Eleanor Dickinson’s Revival! Videotapes

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.[1] These recordings, now held in institutional collections, capture revival services, ecstatic worship, and interviews with figures like roadside evangelist and “God’s Ad Man” Henry Harrison Mayes. Dickinson always meant them as part of Revival!, not a separate ethnographic project.[1]

From Dickinson’s perspective, the tapes were one of three main building blocks of Revival!: the drawings and velvet paintings, the video and sound recordings, and the physical artifacts from revival settings: snake boxes, poison bottles, fans, tent hardware, roadside crosses.[1] In major installations, particularly the Corcoran Gallery show in 1970 (organized with curator Walter Hopps) and the Tennessee State Museum exhibition in 1981-82, these components were interwoven so that visitors moved through a continuous field of images, objects, and sounds rather than a conventional lineup of artworks.[1]

The tapes were the project’s second dimension, “recording not representing — framing, not transforming,” in contrast to the drawings, where the same worshippers are compressed into charged, stylized images.[1] Visitors could encounter the same preacher in multiple forms: as a voice on tape, as a figure in a video frame, as an isolated head or pair of hands in a drawing, with the physical objects of the service (chairs, fans, basins, snake boxes) anchoring the scenes in space.[1]

What the Revival! tapes contain

The tapes document a wide range of Southern revival practices, centered on Appalachian and East Tennessee Holiness-Pentecostal congregations.[1] They include full services, sermons, altar calls, healing lines, and extended sequences of singing and prayer, as well as practices that rarely appear in mainstream media:

• Snake handling (with dedicated snake boxes on site).
• Drinking poison (often strychnine) as a test of faith.
• Laying on of hands, exorcism, and “casting out devils.”
• Foot-washing services, creek baptisms, and grave-decoration rites.
• Dancing, shouting, glossolalia (speaking in tongues), and other forms of ecstatic bodily expression.[1]

On the tapes these come across as loud, high-energy services: congregations singing to driving, electrified music closer to a rock and roll jam than a hymn, with people dancing and moving ecstatically.

Much of the serpent handling on the tapes is the Elkins family of Jolo, West Virginia. Their church, the Church of the Lord Jesus with Signs Following, was founded by Bob and Barbara Elkins in 1956 and is still the best known serpent-handling congregation in the state.[6] The same family and church are the subject of a better-known film, Karen Kramer’s documentary The Jolo Serpent Handlers (1977), made the same year as Dickinson’s “Revival!” tape.[7]

Dickinson filmed these services as religious events, not documentation of the exotic. She had long sought out what she called “ecstatic subjects, moments where there’s some heightened emotion,” and revival worship was a natural destination. Her drawings and tapes resist the Southern literary trope of the preacher as hypocrite or grotesque. These were real services, with real intensity, and she wasn’t there to defuse it.[1]

The Pentecostal Videotape and Audiotape Collection (NMAH.AC.0199)

One portion of this work is held at the National Museum of American History (NMAH) as the Eleanor Dickinson Pentecostal Videotape and Audiotape Collection (NMAH.AC.0199), recorded between 1967 and 1977.[2] It holds three videos:

• An interview with Henry Harrison Mayes.
• “Revival,” a 50-minute black-and-white tape the finding aid calls a “Collage of drawings, photographs, and tapes of Southern revival meetings,” covering creek baptism, snake handling, foot washing, casting out devils, speaking in tongues, and dancing in ecstasy.
• “Revival!” (1977), a documentary tape in three parts: serpent handlers, healing and casting out devils, and Appalachian music.

That first “Revival” tape belongs with her exhibitions and the 1974 book Revival! (Harper & Row): it puts her drawings, photographs, and footage together in one piece. The finding aid connects it directly to those shows.

