeah, I was about to ask–

I’ll give you the same answer I give everybody else: I’m too busy buyin’ em and grabbin’ em to count em.  Listenin’ to em.  It’s true: the count would change every day.  I mean, today I went up to the station to pick up my mail and I had four CDs.  That’s seven so far this week, and it’s Wednesday. 

Do you still come across a fair amount of 78s?

Not really, not really.  I mostly get them out of record auctions now.  But–I knew it would come one day, too–the old country stuff, the kind of stuff that interests me and that I like to collect, is getting real pricey now.  And I think there’s two things that make that.  This is just my opinion, but the two things I think that are making it: number one is the internet, there’s more people have access to the stuff, and number two, ever since Nashville and the powers that be destroyed real country music, where else does it exist?  Nashville–well, we can get to Nashville later on.  When I think of all that … Next question.

But this guy, Jim King: he was fun.  He invited me up, I think it was the first time ever done in the Hudson Valley, at least until I did it again a couple months ago, where somebody decided to do all thirteen of Jimmie Rodgers’ blue yodels in a row, uninterrupted, on the air.  Just seemed like a good concept, you know.  But he didn’t have all the blue yodels.  I did, so…

Then we came up with–”Hey, Dar, what do you think: you want to do two hours of Jerry Lee Lewis?  You bring your records, I’ll bring mine.”  And he gave me a little hands-on experience with cueing up the records.  “Here, I’ll show you.  There’s nothing to this, kid, just read this,” you know.  And when I was in high school I was interested in English and stuff like that, in writing; I took debate classes, elocution lessons.  Even took a course up at Dutchess Community College in communications and broadcasting.  What a waste of time that was-because I never really needed any of that knowledge in later years, especially how I came into radio.  Kind of fell into that.

Anyway, he gave me the idea, I thought it might be a cool thing to do when I got out of school.  Till I started asking around and found out what these guys made.  You hear this guy, big booming voice; you ride by the station later on at night, the guy’s out there emptying the garbage.  I was like, “Some radio personality!  What is this shit?”  You know?  And to a fifteen-, sixteen-year-old kid, that just wrecked the illusion of that.  No, no, no, no, no.  No, I’ll go work in a store or drive a truck or something; at least that’s honest and people know, what they see you doing is what you’re doing.

About twelve, thirteen years ago, my buddy Stewart I went to high school with–he’s probably got as many records as I do.  His tastes are a little different, so his collection varies.  But he got a show on WVKR.  I don’t remember, I’ll have to ask him sometime; I forgot how he got that show.  But he got it, and it’s the Jukebox Jamboree.  It’s a good show.  It’s an open-ended concept, so you can do damn near anything with it, you’re not locked into any particular kind of music, as long as it’s something that would hold somebody’s interest on a Friday night while they’re partying.  That’s a good concept.  So, it didn’t take him long, he started dragging my ass up there.  He’d come over here and start going through my records and borrowing records off me to use for his show.  I was like, “Why don’t I just come up and do the show for you?”  “Oh.  Ok.”  In fact, we’re doing one on Elvis’ death anniversary, August sixteenth.  Cause it’s the twenty-fifth anniversary this year.  That’s also my birthday-Elvis died right on my birthday. 

So he’s like, “Let’s do an Elvis show together.  Can you come up with something?”  He kept calling me: “Can you come up with something?”  So I remembered that over the years I collected a lot of the original newscasts when Elvis was discovered dead, and then the funeral and stuff.  So what I’m gonna do for the twenty-fifth anniversary, the concept is: “Elvis is Still Dead.”  I’m just gonna run all these interview clips with the family, the newscasts, the bulletins, and then splice it with his records.  No commentary needed.

I’ve done other Elvis shows with Stewart, too.  We did one five-hour Elvis show, was nothing but songs from his movies.  The last Elvis show we did about five years ago, we didn’t play anything by Elvis.  We just put together two solid hours of all the songs he covered, starting with “That’s All Right, Mama,” running up to “My Way,” by Frank Sinatra.  And we just documented his whole career without playing anything by him.  That was the hardest show to put together; that took us about a week to pull all those records, and sequence it in a way that would make sense.  [Laughs]  So that you would have everything from Bill Monroe, to Arthur Crudup, to Wayne Newton and everything, all in there, and have it make some kind of musical sense.  It wasn’t easy.

But I started going up there and doing shows with him and, I don’t know, we come up with some wild-ass concepts.  We were doing these goofy shows from time to time.  Then Pirate Joe took over WHVW and made it all country.  So me and Stewart used to sit around and go, “Why don’t we show them what a real country music show would sound like?”  So we went up there one night, we picked out the most hillbilly-sounding, outrageous country records imaginable.  Stuff like-one was this guy imitating Alfalfa singing “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”  Troy Hess doing “Mama, Please Don’t Go Topless.”  This song about a guy killing his dog, called “Psycho.”  Along with red-hot rockabilly and everything else, you know.  And in between the sets and in between the songs we were making fun of everybody that worked for WHVW.  Pirate Joe was dubbed Pirate Schmoe, and everything.

Pirate Joe heard the show.  I already knew him at that point, not too well.  And he said, “Whose records were they?”  I said, “They were mine.”  He goes, “Did you ever think about working for WHVW?”  I was like, “Sure!”  He goes, “No, not with the schtick!  That’s gotta go.”  [Laughs]

At WHVW studios, 1990s

So, yeah.  That’s how I came here, by a series of goofs and mishaps.  I wasn’t at all serious about it. 

Can you describe the format of your show at WHVW?

