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The Chuck Wagon Gang
God’s Gentle People
b y B i l l C . Ma l o n e
A
mong the pleasant memories
associated with growing up in
rural east Texas in the seven years
or so before World War II was the
joyful experience of listening each
day to the Chuck Wagon Gang radio
show on WBAP in Fort Worth. One
of my few remaining artifacts of
those days is a yellowed, slightly-
frayed picture postcard of Dad Car-
ter, his three children, and their
announcer, Dwight Butcher, all
standing beside or leaning out of a
little covered wagon. The postcard
had been solicited by my mother,
an ardent radio listener and faith-
ful fan of the family singers whose
likenesses were captured there. Life
was hard for most rural women in
those bleak Depression years, and
there on our isolated tenant farm
on the western edge of Smith
County, even the presence of an or-
ganized church was a rare privilege.
The comforting songs of the Chuck
Wagon Gang, with their visions of
a caring Saviour and a Heavenly
reward, brought both immediate
solace and a promise of ultimate re-
demption.
My mother was an alto singer who,
like most people hearing the Chuck
Wagon Gang, was captivated by the
warm, liquid-smooth alto singing of
Anna (born Effie) Carter. Years later,
upon meeting Anna Carter Davis for
the first time, my thoughts went back
to the mother who had given me my
introduction to music many years be-
fore. Anna seemed genuinely moved,
and even surprised, when I told her of
the affection that my mother had
held for her and her family's music.
Even after more than four decades of
public performing, neither Anna nor
the other members of the Chuck
Wagon Gang really seemed aware of
the myriad ways in which their music
had touched the lives of other people.
For almost eighty years, and through
a multitude of personnel changes, the
Chuck Wagon Gang still retains a de-
pendable, reassuring, and vital pres-
ence in American religious music.
Despite the cowboy aura suggested by
the professional title they inherited,
the Chuck Wagon Gang is more prop-
erly an heir to the singing school
and brush arbor traditions of rural
America. Originally established in New