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SPEAKER 1: Poor boy.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

(SINGING) Wait, poor boy, we were traveling

Traveling a long way from home

Wait, poor boy, we gotta pull on

Wake up, pull off and fell not bound

BETH FRIEND: August Wilson calls the blues the sacred book of Black experience, the rhythmic vault where 400 years of American Black life is stored. Wilson takes the blues and turns it into poetry on stage. Poetry with an ear for the perfect pitch of Black speech. A clear and faithful poetry of the streets.

(SINGING) My damn mother, she got worried

When we were down on our little farm

My mother, she called that farm

And they told her they have a sand filled dug mound

If blues is the sacred book, the words are written in settings like this one, a pool hall and cigar store in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, called Pat's Place. Pittsburgh is where August Wilson was born and raised. And this is where he first heard the poetry of Black America.

SPEAKER 2: You go, you back downtown, you know I'm so glad. Know why? Because see, I had the job--

SPEAKER 3: I know.

SPEAKER 2: And then she was out. And I was mad about it, you see. I'm glad--

BETH FRIEND: Actor James Earl Jones played the leading role of Troy Maxson in Wilson's most celebrated play, Fences. Jones says Wilson's ear for language gives his characters a power and depth that other Black characters have lacked.

JAMES EARL JONES: So rarely do you have a man created poetically where, whether he's articulate or not, he's a poetic creation. I shouldn't do this, but I'll give you an example. Rose comes out when Troy and his buddy Jim Bono are talking about women's legs. She says, what you all out here getting into? And Troy's answer is, what you worried about what we out here getting into for?

[LAUGHS]

I can't think of any more profound poetry than that.

BETH FRIEND: With the blues as a bible and the streets of Pittsburgh as his backdrop, August Wilson writes about a people dispossessed in their own country. Black Americans for whom the liberation from slavery did not mean freedom, but simply a more subtle form of servitude. His plays are detailed etchings of Black life in Northern American cities like Pittsburgh, in neighborhoods like the Hill, where Wilson grew up.

To outsiders and some who live here now, the Hill can seem like a profoundly sad place. A scramble of worn and decaying shops and houses slumped on a slope overlooking prosperous downtown Pittsburgh. To August Wilson, returning on a damp day to visit relatives, many of the old buildings are now just brick scattered lots, like lost teeth from the wide welcoming face of the neighborhood he knew.

Even so, walking the streets of the Hill clearly energizes the writer.

AUGUST WILSON: Across the street there, there's Doc Goldbloom. The neighborhood doctor, his name was Goldbloom. And he's in-- Joe Turner's coming down, I used his name. One time my brother got a piece of orange caught in his throat. And my mother went from there, ran across the street to Doc Goldbloom. They gave him a glass of water and charged him $4.

This house over here, there's a witch lived over there. It was a big house on the corner. And she had these two white dogs, statues of dogs out front. And she lived alone in this huge house. And she looked strange, and we all thought she was a witch. And if our ball went in the yard, it stayed in the yard, because nobody had enough nerve to ever go into the witch's yard.

It's true. Up on the corner was the people-- there's another store, right. St. Helens here right up on the corner is another store. And you could play your numbers and whatnot there. You know how nobody knows Nellie lived right in here somewhere. And she would pull the shades down until they were about that high and sit all day long looking out from behind the window.

There's Johnny Butera. Hey, Johnny. How are you?

JOHNNY BUTERA: Good.

AUGUST WILSON: I'm fine. Good to see you.

JOHNNY BUTERA: No long time no see.

AUGUST WILSON: It's been a long while, yeah. Well, you're looking well.

JOHNNY BUTERA: Yeah.

AUGUST WILSON: This is my wife Judy.

AUGUST WILSON: How are you doing?

JUDY OLIVER: I've heard so much about you through the years. Yeah.

[CHUCKLES]

JOHNNY BUTERA: He's a good boy when he was young. Didn't smoke, didn't drink. Didn't run around. All he had was a paper and pencil.