Kind of evolved over time.  Took about a year and a half before I figured out what in hell I was doing.  I used to just go up there and spin records, say, throw the phone lines open and see–people tell me what they like and don’t like.  They’ve always been good at that.  Still are.  And I decided there were certain things I needed to play.  There needed to be a place for some bluegrass in the show.  One thing the guy that does the German hour insisted on, he said, “You got to have a portion of the show set aside for Western music.  Nobody plays Gene Autry or Tex Ritter or anything anymore.”  So that got me thinking, let’s just have Western music period, both old and new.

I’ve got one record right now, I haven’t figured out where it’s gonna go yet, but I got Bing Crosby doing “Y’all Come.”  Don’t laugh, it’s a hot record, but people are gonna go, “What the hell is he playing that for?” when I do play it.

Yeah, it just kind of evolved over time.  I just wanted to touch on a little bit of all the genres, subgenres, of country music in the space of the show, and go from the old to the new, and hopefully present a whole bunch of stuff that’s not easy to hear.  Not just old records but also there’s a lot of independent artists, not only in this country but other countries, make great music, needs to be heard.  And so, over time–like, now I start with bluegrass.  Then I got–the latest new feature–the Hillbilly News.  It’s news about people in the industry, the old-timers, stuff like that.  Requests.  “Here’s something new I want to lay on you.”  Bad-a-bing, that’s first hour. 

Hour number two used to start out with a yodeling set, but I just got burned out putting that together, so I went to the old-timey set, which is stuff from the ’20s and ’30s.  But after a while that all sounds alike to me, too, so I alternate–basically I put the show together now like a Chinese menu: pick some from Column A, pick some from Column B.  All right, what are we going to have this week?  All right, yeah: let’s have a train set, a trucker set, you know … But there’s certain essentials that always need to be there: you always got to have some songs about love gone wrong, and drinkin’.  Gotta be in there.  And you gotta end with a song for our sick and shut-in friends who like a good inspirational tune.  Other than that, anymore, the show’s getting to be pretty freestyle.  Best way I could describe it.  But I keep switching up on it, because I don’t want the listeners to get bored with it, and I don’t want to get bored with it, either.  When you tune in every Sunday, you know I’m gonna start with some bluegrass, but other than that it’s really hard to tell where I’m gonna go with the show.

What about your listeners?  Do you have a sense of who they are?

Very demanding.  They know what they like; they really know what they don’t like.  They’re not afraid to express themselves.  And there ain’t no simple demographic for it, either.  I thought when I first started doing it, it’s gonna be all older people listening to it, anyway.  Nope.  All age groups seem to like it.  And I’ve gotten to be friends with some of them.  They’re funny, you know.  One time I was just riffin’ away on the air.  I was playing drinkin’ numbers.  “Yeah, boy, man, my liquor cabinet could use restocking.”  This guy Don from Newburg calls me up: “Whaddaya like?” 

So I was being smart: “Why don’t you bring me a bottle of Johnny Walker Black?”  About three days later it comes to the station.  [Laughs]  I was only kidding with the guy, you know.  Then he calls me up the following Sunday: “Did you get it?”  I was like, “Well, damn, that was awful nice.”  He says, “Well, you played my request a month ago.”  Hm.  Ok.

Are there any especially memorable shows that you’ve put together over the years?  Memorable to you or otherwise really popular with the listeners?

I can tell you one they hated: I did an all female one.  I figured it’d be fun, just to trace the evolution of the female in country music history.  “Where’s the Hank Williams?”  And I think the kicker was: “I ain’t playin’ Hank today, but I’m playin’ his wife!”  You ever heard his wife’s records?  [Laughs]  ‘Nuff said?  They weren’t amused by that.  You know, I was playing yodelers and all sorts of stuff, I thought I was doing great–the Dezourik Sisters–I was playing stuff that you’d never hear! 

Nope, they didn’t like that.

With Jim and Jesse McReynolds, 1997

The shows kind of all run together after a while.  But since I’ve started doing the taped phone interviews with country musicians and country music legends-now, those things on their own merit are all extremely memorable.  I think Big Bill Lister was the first one.  He’s kind of burned out on talking about his buddy Hank Williams.  That’s all anybody ever asked him about-that’s why he has an unlisted phone number, that’s why you sent him registered letters and they’d come back and everything. 

When I finally did get in touch with him, I explained to him that I didn’t want to bug him about Hank, I wanted to talk to him about what he had done and all the people he’d crossed paths with.  He thought that was fabulous-nobody ever approached him about him.  They just wanted to know about the people he worked with, they didn’t care nothing about the records he made or anything.  And the guy’s a great storyteller, one of the best storytellers I ever had on this show.  I got a fabulous interview out of him.

I talked to Jett Williams a couple weeks ago, Hank’s daughter.  Oh, she had a great Hank story-you’ll like this one.  This is one of the best Hank stories I heard in a long time.

Hank was working out in California with Freddy Hart.  Freddy Hart’s the guy that did “Easy Lovin’” in the ’70s.  But this story happened early on.

Freddy Hart had bought a brand new Martin guitar.  You know, they’ve never been cheap, and I’m sure for a guy just starting out in the music business it was quite an investment, back in the early ’50s.  Freddy’s opening for Hank.  Hank keeps bitching that his guitar don’t sound right: it must be out of tune or something wrong with it, maybe it’s defective.  And Hank puzzled over this and then finally he figured it out: he says it didn’t have that country soul.  It didn’t have the right ring to it. 

“Freddy, I can fix that for you.”

