Excerpt from Louder than God, some typing, old and very new music from John Douglas and Shetland’s North Country Fair

Thanks for subscribing ( if you have) to my newsletter, which I’m trying to put out weekly and includes the latest hour-long selection of music that usually streams on 60 North Radio under the Beatcrofting moniker. But not this week as I was struck down with a post-COVID migraine that I’m only just emerging from, thanks to sticky toffee pudding and paracetamol.

As promised last week,and after much heart searching and re-working (not to mention re-titling), I’m streaming for free an excerpt from chapter one of my proposed new book, multi-media website, and general piece of rampant self-indulgence, provisionally entitled Louder than God: Jesus, guitars and the lost fly cemetery.

This is a kind of memoir about my experiences as a child brought up in the Scottish Gospel Halls of the 1960s, and subsequent involvement in the bizarre world of ‘Christian rock music’, life as a full-time ‘singing evangelist’, and subsequent fall from grace into the evil worlds of journalism, proper rock’n’roll and broadcasting.

I’m still groping towards a method of doing this. At the moment I’m thinking book, but an accompanying Substack/website with songs, videos, podcast and interviews might be good. What do you think? Are you interested? Are you interested enough to pay a modest monthly amount for exclusive access to all the bits and bobs, lost records, strange memories such as that time we lost an absolutely real gun, used in a piece of religious drama. In Kilmarnock Prison? A Walther PPK as I recall.

As for the ‘lost fly cemetery’…all will be explained.

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Also, I bought a typewriter. I hope you can read the horrendous script reproduced below.

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Finally, the edition of my  Beatcrofting show contains a number of records released or re-released in 1955, the year of my birth. And the year rock’n’roll really began. More of that in the continuing saga of Louder than God (see above). Playlist at the end. Listen to the Mixcloud stream here:

https://www.mixcloud.com/tom-morton2/beatcrofting-saturday-22-september-2023/

Louder than God:

Jesus, guitars and the lost fly cemetery

Chapter One: You’ll grow up to be bad…

It was a simple transaction: if you got up and sang a song or recited a Bible verse, you got a sweetie. Admittedly it was a boiled sweetie, like a soor ploom, a cinnamon ball or a Spangle, something hard, and wrapped in paper so that you were meant to keep it for afterwards, but never did. Straight into the mouth it went after your performance, for a hit of sugar and vicious chemical flavourings. Inevitably, a baleful adult gaze meant you were forced to spit it into a hankey or finger it straight into a foul pocket for future, fluffy consumption. Sometimes weeks later

But what to sing. Or say. Duplicates weren’t permitted, so if someone had already recited John Three and Sixteen (For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten…) it had to be one of the jingle-jangle choruses that lodged themselves in your brain. Forever. 

More than 60 years later, they’re still there.

Romans Ten and nine

Is a favourite verse of mine

Confessing Christ as Lord, I am saved by grace divine

Now hear the words of promise, in golden letters shine

Romans, Ten and Nine.

That had the advantage of being a Bible verse you could actually sing. Some of the other Sunday school jingles were a bit more freely interpretative, more theologically imaginative. Take the still-well known Jesus Loves Me, this I know (for the Bible tells me so. We belted out its additional verses with gusto

Jesus Loves the Indian Boy

Boy and arrow for a toy

And he loves the cowboy too

With his horse and rope lassoo

Jesus loves the Eskimo

In the land of ice and snow

Big Filipino, wee Chinee

Living far across the sea

Yes, Jesus loves them

And me, Jesus loves me. He wants me for a sunbeam, to shine for him each day. He wants me to store my treasures in the Bank of Heaven (where no thief can steal away, and there is no inflation or devaluation) He wants me to ride with the cavalry, march with the infantry, shoot with the artilley, because I’m in the Lord’s army…

Those songs had odd roots. Jesus Loves the Little Chidlren (All the children of the world) was sung to an old marching song vrom the American Civil War (Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (We go a-Marching). Red and Yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight. Jesus Loves Me itself began as a poem to a dying child in an 1860 novel by Susan Warner called Say and Seal, written by the author’s sister Anna Bartlett Warner. The cowboys and the racism came later and their authors are, perhaps thankfully, anonymous.

 But none of these Sabbath anthems were as odd as the little RCA Victor 45 rpm record that lurked at home in the depths of our Bush Radiogram, along with permitted music like Kenneth McKellar and for some reason, Ray Charles’s Take These Chains from My Heart. Which my parents thought was about sin and salvation but was actually about frustration, lust and desire;  with its sweeping strings and maudlin twang, it was part of Ray’s country period.

Decades later I would discover thatRay Charles was instrumental, literally, in kick starting modern soul music by rewriting the gospel classic It Must be Jesus by the Southern Tones as I Got a Woman. The coming and going between the holy and the profane in popular music continues to this day.

But Ray wasn’t my disc of choice, back in those radiocgram days. We liked Pinky and Perky (we were allowed to play those speeded-up comedic pigs) and the Cowboy Church Sunday School sounded just like them. This was someone called Stuart Hamblen, I now know, and his wife and family, their voices revved up to sound just like little piggies.

If you don’t go To Sunday School

You’ll grow up to be BAD!

You’ll never know just what you’ve missed

And someday wish you had

If you want to someday see the Lord

You’d better start today

The ones who miss the Sunday School

Are on the DOWNWARD WAY!

