Sundays With The Happy Goodmans

When I was a child, my favorite day of the week was Sunday. I loved Sunday mornings. To me and my oldest brother, Sunday mornings meant wrestling, country music, and The Happy Goodman Family. To us, this was the perfect combination for a fun-filled morning. We would get up early and plant ourselves in front of the television.

Our first show was a local country music show from the "big" town of Jonesville, Louisiana. Don Wiley and his Catahoula Boys were a local band that had somehow managed to get their own television show. I don't think Mr. Wiley ever made it to the big times of Nashville or Hollywood, but to me and Jr. he was as good or better than Hank Williams. We loved his music. We would dance around the living room and twist up and down the hall.

After 30 minutes of "catahoula country music" the television would begin to blare with shouts and screams of wrestling fans. Mid-South Wrestling was something to behold. Today's wrestling matches have nothing on the old Mid-South circuit. Jr. and I would practice our wrestling holds and throw each other around the living room while legends of wrestling such as Dusty Rhodes, Johnny Eagle, and an unknown blonde wrestler by the name of Rick Flair would put on a show to please every wrestling fan in the south . Mother would watch us from her place on the couch and laugh at us as we talked Daddy into being the referee. Both she and Daddy loved wrestling and they passed that love down to us.

As much as we loved wrestling and country music, our greatest Sunday morning love was "The Gospel Music Jubilee with The Happy Goodman Family. We absolutely loved this show. Whenever the music would begin and we heard the first strains of "Jubilee, Jubilee, Are you ready for the gospel Jubilee" we would both begin to dance. The Happy Goodmans sounded like angels and we could not be still. As we would start twisting, Mother would come off the couch and chase us around the living room with a switch. As she stripped our legs, she would tell us that we weren't supposed to dance to church music. We couldn't understand why dancing to church music was bad. The music was so happy and peppy, it just begged us to jump around and dance. If we weren't supposed to dance to it, why was it so festive? After she finished our spankings, we would get dressed and go to church. We rode to the baptist church with the neighbors and everyone in church said we were the best behaved children they had ever seen. We didn't talk in church, we didn't squirm, and we didn't do anything that would get back to mother. I wonder what the nice church ladies would have said if they knew that Clytie's heathern children had been jitterbugging to church music just 30 minutes ago.

The older I get the more I cherish my childhood memories. I find comfort in simple things such as remembering Sunday mornings and The Happy Goodmans. I've discovered that sometimes simple things are the best. In fact, I'm listening to The Happy Goodmans on MusicMatch Jukebox Radio and I know Mother is listening to them also. Maybe I should stop dancing to "The Eastern Gate", but I'm not. Tonight I'm not a 45 year old teacher, I'm a 7 year old girl trying to get away with dancing to church music.