Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [32]
Dorothy smiled at her. “Hello, Betty Raye. We’re looking forward to having you with us. We have a daughter about your age and I know she’s going to be very happy you are coming.”
Minnie nudged Betty Raye. “Tell the lady thank you.” The girl blushed and said something but she spoke so softly Dorothy could not hear what she said.
Later, after Dorothy returned to the table and realized what she had just done, she said to Doc, “Anna Lee is going to kill me.”
Dinner on the Ground
THE OATMAN FAMILY was just one of the many white gospel groups traveling all over the South and Midwest that year. Groups like the Spear Family, the Happy Goodman Family, the Statesmen, the Harmony Boys, the Weatherfords, the LeFevres, the Dixie Four, the Tennessee Valley Boys, and the Melody Masters made their living by traveling and appearing at small churches, singing conventions, revivals, all-day sings, and dinner-on-the-ground events. The roots of what was now called southern gospel music had actually started in New England in the 1700s, when early colonists brought hymnbooks from the Old World. Gospel was the dominant musical style in America for a long time and was very popular at churches and camp meetings all over the country. However, after the Civil War the style of singing known as Sacred Harp or shape-note music lost its popularity in the North but was kept alive in the rural churches of the Deep South. In 1910 a man named James D. Vaughan published his first songbook, Gospel Chimes. To promote it he sent out the Vaughan Quartet, the first all-male southern gospel group in America. Eventually, he started the Vaughan School of Music in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. Soon other schools opened, and by the 1930s southern gospel groups featuring men and women and children were springing up everywhere and crisscrossing the South, Midwest, and as far north as Iowa. The more successful gospel groups began to appear and thereby advertise over the radio and were able to promote a good crowd at their appearances.
But in 1946 radio appearances were a fairly new thing for the Oatmans. Ferris and his brothers, Floyd and Le Roy, had all been raised on a hardscrabble dirt farm in northern Alabama by strict Pentecostal parents. Because of his upbringing Ferris believed that just listening to the radio, much less singing and preaching over it, was a sin. As Minnie put it, “Ferris is bad to think the devil is behind everything.” However, in 1945, after seeing how the other groups were attracting so many people to their appearances by using broadcasts to tell people where they would “be at,” he prayed about it. A week later he said, “Minnie, the Lord spoke to me and said he wants us to go on the radio,” and so it was settled.
Minnie Varner, the fourth child of an Assembly of God preacher, was born outside of Shiloh, Georgia. The Varners were a musical family and Minnie was playing piano in church by age nine. She met Ferris Oatman when she was twelve and he was twenty-four. She had been at an all-day sing and dinner on the ground playing for the Harmonettes, an all-girl gospel group from Birmingham. That day Minnie saw Ferris, with all that black curly hair, she fell in love. Ferris must have felt the same. That night he told his brother Le Roy, “I just met my wife today.” Two years later, when she was fourteen, she ran off with him, ignoring the warnings of her parents and older brothers about marrying into a traveling gospel group. They said if she did she would be living in the back of a car hawking songbooks out of the trunk all her life. So far they had been right. But Ferris Oatman, who had worked picking cotton to send himself through the Stamps-Baxter School of Gospel Music in Dallas, felt he had a real calling. From the age of six all he ever wanted to be in life was a gospel quartet man. All Minnie wanted from age twelve was to be his wife and so she joined the group and went on the road.
After the two boys, Bervin and Vernon, and later Betty Raye were born, Minnie’s parents bought them a small, two-bedroom