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still sounds much like the original
quartet (Dad, Anna, Rose, and Jim) did
when they inaugurated the quartet's
career back in 1935. In fact, neither
time, personnel change, nor the com-
mercial revolution that gospel music
has undergone since World War II
have really altered the overall mood
or sound conveyed by these family
singers and the people who have fol-
lowed in their wake.
The Chuck Wagon Gang owes its en-
during and widespread popularity in
large part to the fact that their style
has successfully wedded both the
country and gospel singing traditions.
Like such groups as the Stamps Quar-
tet and the Blackwood Brothers, the
Chuck Wagon Gang chose the quartet
format, sang in a style drawn from
the singing schools, and performed
songs taken from the paperback,
shape-note hymnals (songbooks that
indicated the pitch of a note simply
by its shape rather than simply its
placement on the staff). But their
voices conveyed an unmistakable
rural f lavor; they used a guitar long
England as a device to stimulate and
improve congregational singing, the
singing school insinuated itself into
the backcountry South in the years
following 1800. Itinerant teachers
moved down the Great Valley of Vir-
ginia and into the hinterlands of the
trans-Appalachian South, traveling all
the way to Texas. They held ten-day
schools to impart the rudiments of
musical theory and sight reading of
shape notes to rural community mem-
bers in churches or schoolhouses be-
fore moving on to another location.
The term 'brush arbor' refers to the
practice of fabricating a protective
canopy of brush coverings against the
sun or rain so that people could meet
informally out of doors, perhaps with
a picnic supper, but primarily to hear
the preaching and singing.
These traditions have appealed to suc-
cessive generations of people who ei-
ther recall those actual experiences or
who savor the basic wholesomeness
and decency associated with them.
Even more important, the quartet
known as the Chuck Wagon Gang em-
bodies the venerable tradition of fam-
ily singing, in this case that of David
P. 'Dad' Carter and his children. De-
spite the personnel changes – and
there have been many since Dad's last
recording session in 1955 – the group
after most quartets had adopted pi-
anos for accompaniment; and they
were never affiliated with any specific
religious denomination or publishing
house. They were part of that large
and often neglected body of grass-
roots religious music that has long ex-
isted as an omnipresent and, in fact,
defining component of Southern
rural culture. While drawing its im-
pulse from evangelical Protestantism
and deriving much of its repertory
and style from the shape-note hym-
nals, this folk religious tradition nev-
ertheless developed and continues to
evolve apart from the churches and
even from the formal quartets. This
genre was a string-band-accompanied
style of music analogous to, and ex-
cept for its lyric content virtually
indistinguishable from, secular 'hill-
billy' music. Such music has embod-
ied the essence of the rural and
small-town South: intensely funda-
mentalist and evangelical, often
tinged with a holiness energy, ren-
dered with unmistakable Southern ac-
cents, part secular, part religious, and
permeated with a highly moralistic
view of life.
Southern audiences had certainly
been aware of such music for genera-
tions, having heard it performed by
blind street singers, or by ballad
(
LEFT
)
The Church In The Wildwood
written in shape-
note notation, from an early Chuck Wagon Gang
songbook.