[LAUGHS]

BETH FRIEND: Wilson returns to this Pittsburgh slum of famous and wealthy man. He's written six plays in a cycle of dramas that chronicle each decade of 20th century African American life. Three of the plays made it to Broadway-- Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences and Joe Turner's Come and Gone. All three won major drama awards, and Fences won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize.

AUGUST WILSON: I see Ms. Pearl.

JOHNNY BUTERA: Yeah. Yeah, Carl just went home.

BETH FRIEND: The playwright is 43 years old. A stocky, gentle looking man with mocha colored skin and a faintly graying beard. He is a quiet and politely shy person who, during an interview, seems to Inhale deep gulps of cigarette smoke with every breath. Wilson is the second of six children born to a Black mother, Daisy, who's loving and devoted attention was the binding force in a family that had to struggle through poverty.

His father, also named August, was a white man of German descent. A baker by trade. A heavy drinker who was largely absent from the home. Wilson's older sister, Frida Ellis, downplays the significance of their father's color or role in the family.

FRIDA ELLIS: He was someone in our life. And we recognize him as having been part of our life. And I think that can happen in a lot of families. The father is there, and then the father is not there.

BETH FRIEND: So as a young boy, it was August who handled much of the family business.

AUGUST WILSON: I did the food shopping. I shopped. I did. I went down to the welfare office, and whatever the problem was there. I took care of them. And I learned to deal with the people behind the desk. And in doing that, I began to notice that things weren't right. The way I was treated was very much different. As a Black, I began to notice the way I was treated very much different than the way they would treat white people.

So I came into an early consciousness of the difference in Blacks and whites. The white folks had better clothes on, white folks seemed to have more money. They never have any problems. Somehow life seemed very much easier for them, because they were not always confronting people in the way I was confronting people.

BETH FRIEND: Frida Ellis remembers her little brother not only as a perceptive child, but also as an avid reader and writer. She says he always had an unusual force inside him.

FRIDA ELLIS: One of the qualities that I see that has always been there is a type of energy. A kind of brewing energy. When he would play in the backyard or play games, he would become really sweaty and dirty. I mean, it's almost as though this is the way. He played hard. He played until he was played out.

BETH FRIEND: That driving energy got a cold reception in the schools. Tired of fighting hostile students in the all white Catholic high school he was attending, August quit in the spring of his freshman year. The next stop was the sheet metal shop in Connelley Trade School, where he was bored and dissatisfied.

Then he tried public high school, where his 10th grade history teacher assigned a term paper. And August chose as his subject Napoleon.

AUGUST WILSON: With great earnestness, I set about the task of writing the paper and turned out a 20-page paper, which my sister typed up on her rented typewriter. And I submitted it to my teacher. And he called me in after class to talk about the paper. And he had written an A plus or an E, which was the lowest grade, which didn't make that much sense to me. And he told me he was going to give me one of the two grades.

And the upshot of it was that he wanted me to prove that I had written a paper. I felt it was sufficient that I said I had written it. I'd fulfilled all the requirements and listed my bibliography and my footnotes and all that kind of stuff. And I thought he should have taken my word for it. Whereupon he drew a circle around the E after I refused to discuss the paper with him, handed it back to me. I tore it up, threw it in his wastebasket, and walked out of school. And never went back.

BETH FRIEND: So at age 15, Wilson began going to Pittsburgh's Carnegie Public Library instead.

AUGUST WILSON: I started with this Negro section of the library, which was only about 30 books. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps. Whoever was there, I read them all. Anyway, I got books on history. I read about the Civil War. Anthropology. I always had an interest in cultural anthropology, different cultures and stuff. I remember trying to read Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture. And I couldn't understand it. And I put it back, and I thought, one day, I'm going to come in and I'll be able to take out this book and I'm going to understand. I'm going to know what she's talking about.

And I did.