Freddy: “Well, ok, Hank.”  He respected him, you know; figured some little trick …

So what Hank did was took his brand new Martin guitar; he opened up a Jack’s beer; he poured the entire contents of the beer into the guitar; sloshed it around; poured it out; and then started pickin’ on it.  And he goes, “There.  Now it has country soul.  Now it’s a real, hillbilly-sounding guitar.”

I think most people who had a new Martin would be upset if somebody did that to em.  Certain people, Hank would of wound up wearin’ that guitar after that.

Have you ever had people over the years get in touch with you, looking for a record?

You mean, listeners or artists?

Particularly artists.

Yeah.  Sometimes some of these people move around a lot and they didn’t keep a lot of their stuff.  Like Red River Dave, he’s since passed away, but I can remember calling him up, cause I’d made a recording of a song he wrote called “The California Hippie Murders.”  It’s about Charles Manson.  It’s done to the tune of “Never No More Blues” by Jimmie Rodgers; it’s got yodeling and everything in it, it’s classic.  It’s one of these things Dr. Demento would cream over, it’s just so  bizarre.  And so I contacted him and said, “Hey, guess what, we do one of your songs: ‘California Hippie Murders.’”  He’s like, “Really?  Well, I’ll take your word for it, I don’t remember it.  I don’t have it.”  [Laughs]  So I sent him a tape of it, along with a tape of our version of it.  He says, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that now.”  He says, “Yeah, I put that record out and the DJ’s were just horrified, nobody’d play it.”  Said, “I don’t even know-how the hell did you get a copy of it?” 

So then we started talking about other things.  It turned out–now here’s a guy, probably made six, seven hundred sides over the years–he maybe had a hundred of em when I talked to him.  So I put as much of his stuff as I had on tape for him.  And he in turn put on tape for me a bunch of demo recordings and stuff that he recorded for release but never did get released.  And now that he’s gone, God knows what happened to his masters of them, but at least I have copies of them. 

And Liz Anderson, she had a house fire about twenty years ago and lost all of–all of her stuff.  Her awards and everything.  The thing that really bothered her was she lost all of these recordings that she had of dozens and dozens of artists, their recordings of songs she had written for them.  That’s one of the projects I’ve got going on right now: finding those records.  When I find em, I just send em to her.  I figure that’s my way of giving something back to these people that have provided me with so much entertainment over the years.  Like, Liz Anderson is an example of somebody who I’ve always really admired.  Always went out of my way to buy her old records and stuff.  Then I get to know her and she’s a real sweetheart, she’d do anything for you.  Calls me up on my birthday, calls me up on the holidays and stuff.  Drop me a note at least once a month: “How you doing?  What, have you been sick; why haven’t I heard from you?”  You know, it’s like-this is pretty damn cool.  Somebody that I admire that’s that nice, you know.  And most of the people I deal with are pretty nice.  The ones that aren’t, I don’t deal with.  I haven’t run into any real scumbags yet, knock on wood.  I’m sure I will, somewhere along the line.

You’ve mentioned your own band.  Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Don’t have it no more!  Which one?  I had a bunch of different ones over an eighteen-year period.  My first one was a punk band–it was called the Pukes.  We sought to invade Dutchess County with this new phenomenon called “Puke Rock.”  Even had a song called “Going to a Puke Party.”  The locals that hung out and drank in the park, we called em pukes–that’s where it all came from.  Cause invariably you got these assholes together and that’s what one of em would do.  So we were covering Sex Pistols and rockabilly and stuff, and then–I had a bunch of bands over the years.  I had a Southern Rock band.  Bunch of rock bands.

I had one band, the only one that made any money, was called “Filler.”  Cause that’s all they were.  We played ’70s rock and disco.  I had those shirts and flared jeans-I used to go to the Salvation Army to shop for stuff like that, to wear for that band.  We would only do songs from K-Tel albums that cost less than 50 cents; I mean, we had real guidelines for this band.  We did a lot of Grand Funk tunes, and James Brown rave-ups; “Kung Fu Fighting,” we used to do that. 

See, we’d take something like “Kung Fu Fighting,” right?  You know how hippie bands, the big thing was they’d have an extended jam on something, they’d take some song and flog it for five to ten minutes?  Well, we took that concept-we’d take a song like “Kung Fu Fighting” and play it for fifteen minutes!  And just as irritating as we could be.  And … people liked us.  I never understood it. 

We had a song called “Do the James Brown.”  Where all it was, was the guys would just play one riff over and over and I’d be going: “Umphh!  Good-God!  Ain’t it funky now!  Get back!  How bout everybody way back there!”  You know, and stuff like that.  We had some ballads we did, too.  We used to do that song Styx did, “Lady.”  Except I’d sing it in a Jerry Lewis voice-so I’d come out: “LAAAADYYYY!!”  Stuff like that.

We just tore em up with that band.  And it actually made money.  I could not understand it, cause the more horrible we got, the more people seemed to like it.  Nobody got the joke.  So you can never underestimate the tastes of the average music fan.

Then there was the hillbilly band: there was the Higgins Brothers Gang.  Originally–let’s see–that grew out of a rockabilly band.  Called Dixie Refried.  Not to be confused with Dixie Fried, because that had another front-man.  That guy moved–Chip–moved back down to Mississippi, I became the front-man, then it became Dixie Refried.  Then the guys got good and sick of me, so then it evolved into the Higgins Brothers Gang.  Then it evolved into a full hillbilly band.  Again–way ahead of our time.  Except, that band, I couldn’t sell that band for shit.  Dixie Refried I remember playing at a bowling alley down in Wappingers; I think we made eight dollars and thirteen cents apiece after playing two sets.  I was like, you know, I love playing music, but not that much.

