Eleanor Creekmore Dickinson’s *Revival!* project is best known for its large drawings and black-velvet pastels of Pentecostal and Holiness worship. But from the late 1960s she also built a substantial body of video and audio recordings documenting the same world in motion and sound.
I came across a True Adventure episode from the 50s called “Serpent Cult” featuring at least one familiar face: Oscar Hutton (sometimes Oskar with a k). I dug through my archive and turned up some photos and a newspaper article. A Courier-Journal piece describes “the Rev. Oscar Hutton of St. Charles, Va., a native Kentuckian…
Primitive church building, serviced by a group of teenagers from Virginia, close to the Kentucky border. I assume the church was built and active in the summer and fall of 2013. These kids were signs followers and seem to have taken it quite serious. The church building looks like a remodeled shag, has outhouses and…
The book The Persecuted Prophets by Karen W. Carden, Robert W. Pelton mentioned the existence of a music group called the All for Jesus Singers that went “on tour”. This is at least the second mention of a named music project out of the serpent handling community, beside Tommy and Lou Coots. Although only the…
This photo above, is clipped from the National Geographic Snake Salvation series. Initially I took a screenshot because I collect these kinds of photos, but later I came back for another reason. I discovered the Alabama Astronaut podcast, which explores the music of the serpent handlers. There they mention the Coots family, and that Jamie…
For some reason (East Kentucky), Mayes’ marker show up in snake handling documentaries like this one – “Snake Man Of Appalachia”. This is the trailer and the marker appears right at the beginning. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1957595/
Mayes’ display near Middlesboro, KY, his hometown, in a short documentary about a snake handling church. Documentary about ‘snake-handling’ Kentucky church fails to grasp tradition, expert says