BETH FRIEND: Even though his mother wanted him to be a lawyer, Wilson always knew what interested him most.

AUGUST WILSON: When I was 14, I moved in a basement that set me up a little office there, where I was going to write. What was it, the first one let me describe the basement. It was a dirt floor basement. It was not really very musky. It was not conducive to-- I liked that idea. And there was a little cot and a little cot I was going to live in a basement. This lasted about four days. Living down there. I think I may have slept one night down there with my dog.

BETH FRIEND: Over the next two decades, August Wilson held a variety of jobs as he learned to write poetry and short stories. He bought his first typewriter when he was 20 years old. With influences as diverse as Dylan Thomas and Malcolm X, Wilson began developing the literary voice that would later flourish on the stage. But for direction, he turned not to the library shelves, but to the sacred book, the blues.

(SINGING) I worry all day, I worry all night

Every time my man comes home

He wants to fuss and fight

When I pick up the paper to read the news

Just when I'm satisfied, yonder come the blues

Wilson collected old blues records, listening through the scratchy faint recordings like an anthropologist. Searching for Black history, for ritual, mythology, and social organization. What Wilson found is a way of life unique to the African mind.

AUGUST WILSON: There's an entire philosophical system at work, and it's been kept alive in the blues. And what I'm trying to do is to, first of all, identify that, and to demonstrate it. And demonstrate its function. Among Blacks in America. When James Baldwin called for a profound articulation of the Black experience, Black tradition, which he defined as that field of manners and ritual of intercourse that will sustain a man once he's left his father's house.

So I'm simply trying, one, to show that it exists, that it's capable of offering sustenance. And try to put it on stage so you can see these values. And these at work.

MA RAINEY: White folks don't understand about the blues. They hear it come out, but they don't know how it got there. They don't understand that's life's way of talking. You don't sing to feel better. You sing because that's a way of understanding life.

SPEAKER 4: That's right. You get that understanding, and you didn't got a grip on life to where you can hold your head up and go on and see what else life got to offer.

MA RAINEY: The blues help you to get out--

BETH FRIEND: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is a play about the exploitation of the sacred book. Set in 1927, it's based loosely on the real life singer from Georgia and takes place in a Chicago recording studio, where two white producers hope to get rich off Ma Rainey and her band. The play documents what happened time and again. A handful of white producers became the brokers of Black music.

MA RAINEY: White folks try and be put out with y'all all the time. Too cheap to buy me a Coca-Cola. I let them know it, though. Ma don't stand for no shit. Want to trap my voice in them fancy box with all them buttons and dials. And then too cheap to buy me a Coca-Cola. And it don't cost but a nickel a bottle.

SPEAKER 4: I knoww what you mean about that.

MA RAINEY: They don't care nothing about me. All they want is my voice. Well, I don't learn that. And they going to treat me the way I want to be treated, no matter how much it hurt them. They back then--

AUGUST WILSON: Now there were a lot of-- in one of the early recordings, these guys would take and go down with portable equipment and find someone and give them $2 and a bottle of whiskey and record 12 songs. Right, and then they would decide whether it was worthy or not.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BETH FRIEND: A consistent message in August Wilson's work is that Blacks in the United States must be seen as Africans first and as Americans second. He set Joe Turner's Come and Gone in 1911 to work with characters who can still remember parts of their African past. Living in a boarding house in Pittsburgh, they are confronted by their conflicting cultures. One of them, a conjure man named Bynum, clings to his African heritage because it helped him find his personal song in life. Another boarder, the independent Molly Cunningham, laughs off the old Southern country ways.

MOLLY CUNNINGHAM: How your daddy heal people?

BYNUM: With a song. He healed people by singing over them. I seen him do it. He sung over this little white girl when she was sick. They made a big to-do about it carried the little girl's bed out in the yard. Had all the kinfolks standing around. Little girl laying up there in the bed. Doctors standing around can't do nothing to help her. So they had my daddy come up and sing his song.