Darwin Lee Hill, center, with Dixie Refried, 1992

But the Higgins Brothers Gang, we had some pretty good gigs.  We played for the Moonies over around Port Jervis–that was real interesting.  That was weird.  We got that gig cause some other guy had booked it, he canceled out and got us.  Said, “Oh, no, I got a conflict, I got another gig that day; you guys will have to take it!”  And once we got there I saw why.  But we went up there and did our usual nonsense, you know.  Everything from “Everybody’s Truckin’” to “Okie from Muskogee” and back.  The killer, “Yodeling Song.”  We had a fiddler and everything.  Our fiddler was a classically trained violinist, it was hard to get her to play bad enough to match the rest of us.  And we had a few personnel changes here and there and eventually that just went by the wayside.  I wouldn’t have gotten so disgusted with it, but I wasn’t making any money off it, and it was taking up what little time I had left that wasn’t taken up by the radio show and collecting records.  So. 

Well, maybe should we talk a little bit about the industry now; about Nashville?

Oh!  Where do I begin.  “The industry now.”  Oh, they’ve done the industry up righteously.  Around Christmastime–you must know about that, right?–the original Coutnry Music Hall of Fame, down around 16^th Avenue?  It’s now the Country Hole of Fame.  They bulldozed it, the day after Christmas.

It was nice.  One thing they had, all around the perimeter of the building and in through the lobby, was called the Walkway of the Stars, and it was set up like down in Hollywood Boulevard, where the stars would have their star and their name and everything.  The goddamn Country Music Association didn’t pay for that, the fans paid for them.  Bulldozers tore that all to pieces.  And that stuff–I put out money for the Lefty Frizzell one myself.  But they have no respect for anything down there.  The music business is so frigged up anymore–well, Nashville got out of the country music business about twenty years ago, anyway.  But they finally had to get rid of that stinkin’ embarrassment that was 16^th Avenue.

That’s where I always used to go.  Now there’s no reason for me to even go back to Nashville.  They had the wax museum, they had the Family Tradition Museum.  Hank, Jr. ran that.  Big sign out front: “Come in and see: Hank’s Death Car!“  [Laughs]  That was my idea of–that’s Nashville.  And lower Broadway, they cleaned that up; they put a Planet Holywood in there.  But you’d go block after block and it was nothing but strip clubs, gin joints, and honky-tonks where live bands played.  Whatever kind of basic entertainment you wanted, it was there, and it was cheap.  Half of these bars that had live bands didn’t even have a cover charge to get in.  You just tipped the band if you liked something.

My dad called this one years and years ago.  My dad’s been gone thirteen years.  And he said, “The time’s gonna come when the music business–all types of music–they’re gonna run it like they ran the pop music industry years ago.  Everything’s gonna be geared to the lowest common denominator.  There’s gonna be no such thing as quality.  And as far as artists-back in the ’60s they called em eighteen-month wonders, cause that was the shelf-life of an artist.  Like an American Bandstand artist.  Well today it’s, what, a three-year wonder.  Cause they make their first album, it takes two or three years to get the second one out.  Say the first album sells ten million, second one sells five.  Second one only sold five, it’s a failure.  You’re gone.  Plus, you owe us all this money off of whatever royalties you had coming for what we spent to promote this freakin’ thing that didn’t sell to our expectations.  That’s the way it’s run today.

And radio–Clear Channel owns 75% of the radio stations in this country today, you know, so what you hear on the air–on FM, anyway–is dictated by probably no more than a dozen people.  And it doesn’t matter.  They’re either in Los Angeles or New York City, they don’t give a damn what somebody in Arkansas wants to hear.  Because their demographic is-I think it’s 20- to 30-year-old now-female.  That’s their target audience.  And I don’t want this to be perceived as a knock against women or anything, or age.  But damn it, there’s older people, there’s younger people, there’s men, there’s every–you know, there’s people out there that have more interest than just that.  They don’t give a shit, that’s not what they’re in business for.  They got their target audience.

Look at country music.  When’s the last time you heard a regional accent on somebody on a major label?  On a major label, or on CMT or something?  Never.

That’s why now I’m damn glad I call it “Darwin Lee’s Real Hillbilly Music Show.”  So people don’t tune in thinking they’re gonna hear that crappy Nashville corporate country.  I started calling it that cause I got tired of people calling up for Garth Brooks and shit like that.  [Laughs]  “Come on, man, it’s a hillbilly show, you know I don’t play that.”  Or Anne Murray or any of that stuff you see on Late Night.

No, they’ve ruined it.  But there is hope.  I mean, there’s great stuff I get; every week I get stuff, some of it’s outstanding.  But it’s only on little pissant labels that people ain’t gonna get to hear, unless they hear it on my show.  And as far as country music in Nashville, it’s doomed.  But, not to worry: there’s great country music coming out of Texas, out of California, out of Chicago, out of North Carolina.  The Two Dollar Pistols, they’re the best honky-tonk band on the scene right now, and their home base is Chapel Hill.

As far as real country music goes, I say give it a generation or two in this country and it’ll disappear altogether, anyways.  Not overseas.  They love it.  In Japan they have country-western bars and stuff.  And it’s just so bizarre: go in there and have a T-bone steak, and listen to a honky-tonk band.  And they dig it.  Well, America’s always been big on basically shitting on its own culture anyway.  People all around the world love our culture better than we love it anymore.  It ain’t just country.  Look at what R&B used to be and soul music used to be, and look at what it is now. 

Country was just one of the last things that hadn’t been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.