The Henry Harrison Mayes interview

NMAH.AC.0199 includes a 1977 video interview with Brother Henry Harrison Mayes, filmed at his home in Kentucky.[3] Mayes was an Appalachian coal miner turned roadside evangelist who spent decades installing concrete crosses and religious signs along highways across the American South.[2] He funded this himself: a “message to the nations” campaign, concrete markers at roads and transportation hubs, inscribed with evangelical slogans and appeals.[3]

Dickinson captured Mayes in video, drawings, photographs, and documentation of the crosses themselves.[2] Her portrait of Mayes and an exhibit of the materials she gathered on him are elsewhere on the site. The interview isn’t a folklorist’s exhibit of a quirky believer. It treats Mayes as part of the same world as the Holiness congregations Dickinson followed into the hills: people who made something physical out of their faith and put it where strangers couldn’t avoid it.[1]

Relationship to the larger Library of Congress fieldwork

Beyond the NMAH collection, Dickinson deposited a much larger body of revival recordings at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, under the title “Eleanor Dickinson collection, 1901–2004” (AFC 1970/001).[4] This archive includes:

• About 170 video reels and 11 videocassettes,
• Numerous audio tapes,
• Field notes, logs, transcripts, manuscripts, and presentation materials.

The finding aid covers Protestant revival meetings, healing services, hymn singing, sermons, snake handling, and related rites recorded in Tennessee, West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia, and California between 1968 and 1991.[4] A 2016 Library of Congress blog post noted the collection’s unusual completeness: detailed video and audio logs alongside the recordings themselves, rather than the recordings alone.[5]

The three Smithsonian videos are only a fraction of what Dickinson recorded. Most of her fieldwork, from early Appalachian services to later revivals in California, is at the Library of Congress.[2]

In the exhibitions

In the Revival! exhibitions, the tapes weren’t background. They ran alongside the drawings and objects so visitors could see the same material in two registers at once.[1] The same preacher who looks and sounds ordinary on video (a voice competing with coughing and passing cars, all the noise that the velvet images have been stripped of) becomes something else in a drawing: just a head and hands, isolated on black velvet.[1]

The tapes also work the other way: they show what the drawings left out, the pews, the sawdust, the hum of the crowd, all the context the drawn figures have been detached from.[1]

The video work is part of the same project as the drawings: to show Southern revivalism as something real people did with their whole bodies, not a spectacle to explain away and not a tradition to romanticize either.[1]

Someone watching digitized clips of the Mayes interview or a snake-handling service may not know that Dickinson was drawing those scenes at the same time, or that revival snake boxes from the same services sit in museum storage nearby. But that’s the context. Richard King called it a “Gesamtkunstwerk, southern style”: video, sound, drawings, and objects, all aimed at the same world, because no single one of them was enough.[1]

[1]: Richard King, “Eleanor Dickinson: Religion and the Southern Artist,” Women’s Art Journal 3, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1982): 1–5. JSTOR stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1357908.

[2]: “Guide to the Eleanor Dickinson Pentecostal Videotape and Audiotape Collection,” Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, collection ID NMAH.AC.0199, via SOVA: https://sova.si.edu/record/nmah.ac.0199.

[3]: “Sounds of Middlesboro – Henry Harrison Mayes,” Folk Visions, and related discussions of Henry Harrison Mayes and the Eleanor Dickinson field recordings in Library of Congress–related materials. The NMAH finding aid gives the interview location as Middleburg, Kentucky, but Mayes lived in Middlesboro (Bell County), which is most likely the place meant.

[4]: “Eleanor Dickinson collection, 1901–2004,” American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, collection ID AFC 1970/001, collection summary and detailed finding aid: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/eadafc.af016005.

[5]: Marcia Segal, “Finding aid to Eleanor Dickinson fieldwork collection now online,” Folklife Today (Library of Congress blog), 2016, highlighting the revival audio and video recordings and their documentation. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/12/eleanor-dickinson-finding-aid/

[6]: “Serpent Handling,” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia: https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/261. The Jolo congregation is the Church of the Lord Jesus with Signs Following, founded by Bob and Barbara Elkins in 1956; Robert and Barbara Elkins, with her son Dewey Chafin, led it as the most active serpent-handling church in West Virginia.

[7]: Karen Kramer, dir., The Jolo Serpent Handlers (1977), a documentary on the Church of the Lord Jesus with Signs Following in Jolo, West Virginia: https://www.karenkramerfilms.com/content/jolo_serpent_handlers/jolo_behind_scenes.htm; IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7583194/.

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