But it didn't sound any different from any other song, just someone singing. But the song was its own thing. And it come out and took upon this little girl with power. And it healed her.

MOLLY CUNNINGHAM: Well that's sure something else.

[LAUGHTER]

I don't understand that kind of thing. I guess if the doctor couldn't make me well, I'd try it. But otherwise, I don't want to be bothered with that kind of thing. It's too spooky.

BETH FRIEND: Blacks must understand their African past to comprehend themselves, the playwright says. And whites should accept the fact that African people live differently in the world. To illustrate this point, Wilson likes to tell the story of several young Japanese men he watched eating breakfast at the Saint Paul bus depot.

AUGUST WILSON: They sat very nicely, and they chatted among themselves very politely. And they got up. One guy got up, took a picture with an Instamatic. They all teased him, and everybody laughed. They got up, they paid their bill. They embraced one another. And the three guys that was getting on the bus got on the bus.

So I said to myself, now, what would be the difference if there were six Black guys who come in here and had breakfast? And the first thing I noticed is that there's a jukebox in the place. None of the Japanese guys played the jukebox. It never entered their mind to play the jukebox. It's inconceivable to me that six Black guys would walk in there and not play the jukebox.

So the guy is going to go over and he's going to put a quarter in the jukebox. And the other guy is going to come over and say, hey, Rodney, man, play A6, man. He said, no, man, get out of here. Play your own record. I ain't playing with you, man. Hey, man, don't you press no record, man. And he's going to play his record. They're going to go, and they're going to order dinner.

Second thing I noticed is none of the guys said anything to the waitress. Six Black guys, it's inconceivable to me that they're going to go in there and not say something to the waitress. Hey mama, how you doing? Wow, she sure look good. Hey, no, no, don't talk to him, man. Hey, what's your phone number? Man, don't pay him no mind. Guy gets up to play another record. Somebody steals a piece of bacon or a biscuit off his plate and he comes back. Hey, who's been messing with my food, man? Et cetera.

Time come to pay the bill. And they say, Rodney, loan me $2, man. Nobody has any money, et cetera. Now, if you are watching that, you would say, they don't know how to act. They don't like one another. Guy wouldn't let them play the record. Stole a piece of bacon off his plate, et cetera. What kind of people are they? They're not acting right.

BETH FRIEND: One of Wilson's greatest skills is that he can tell a story like this one on the stage by giving his characters the same natural language he speaks. Here's a slice of conversation from the Broadway production of Fences, where Troy Maxson is telling his friend Bono how he courted his wife, Rose.

ROSE: Troy Maxson, don't you start that.

TROY: Come here, woman. Look here, Bono. When I met this woman, got out of that place, say, hitch up my pony, saddle my man. There's a woman out there for me somewhere. Look here, look there. Saw Rose and latched on to her. I latched on to her and told her, I'm going to tell you the truth. I told her, baby, I don't want to marry. I just wants to be your man. And she told me-- tell him what you told me, Rose.

ROSE: I told him if he wasn't the marrying kind, then move out the way so the marrying kind could find me.

TROY: That's what she told me. Boy, you in my way. You're blocking the view. Move out the way so I can find me a husband. Yeah, I thought it over two or three--

BETH FRIEND: James Earl Jones is not the only actor to revel in the poetic dialogue of August Wilson. Other Black actors greet the work and the words almost with a hunger. Actors like Ed Hall, who played the character of Bynum in Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

ED HALL: I have never been associated with a play that just swept me up into it so much. And I felt so comfortable with it. And I just loved speaking the language. It's so poetic. It's musical. And I have a kinship with it as a Black person.

BYNUM: And now you take a fella. He go out there and grab hold to a woman and think he got something, because she's sweet and soft to the touch. Well all right, touch is a part of life. It's in the world like everything else. Touch is nice. It feels good. But you can lay a hand upside a horse or a cat, and that feels good, too.