Webb Pierce's car--in the old Country Music Hall of Fame--1997

Ernest Mostella

Ernest Mostella was a fiddle maker from Alabama’s St. Clair County, a rare practitioner of African American fiddle traditions surviving into the 21st century. When I met him he was in his nineties and full of excited vitality, still operating a power saw to carve his fiddles out of the raw trees. He lived alone in a one-room trailer in Ashville and talked and sang for as long as any visitor would listen.

I have included four samples of his singing here. I made these recordings of Mostella in 2000, in his home. The sound quality is not perfect, but I think the recordings are worth the listen, capturing the energy, humor, faith and passion of the singer near the end of his life. Hopefully in the future I will be able to make more of Mostella’s recordings available. Maybe others have also recorded him over the years.

Singing

1. Eat Fried Chicken, Uncle Ned, Uncle Joe (0:37)

This is a song Mostella used to play on the fiddle.  When he sang the da-dee-da’s at the end of this recording, Mostella moved both hands in the air to mimic the playing of the instrument. 

2. Nearer My God / The Titanic / Sad When That Great Ship Went Down (2:03)

The sinking of the Titanic inspired a number of songs, and provided Mostella with one of his favorite subjects.  During our visits, Mostella would return again and again to the Titanic, singing the songs and often talking at length about its sinking.

A real regret of mine is that in all of our visits I never heard Earnest Mostella fiddle. (All the sound files on this page are pure unaccompanied singing.) Mostella’s handmade fiddles were unwieldy contraptions, each of them with a look and dimensions of its own: blocks of hollowed-out walnut or pine, depending on what he could find (he would cut down the trees himself; long leaf pine, he said, was best), clunky fiddles strung up with twine, huge tuning pegs extending horizontally from either side. For most of his life he used a sturdy homemade glue to hold things together, a mixture of egg yolks and sawdust; later, if he could get a ride into town and if he had the money, he’d use carpenter’s glue. The bows were equally rough, strung with the same twine, and, like the fiddles, varying widely in size. These instruments were fascinating works of art as much as instruments. I was eager to know what kinds of sounds these things could produce in the hands of perhaps the one man in the world who knew how to play them.

Fiddle

Though spry and hilarious in his nineties, perhaps the older age had somewhat slowed his fiddle-making and -playing. Ernest Mostella was always at work, though, even at that age, and he sold the fiddles as soon as he finished them. (In the very last years of his life, he raised their price from 25 to $35; he might ask for a quarter down upfront if, before he had one ready, a customer pre-ordered a fiddle.) By the time I knew him he did not keep a fiddle around for his own use, perhaps because he could not keep up with demand, perhaps also because he could no longer play himself. Whenever I came around, he would have a fiddle made and no bow or a bow made and no fiddle–to this day my fiddle lacks a bow–and thus I never heard him play.  Before he died Mostella was moved to an assisted care facility in nearby Atalla; his woodworking abruptly stopped, though he would entertain the nurses with his enthusiastic singing and his ceaseless talk. Somewhere out there there must be a tape of him playing one of his fiddles. I think that to hear whatever music he could coax from one of those instruments would be a revelation and a joy.

Mostella did sing, though, all the way to the end, and for me his singing was revelation and joy enough. “Nearer My God to Thee”; “The Titanic”; “The Boll Weevil”; “St. Louis Blues”; “Muscle Shoals Blues”; “Let Me Be Your Sweetheart”; “Careless Love”; “Columbus, the Gem of the Ocean”; “God Bless America.” He made up songs of his own and strung together old songs with loose chains of association. His talk worked the same way, jumping from one association to another but somehow coming back suddenly to where it started: he would preach on Noah and the Ark and somewhere in his monologue the Ark would become the Titanic, leading him to speak of John Jacob Astor and rich men’s drowning maids and “Nearer My God to Thee”; and then he would be talking again of the people and animals saved in the flood of the Bible. This talk would be interspersed constantly with snatches of song, and with numerous reminiscences about his late wife Rosetta. A coal miner for most of his life, Mostella had long preached on Sundays (he was known in the neighborhood as “Preacher”). Sermonizing and story-telling came naturally to him.

Praying

3. Shape notes (0:30)

Here Mostella sings a brief melody in the tradition of the Sacred Harp, singing the names of each notes (do mi do, etc.) and ending in prayer.

Ernest Mostella’s grandfather–Gus Cochran, born into slavery–was a locally celebrated fiddler in his own time. He taught himself to play, Mostella said, after whittling a key to open the cabinet which housed his master’s fiddle. Cochran was about seven feet tall, an imposing character, and was in high demand as a musician. Mostella learned to play by watching this grandfather. One of his favorite tunes was the novelty number “Mockingbird.”

There were two decorations in Mostella’s trailer: a photograph of himself with a fiddle, and a much older, faded photo of Rosetta as a young woman. Mostella was especially eager to talk about her. He explained once that in his old age he had all but stopped sleeping; he would be up all night, alone, often passing the hours by singing to Rosetta. The recording included below suggests a good idea of what those late nights must have sounded like. The song is a kind of stream-of-conscious tribute to Rosetta; scenes from his courtship and marriage, expressions of grief, and interspersed lyrics and melodies of familiar tunes (”Corrina, Corrina,” “You Are My Sunshine”) weave in and out of the performance. I can not think of a real and raw expression of love and longing as moving or profound as these eight minutes; I do not expect to ever forget witnessing the tribute, watching Ernest Mostella disappear deep into the song. I hope that this and the other recordings included here will provide some small window, however incomplete, into this man’s character, his originality, his music and kindness.

4. Rosetta (8:20)

*   *

Note: The above photographs of Ernest Mostella were taken by Colleen Cook Stonbely.

*  *

I have included below the lyrics to Mostella’s improvised song to Rosetta. As Mostella himself sometimes said after singing a particularly emotionally- or spiritually-charged tune: “That song will make you cry.”