The moral and emotional power of that song used to strike terror into my very bones. I could never have sung that in front of the assembled Sunday schoolers at the Gospel Hall. It was too horrific. The threat of possibly growing up to be bad, of causing such disappointment to my parents, God and assorted Sunday School superintendents, drove me to desperate attendance and enthusiastic singing, much of it accompanied by physical actions.

Deep and Wide (arms up, then out)

Deep and wide (repeat)

There’s a fountain flowing (big skooshy actions)

Deep and wide (see above)

But back to Stuart Hamblen. The man who invented `Billy Graham. Who saved Shakin’ Stevens career. Who refused a drink from John Wayne, but took his songwriting advice and wrote the billion-selling It Is No Secret (What God Can do).

Hamblen was born in 1908, son of a wandering Methodist preacher, and like many children of ministers and pastors (something to do with all that exposure to public performance) gravitated towards showbiz. He wrote songs – This Ole House was a hit for Rosemary Clooney and later revived Shakey’s career (after being banned from Glasgow University’s Queen Margaret Union for trashing a piano…I mean, who could recover from that?) – and became an actor and singer in the cowboy movie genre, with the likes of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and John Wayne. He was a radio DJ, a mad drinker, gambler, racehorse owner and general celebrity casualty. He described himself as “the original juvenile delinquent” and it wasn’t until he was 41 that God came calling, in the form of a young Billy Graham. At a sparsely-attended gospel crusade in Los Angeles, Hamblen was very publicly converted and as a major California star, instantly became a key part of Graham’s religious pulling power. From that point on Graham’s, appeal, and indeed that of other big time stadium evangelists,  was harnessed to the conversion of other celebrity converts like Johnny Cash and later Cliff Richard.

Drinking was out for the newly redeemed Stuart, and so were beer commercials, so Hamblen’s radio employers sacked him. He embraced Gospel broadcasting with a new show called The Cowboy Church of the Air, along with his family, and recorded The Lord is Counting On You. Which duly ended up in that small stack of records my dad and mum deemed suitable for their children’s ears.

Where and when was this happening? I was born at the end of 1955, so my first exposure to Sunday School would have been at Greenview Hall, Pollokshaws, Glasgow, just round the corner from my dad’s dental practice. We lived above (and behind) the shop, which was a full-service,hardly any waiting operation where dad, sometimes helped by an assortment of moonlighting anesthetists, would repair and remove teeth for the local citizenry. On the National Health, of course, There was no private work, or very little, other than for a few wealthy denizens of Newton Mearns or Pollokshields.

Dad always refused to believe I remember this, but I have a very clear memory of mum hauling myself and my two younger psisters out of the house, me trailing behind the huge black Churchill pram, on Gas Day. this was an afternoon of “complete upper and lower clearances”, often something done to celebrate a 16th birthday, where rotting molars and incisors would be removed in their entirety and under general anaesthetic. No crash team, no nurses. A queue of black cabs waiting outside, half-recovered, woozy patients with bloodied hankrechiefs held to their mouths, staggering down the steps of 1425 Pollokshaws Road. Screams, moans and ocasional collapses. There must have been days when we cowered in the back kitchen while all this was going on. Other days when we arrived back early from shopping in the Shaws or Shawlands, or risking near-fatal injury on the vicious roundabouts and swings of gravel-based playparks, designed to maim and amputate..

As far as I know, nobody died in the dentist’s chair while this stuff was going on. Or if they did, dad never told me. And it’s too late to ask him now.

Greenview Hall was an outpost of the Brethren. Christian or ‘open’ Brethren if you please, or Plymouth Brethren if you insist. Greenview is now The Greenview Church, a slick and sternly groovy independent evangelical church that has, in common with many former Gosepl ‘meetings’  moved from its roots in the Scottish working class towards something contemporary, much more middle class and inclusive, in that women are now sometimes allowed to speak, if not to lead, and no longer have to cover their heads “because of the angels” (an obscure Bible passage where heavenly beings were seduced by human females with nice perms)..  Still fundamentalist, though. The ‘hall’ is now a modern, professionally staffed building, offering all kinds of services to the community, which is now a forest of new build, privately-owned housing. The soaring multistorey 1960s flats have mainly been demolished. The vast Shawlands Shopping Centre, a brutalist edifice that was being built when I was watchingthe bloodied toothless leave my dad’s practice,is soon to disappear too. 

The Morton family left Glasgow just when the now-lost high flats were going up, when the wrecking balls were turning grey and red sandstone tenements into piles of rubble; Pollokshaws looked like a bomb site. Out destination was the seaside, the little Ayrshire town of Troon, 35 miles to the west. Dad would commute every day back up to Glasgow, and we weans would have a healthy upbringin amid the beaches and salt sea air. And at a new Brethren assembly, one called Bethany Hall.

Whitebrow— Northern Lights

Smiley Lewis — I Hear You Knocking

John Douglas — Lost

Bo Diddley — Bo Diddley

Elvis Presley — That’s All Right

Ray Charles — I Got a Woman

The Southern Tones — Must Be Jesus

Fats Domino — Ain’t That a Shame

Little Richard — Tutti Frutti

Trashcan Sinatras — Weightlifting

Ralph McTell — Tequila Sunset

Robert Palmer — Spanish Moon

Ace — How Long

Donovan — Hurdy Gurdy Man

Marmalade — I See the Rain

The Beatles — Rain

North Country Fair — Where the Waves Meet the Shore

https://www.mixcloud.com/tom-morton2/beatcrofting-saturday-22-september-2023/