Now what's the difference? When you grab hold to a woman, you've got something there. You got a whole world there. You got a way of life kicking up under your hand. That woman can take and make you feel like something. And I ain't talking about any way of jumping off into bed together and rolling around with each other. Anybody can do that. When you grab hold to a woman and look at the whole thing and see what you got, why, she can take and make something out of you.

[CROWD CHATTER]

BETH FRIEND: Elegant and organic, Wilson's street poetry is created not in quiet seclusion, but amidst the smoke and noise of a saloon. Here at Sweeney's in Saint Paul, Wilson wrote half of Fences sitting at the long wooden bar. But his favorite place to work was a Grand Avenue restaurant called Esteban's, which closed several years ago. Nothing has quite replaced.

AUGUST WILSON: It was a good space, first of all. And I felt comfortable in the space. But then I knew the manager and I knew all the bartenders. And I knew all the people that worked there, and they would just come and quietly sit. And they'd go, oh, there's August. Hi, August.

And it was like I was like a regular and I knew the other regulars in the bar. Sometimes I would come in, it would be 11:00 at night. And they'd turn the lights up. And I would sit here. He's going to write.

BETH FRIEND: Wilson ended up in Minnesota because the director of Saint Paul's Penumbra Theater, Claude Purdy, urged him to visit the city back in 1978. Wilson moved to Saint Paul a short time later. And in 1981, married social worker Judy Oliver. She is Wilson's second wife. After the bruising atmosphere of Pittsburg, Saint Paul's Cathedral Hill neighborhood allowed Wilson to relax for the first time in his life.

And as a kind of expatriate writer, he began to hear most clearly the poetry he'd grown up listening to in the streets back home. He took a scriptwriting job for the Science Museum, then worked part-time as a cook to allow more hours for writing. He won a modest fellowship and completed Ma Rainey's Black Bottom in 1981. Fences and Joe Turner's Come and Gone soon followed, each starting as a single image or a scrap of dialogue. Now Wilson is in the midst of writing a play set in the 1960s, titled Two Trains Running

AUGUST WILSON: I chose the title because of a line in a lot of blues songs, two trains running. And it's most commonly followed by the second line, which is, neither one going my way. So I thought that there are two dominant ideas in the play, which the main character, that's the two trains running. And the main character doesn't want to go catch either of those trains. So he either has to build a railroad or walk.

Most of my plays, I started with a line of dialogue that I heard the characters say. And it said, when I left out of Jackson, I said I was going to buy me a V-8 Ford. And I was going to drive by Mr. Henry Ford's house and honk the horn. And if anybody came to the window, I was going to wave. Then I was going out and buy me a 30 odd 6 and come on back to Jackson and drive up to Mr. Stovall's house and honk the horn. Only this time, I wasn't waving.

So then I began to wonder who this character was talking, why he wanted to get his gun and go back to the Stovall. Who was Stovall, et cetera. And then, did he ever get the Ford? And so the next time I get in contact with the character, I ask him, say, man, did you get the Ford? He said, man, it took me six-- it took me 13 years to get the Ford. So six years later, I traded it in on the Cadillac. Then there wasn't no way in the world I was going back to Jackson then.

And you know what they do to the nigger they see driving a Cadillac down in Jackson?

BETH FRIEND: If Wilson is true to past pattern, once Two Trains Running is finished, it will embark on a transcontinental journey of performances at regional theaters. Wilson and his mentor director Lloyd Richards will hone and shape the work on its way to New York. A prominent American director, Lloyd Richards helped discover August Wilson and was the first to stage Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. The two have since worked closely on all of Wilson's plays.

With Richard's help, Wilson is finding much greater commercial success than Black playwrights of the 1960s. It's natural to compare him to predecessors like Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins. Wilson claims as much membership in the Black Power movement as they did. In the '60s, Wilson and a friend named Rob Penny established the Black Horizon Theater in Pittsburgh, staging plays by Black activist writers. Wilson says his plays are simply less didactic than those of 20 years ago.