*   *

In a world full of sinners, hypocrites, whoremongers, and thieves, William Carlton (W.C.) Rice saw himself as a modern-day Noah: ordained by God to prophesy destruction, to call the unsaved and endangered to salvation, and to build with his own hands a vessel for his and for others’ deliverance. He was the spiritual inheritor of the Old Testament hero, his warnings not of the flood but of the fire next time, his Ark not a boat but a Garden.

“Remember,” Rice would say, “Noah built the Ark and God borned the spirit in Noah’s flesh like he has in mine.”

In the Biblical account of the flood, God speaks the dimensions of His Ark to Noah, naming in detail the materials and layout of the construction, its width, breadth, and height. And in similar fashion so did God speak to W.C. Rice—every day, for close to three decades—the blueprints of His Garden. “The best way I can describe it to you,” Rice once explained, “it’s like a puzzle. You got to put every piece together, to make it come out right. So that’s what God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost did with me. See, they built it. I built it, but they built it through me. Just like a puzzle. And we’re still building it. I will be as long as I live.”

*   *

The Miracle Cross Garden still sneaks up on you as you curve around the bend of Autauga County Road 86 near Prattville, Alabama. A few wooden crosses pointing in all directions, growing from the ground or nailed to trees and posts, evolve around the corner into hundreds. Words painted in red and black across weather-beaten boards warn the driver that “YOU WILL DIE”; to “REPENT”; that “HELL IS HOT.” A graveyard of broken appliances covered in more painted words preaches the sins of sex, the fires of hell, and the possibility of salvation from both through Jesus; other planks of wood and appliance carcasses boast cryptic strings of numbers. Looming over the nearly three acres of roadside evangelism are three enormous crosses, standing in remembrance of the crucifixion scene at Calvary. On the other side of the street, surrounded by still more crosses and crowned with an air conditioner fan, a hollowed mound of wood and dirt reconstructs Jesus’ empty tomb. A rusted blue car, overgrown with vines and perched on the edge of one of the landscape’s natural bluffs, proclaims in huge letters: “THE DEVIL WILL PUT YOUR SOUL IN HELL, BURN IT FOREVER.”

Many visitors have come to Prattville from across the U.S. and beyond, having seen the Cross Garden in a book or magazine or on the internet. Some visitors have told Rice that they first stumbled as unsuspecting drivers onto the Cross Garden, were moved by the scene, and accepted Jesus as a result. But to many, the Cross Garden is an eerie, even frightening, stretch of land, offering a grotesque vision of Christianity: crooked crosses sprouting chipped and splintered from dry red dirt; crosses wrapped in barbed wire or covered with the repeated word “HELL” in sprawling black paint; jagged pieces of metal rusted to an orange-brown, the words “REPENT YOU WILL DIE” printed over a faded “READ YOUR BIBLE”; the appliances and automobiles which form so much of the Garden broken and wrecked, Rice’s creation springing out of rust and decay. It is without doubt a strange landscape, complete with its own language the outsider must struggle to understand—a language made largely of numbers, of truncated sentences and loose associations, overflowing with commas and repetitions, full of contradictions. In the Cross Garden, threats of damnation are juxtaposed against images of salvation: a cluster of thin, white crosses angle upwards out of the dirt, the single word “HELL” painted across each. Sin and Salvation, Jesus and Satan, Heaven and Hell, the Flesh and the Spirit come together in a kind of perpetual battle; the violence of their coexistence is wrought into the broken and beaten landscape of the Garden. Mixed among the description of Hell’s fiery fury are calls to redemption and glory, signs which insist and beg, perhaps even soothe, signs which offer the only way out of the Cross Garden’s nightmare: “JESUS WILL HELP YOU”; “JESUS SAVES”; “JESUS DON’T LIE.” “WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH JESUS?”

In the midst of all this sits the home of W.C. and Marzell Rice. A van is parked in the driveway, the image of Jesus carrying His cross painted against its side; there’s also a pickup in the garage around back, a five- or six-foot cross extended upward out of its bed. “DON’T BRING THE DEVIL IN THIS HOUSE,” signs at the front and back doors implore the visitor: “LEAVE THE DEVIL OUTSIDE.”

In the last years of his life, W.C. Rice found himself increasingly confined, by diabetes, to a wheelchair. Up until his death he continued to add to the Garden, just not as much as he liked. When he could not do the work himself he would give the instructions to his wife Marzell, instructions given first to him by God. Rice died on January 18 of 2004, his body giving out finally to pneumonia. He was 73 years old, and surrounded by family.

In reporting his death, local papers anticipated public questions about the fate of the garden. “Garden remains tourist attraction,” a paper from nearby Montgomery proclaimed; “Widow vows to maintain husband’s cross garden,” another headline assured (and, so far, she has). As always—Rice and his crosses had long appeared in area papers as recurring local-color items—headlines were more concerned with the Garden itself, an item of curiosity and local weirdness, than with its message. In his later years, Rice had become celebrated as a “folk artist,” his front yard likened to other home-made revelatory spaces like Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden. But unlike Finster, who created from it a cottage industry, Rice rejected the “folk-art” label. “I don’t know anything about art,” he insisted.

He was up to something else entirely.

*   *

W.C. Rice was born on February 20, 1930. He was saved on April 24, 1960—”in a house trailer, down in Fort Rucker. Sunday morning, about two o’clock.” That night, God healed Rice of an ulcerated stomach that had troubled him for some fifteen years. “Next thing I know, I come up out of the chair, and I spit tobacco all over that refrigerator, and I started preaching.” Rice never had another taste of tobacco, and was never bothered by ulcers again. “God borned the spirit in my flesh-body when He saved me that Sunday morning,” he explains. Ever since, Rice has been listening to God, talking to God, and preaching God’s word—from the makeshift pulpits of his pick-up truck and living-room recliner, in his occasional writings for local newspapers, and, above all, through his Garden.

