Newsweek Articles about Henry Harrison Mayes “The Jesus Artists” and “God’s Ad Man”

Thanks to Shawn of Lexingtunes.com who discovered the Newsweek articles about Mayes and also Eleanor Dickinson’s Revival! exhibition.

The Jesus Artists

The Jesus Artists

Both the sights and the sounds of an exhibition called “Revival!” seem out of place at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., or at any museum, no matter how informal or avant-garde. It takes place in a large room filled with old wooden chairs and one lone, empty lectern with a Bible spread open upon it; at the front of the lectern, nailed on its face, is a metal plate with a pair of wings, emblazoned with these words: “GOD IS MY CO-PILOT.” Throughout the room, a deluge of tape-recorded sounds hits the ear. There are rhythmic bursts of clapping, shouting, singing, screaming. A husky voice suddenly roars: “Don’t tell me the devil don’t exist. Who owns those beer joints out on the highway? If that isn’t the work of the devil, what is it? He doesn’t like us to point the finger at him, no sir, to call out his name, and give his address!” More singing, chanting and clapping follows, interspersed with bursts of thunder.

Scattered around the wooden chairs there are worn, shredded hymnals, bearing titles like “Living Faith” and “Gospel Pearls,” paper fans embellished with Biblical scenes and, tacked on old bulletin boards, scraps of paper covered with short prayers and fragments of hymns. At the very back of the room there are huge, battered roadside signs, some in wood, some in metal, fresh from the countryside. The largest and strongest is shaped like a cross, almost 8 feet high and reads: “GET RIGHT WITH GOD!,” the words intersecting each other on the cross. The most appropriate sign reads simply: “LORD SEND A REVIVAL.”

By the term “revival” the Corcoran means the emotion-charged evangelistic church meetings rooted in the rural, Protestant South. But the Fundamentalist movement is in fact flourishing invisibly throughout the land, according to Eleanor Dickinson, the San Francisco artist who organized the exhibition. “I thought of these signs and the music and the books as art, that’s all,” she says, “but I’m turning into a kind of missionary myself. Sophisticated people come to the museum and say how strange, but if they look around they will see this movement right beside them. Wherever I go, even in the big cities, I hear revival music on the radio and see signs for meetings.”

“Revival!” turns this invisible phenomenon into a resounding visual and aural fact. Protestant Fundamentalism has its own music, its own forms of liturgy, its own direct—and ambitious—approach to the symbol and the sign. Among its prime artisans is the legendary Brother Harrison Mays of Middlesboro, Ky., the creator of the 8-foot cross, who seeds the American countryside with thousands of homemade “Jesus” signs; in his backyard there are rows of 1,400-pound concrete crosses, marked for delivery to each of the planets. “The exhibition began with my drawings,” says Miss Dickinson, a native of eastern Tennessee who still summers there, “but as I sketched the people I saw at revival meetings I decided I had to add their music and preaching and signs, all these rich artifacts.”

Trip: Miss Dickinson’s drawings, simply and professionally rendered, pale next to her artifacts, her music and the film that attends the exhibition, displaying the bizarre rites of extreme Fundamentalism. The show is not universally popular; it has an intensity and a crudity that clearly bothers the normal museum audience, used to a lower key in both religion and art. “The young people get it better,” Miss Dickinson says. “They understand the emotion as another kind of trip, similar to their own experiences, in music and drugs.” What young and old are responding to in their own ways is a movement that generates more cultural power than anyone yet acknowledges, even the movers themselves.

God’s Ad Man

You see them everywhere along the highways and back roads of the Bible Belt—crosses and signs proclaiming Jesus saves or get right with God. Thousands of these exhortations are the work of one man, retired coal miner H. Harrison Mayes, 76, who has been making them for more than 50 years. Last week, Newsweek‘s Jon Lowell traveled up the Cumberland Gap to visit Mayes at his home in the mountain town of Middlesboro, Ky. Lowell’s report:

“You’re not from the highway department, are you?” With this suspicious greeting, H. Harrison Mayes, short and gnarled as a leprechaun, welcomes the visitor to his cross-shaped home, symbolic of his faith. The twelve windows across the front room represent the Twelve Apostles; the ten across the back the Ten Commandments. Out in the yard stands a long row of 200 concrete crosses, weighing 1,400 pounds each, urging the passerby to get right with God. Soon they will be hauled away by truck and one by one will appear mysteriously overnight on selected highways. Mayes is a humble man who never went beyond the fifth grade in school. But he believes that the Almighty seldom relies on geniuses. “God had to pick a fool like me,” he says, “to advertise him.”

Mayes began his unconventional career in 1917 by painting Jesus saves on rocks near his home “up here in the holler, where I’ve lived all my life.” As a young man working for the Fork Ridge Coal Co., he says, “I was saved from an accident by the Lord and I figured I would devote the rest of my life to warning others to follow His word.” Since then, Mayes has erected signs in all 50 states and in 82 foreign nations or provinces. Some of the crosses are made of concrete poured into homemade wooden molds that Mayes builds himself; others are fashioned from corrugated aluminum. And for foreign missionaries, Mayes cuts out crosses of oilcloth that he mails overseas.

As God’s ad man, Mayes figures he has spent more than $50,000 on his campaign—all of it raised by free-lance sign painting in Middlesboro.

Except for postage for his mail-order ministry, Mayes says he doesn’t solicit any help. He does receive assistance, however, from friends who help him move the concrete crosses and from contacts in seaboard towns who assist him with a second line of advertising for his client. In his dusty, crowded shop, which he calls “Hub’s Nub Theological Seminary,” Mayes cleans out whisky bottles and fills them with messages like prepare to meet God, printed in sixteen languages, including Chinese. Then he mails them to friends who drop them into the ocean. Sometimes he hears from people who find the bottles, including one correspondent in the Philippines who recently found a bottle that had been dropped into the ocean off the main coast of Nicaragua 23 years before.

Despite his rural, fundamentalist background, Mayes belongs to no church. “I’m a Protestant-Catholic-Jew,” he grins. “I follow the best parts of each.” His eclectic theology has led him to the conviction that “the world needs one religion, one language, one nation, one kind of politics and one race.” To that end, Harrison says he wants to marry a Black woman and raise an interracial family if his wife, Lillie, should pass away before him. “It’s the only way to end racial prejudice,” he declares.

Lillie Mayes, meanwhile, quietly reads her Bible in the front room of her cross-shaped home and smiles at her husband’s patriarchal dreams. “He sure likes to carry on,” she says. “My kids say, ‘if he stops, he’ll die’.” And in his weaker moments, God’s self-appointed huckster is inclined to agree. “I’m just 150 pounds of mud,” he sighs, “waiting to join God in heaven.”