Rice’s first congregation, early that April Sunday morning, was his wife Marzell; with her husband’s help she, too, “came to the Lord” later that morning, around nine o’clock. Eventually Rice also helped bring his mother and father, both of them death-bed repentants, into the fold. “I won their souls to Jesus,” he told me a few years before his own death, and added an important distinction: “I didn’t save them. Can’t nobody save a person. You can pray for them and the Lord does that. He’s the one that does the saving.”

To commemorate his parents’ salvation, Rice tacked three small cards above his kitchen door, each professionally printed in black and white and picturing a cross alongside printed text. The first card also bore a strip of black cloth, “in remembrance of God’s son,” and included a quotation from Scripture. The other cards included the dates of his parents’ births and deaths and read, “I thank the Lord for saving my MAMA and DADDY.” Then the Lord spoke to Rice, and told him to move his crosses outside.

“You see, from the three cards how big it is now.” We were sitting in his living room, Rice talking and talking; I visited Rice several times before his death and he would talk each time for as long as I would listen. Confined by diabetes and other health problems to a fat recliner, Rice gestured to the world beyond the living-room walls. “And it ain’t come to an end yet.”

The three little cards grew into Rice’s Miracle Cross Garden, a landscape of revelation that has attracted visitors from all over the world. With the advent of the internet word traveled far and visitors would come from Germany or Japan to the United States, just to visit Prattville and Rice and the Garden. Some visitors kept a distance from the man inside (when I was a teenager in Montgomery most people I knew were afraid of the Garden’s unseen creator); others knocked on Rice’s door to meet the man behind the crosses, to sign his guest book, even to give him more crosses or to listen to him preach. For all the hellfire of his Garden, Rice’s demeanor was always inviting and warm. He welcomed the attention as a means for spreading the Gospel. Rice insisted that he would not argue or force religion, but would welcome the questions of the curious as invitations to witness. Once that door was opened, he said, you would probably have to stand up and leave before he would stop talking.

This was essentially true.

*   *

The inside of the Rices’ house is as elaborately designed an environment as the Garden outside. Wooden, plastic, stone, and metal crosses—bought from stores, ordered from catalogues, or received as gifts—cover the living room walls and dangle in heavy bunches from the ceiling. Hangings depict Jesus in velvet, bearing His cross and walking on water. A tapestry reproduces the Last Supper. The face of Jesus, his scalp bleeding beneath a crown of thorns, looks through the peeling paint of an ancient plywood canvas. Photographs of Rice, his family, his dog and his truck are tacked to walls and ceiling amidst scores of newspaper clippings, strings of numbers, a few small rebel flags, and more crosses.

“I got a lot of Catholic stuff in here,” Rice told me. “But I don’t know nothing about it, all I know is a cross. The reason I got it is because I like the crosses and they like crosses. A lot of this stuff comes from Roman, Inc., in Chicago, Illinois. You see, they put that stuff on sale every once in a while, and I ordered me one of em and I liked it, so I ordered some more of em. I wound up getting nineteen. See, it’s just like making cars, all this stuff—every year they come out with a different model.”

He leaned further back in his recliner. His activities were largely confined by now to that chair. Unable to add to the Cross Garden as much as he would have liked, he still managed to spend time outside in his wheelchair, but less and less time. Marzell had begun helping him with the Garden’s upkeep and new additions.

“I don’t have no enemies,” Rice said. “You know, a lot of people tote enemies in a sack. Some of these people, you can’t talk to them, the Bible says just shake the dust off of your feet and go on and leave them alone. So that’s why I say I don’t carry none of them, I don’t carry none of them devils on me. Them peoples don’t like me, about the Cross Garden and all this stuff. Oh yeah, I get persecuted; my wife does, too. Yeah, it’s a hard, hard, straight line to walk.”

On another occasion Rice indicated pictures, taped to his wall, of him and his old Labrador retriever, Mac. “He was a praying dog,” Rice said proudly. “I got a pulpit over there. I’d call him–‘Come on boy, we got to go pray.’ He’d come around on that side, I got a stand about that high, he’d walk around that side and put his feet up there on that stand; I’d come around this-a-way, I’d bow my head and pray, he’d stand right there like he’s a-praying.

“People, people, people used to come by here. They’d bring people, people out here to see that dog, praying dog. So God works through all kinds of things, see. And I believe some people got saved by seeing that dog.”

*   *

“I can back up every piece of the stuff out there,” Rice says on another occasion, as if offering a challenge. “I don’t care which one you ask about, I can give you a Bible answer for it.” Sure enough, he is impossible to stump. I ask him at one point how many crosses are in the garden, a question he says he gets all the time. For the answer, he says, count all the crosses outside, inside, and on all the papers throughout and around the house. Then count all the words in the King James Bible. The numbers will be the same. “I’ve never counted all the words in the Bible,” he admits, also noting that he can’t walk well enough anymore to count the crosses outside. “But, it can be done. It’s a little long a job to do, but it’s not impossible.”

*   *

Rice described the Cross Garden as a “warning station.” “That’s what them signs is about down there. I warn people.” Signs marked “YOU WILL DIE” are not threats, but facts, intended less to scare than to explain: warnings that we all must die, that we know not the hour, and that if we are not born again, then we are bound for the fires of Hell. “The biggest part of the people that’s gone on and died, their soul’s in Hell,” he would say, and plead of his visitors: “Don’t, when you die, go to hell-fire. And want water, cause you ain’t going to get none. There’s no water down there. There’s no air conditioners down there. They’re wailing,” he sayid of the damned, “and gnashing of teeth. They’re mad. They’re on fire. Never get out of there. Be down there forever.”

Thus, a cinder block on the ground outside warns the visitor with a single word: “HELL.” A toilet seat lying in a patch of dead grass elaborates: “HELL IS HOT.” Discarded air conditioning units, refrigerators, Coke machines, and ovens add cryptically to the messages of a burning eternity with no ice water:

TOO LATE

IN HELL

FIRE

WATER

ALL KIND’S

IN, HELL

FIRE WONT

WATER

SIN SOUL

HYPOCRITES

IN HELL

WONTS

WATER

DRY

RICH

MAN

HELP ME

CRYING

IN HELL

WATER

REPENT

SEX

USED

WRONG

WAY

IN

HELL

SEX

SIN

HELL

FIRE

HELL IS HOT, HOT, HOT

The messages distill Rice’s imagery of Hell into a few frantic words. The messages of the Garden comprise Rice’s Bible, stripped to hits most fundamental bones and emotional core, constellations of meaning exploded down into a few words, a single word, a chain of numbers, even a single number. A sign on one cross bears the inscription “JESUS SAVES”; beneath it is a second sign: “HELL SEX.” Other signs say simply “JESUS” or present the numbers 8 or 26 or 7 in bold red or green, offering no instructions for their interpretation.

Rice’s religion was rooted firmly in a language of numbers, and Rice would claim an “understanding of numbers” given by God. “He works with me in numbers. That’s part of my calling. He works with numbers in the flesh-body. If you start paying attention to it, you’ll see things, different numbers.” And so Rice would tell stories: of the ten virgins, of the two thieves, of the three men thrown in the furnace, of the eight saved in the flood. He spoke of seven, “God’s perfect number,” and of twenty-seven, “my mother’s number” (Annie Mae Rice was born on April 27, 1905; she was born again on April 27, 1976, the say she died). The numbers are reflections of spiritual realities, embodying layers of meaning so thick that Rice, who admittedly loved to talk, would say, “I can’t get into all that—I won’t get through talking.”

Off and on over the years, Rice would buy out the back page of the local Prattville Times and Centerville Press newspapers, and fill these pages with written sermons, plain black crosses, and significant numbers arranged into patterns. His writings for the paper (dictated to Marzell, who typed them out) contain long and tangled discourses on, among other things, the meaning of various numbers, relying heavily on stream-of-conscious Biblical associations and rendered more or less indecipherable to readers unfamiliar with Rice’s language:

Today is the 30^th day of March! Yesterday was the 29^th day of March! My daddy died on the 29^th day of January, 1977, two sevens, two thieves on the cross. One asked Jesus, one did not. On Saturday the 29^th, when I got to the Nursing Home, my daddy had just passed away around four o’clock. There was one furnace and there were three men put in that furnace, they looked in there and saw the fourth man, His name was Jesus. So my daddy went to be with the fourth man, just like Lazarus, Jesus. No. one, Lazarus, no. one My daddy, No. one, makes three persons or three spirits.

In the same essay, God Himself becomes a number—the number three, indicating the trinity. “I am,” Rice writes, “No. 3’s servant.” “There is no other person on earth who can stop the No. 3’s. Man can destroy the body but man cannot destroy the soul and spirit. Hallelujah, Praise the No. 3’s. What a miracle, miracle, miracle.”

As Rice writes, the numbers pile quickly upon one another, simultaneously referencing multiple points—dates, events, Bible verses—and spinning convoluted webs of spiritual meaning. He continues:

*   *

“When I die,” Rice once said to me, “put my old body in the ground; my spirit’s going up there to live with all them spirits up there, Jesus and God and all of em, all them people that’s done gone on to Heaven. I’m looking forward to it,” he said, but added: “I want to stay here as long as I can. The Lord knows all that. Just like me talking to you today. You see, when I’m dead and gone in the grave, I can’t talk to more people. I’ll have a spiritual body, I’ll be living over there. So they get more good out of me as long as I stay on this earth. Like I’m talking to you today, see. But according to age and time, you know, flesh-body wears out.”

“He ain’t coming back to get these crosses and all here. No, He ain’t coming back. Ain’t coming back after no church building on this earth. He ain’t coming back. The people is the church. The ones that’s been born and saved and are living for Him, that’s the church; that’s the ones he’s coming back after. He ain’t taking no church building, no building, that’s all going to be burnt up.”

“I’m in a lot of books. Magazines. All these things going throughout the world. On the internet. I’m on there three times, and you can’t tell how many more times I’ll be on there after I’m dead and gone. They’ll still be putting me on that internet system, circulating around the world. So this Cross Garden will never die. The wood will rot down, signs will rust down, but it’s been planted in people’s hearts, just like Jesus Christ. I ain’t calling myself no Jesus, cause there wasn’t but one—that another one,” he points out, always on the lookout for numbers—”but it’s been planted in people’s eyes, it’s going throughout the world all kinds of ways.”

“So,” one of Rice’s Centerville Press writings reads, “I’m warning you sinners and hypocrites just like Noah, warned the people in the other world, and did what God told him to do, he built an Ark, told the people it was going to rain. They didn’t believe him. It’s a sad thing that there was not one soul outside Noah’s family saved. 8 souls saved.”

“And,” Rice would say, leaning back in his chair, repeating a favorite phrase: “on and on it goes.”