The drama critic for The New Yorker magazine Edith Oliver thinks Wilson sets a different tone because the '80s are a different time.

EDITH OLIVER: His feelings are as strong as Ed Bullins' feelings. But the militancy and the upheaval of the '60s is gone. I think that August's feeling about Blackness is as strong as anyone's. But he's not as feisty.

BETH FRIEND: Frank Rich is theater critic for The New York Times.

FRANK RICH: Wilson like so many playwrights like Mamet or Lanford Wilson right now tries for a more finished work than was common during a very upsetting period in American history of the '60s. Whether it be in plays about Black American experience with the Vietnam War or whatever, the rough edges was the temper of the times. That was the temper of life in America then, and the culture expressed that.

BETH FRIEND: Actor Ed Hall, who's performed in Black theater for decades, says Wilson's work lacks the overt anger of earlier playwrights.

ED HALL: August has a sweetness and a love to it. And that's why I think it's so wonderful. It's not banging you over the head with a message. Before you know it, the message is within you and something has happened to you as an audience.

BETH FRIEND: Edith Oliver believes there is a universal quality to Wilson's writing that carries the audience beyond racial politics. She says Wilson's plays aren't as Black as he thinks.

EDITH OLIVER: I mean, I think there are general things he has to say about men and women and children, how they feel about one another. I don't think all that's so different.

BETH FRIEND: Fences may be the most universally approachable of Wilson's plays. Set in the 1950s, it explores the relationships between garbage collector Troy Maxson and his wife and son. In this scene, the son Cory asks Troy if he likes him.

TROY: Like you? I go out of here every morning and bust my butt putting up with them crackers all day long because I like you? You're the biggest fool I ever saw. It is my job. It is my responsibility. Do you understand that? A man got to take care of his family. You live in my house, you sleep your behind on my bed clothes. You put my food in your belly because you are my son. You are my flesh and blood.

Not because I like you. It is my duty to take care of you. I owe a responsibility to you. Now wait, let's get this straight right now. Won't go along any further. I ain't got to like you. Mr. Ran--

BETH FRIEND: With stars like James Earl Jones and Mary Alice on stage, Fences became a record breaking Broadway success. But Rob Penny, Wilson's old theater pal from Pittsburgh, isn't entirely pleased with the nature of Wilson's fame. Penny teaches Black Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. In an interview with the Crawford Grill, a famous Black nightclub on the Hill, Penny complains that Wilson is being viewed as the first Black playwright to do work of lasting literary quality. And that isn't so.

ROB PENNY: Now you got to remember that August is a genius. He's an excellent magical playwright and human being. But for white folks, August Wilson is like a topsy character who suddenly just to them just grew up, just popped up. They don't remember August Wilson in the '60s. So he wasn't a part of the '60s to them. You see, August Wilson doesn't have a nationalistic ideology in his work. He doesn't have a Black revolutionary political philosophy that's in his work. They don't see that, but it's there.

So he represent a kind of a safe kind of playwright or idea for them to make money off. Because his work speaks for itself as being a quality, excellent piece of writing.

BETH FRIEND: Wilson's new play, Two Trains Running, will take place in a Pittsburgh restaurant across the street from a funeral home and a meat market. Neighbors will gather to mourn the death of Pashnik Red, a character Wilson says will be the symbolic equivalent of the Civil Rights Movement. The year is 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated.

AUGUST WILSON: There's a guy across the street from the meat market who every morning for the past nine years at 7:30 in the morning stands there and waits for the owner to come. And he says to the owner, I want my ham. And the owner says, take a chicken. And he goes on and opens his door. He did some work for this guy nine years earlier. And he told him, if you paint my fence, I'll give you a ham.

And after he painted the fence, he said, take a chicken. And he said, no, sir, you say a ham. He say, well, take a chicken and don't take nothing. So his response to that was every morning to stand there and wait. Now to my mind, that's representative of Black America standing in all their moral rightness, standing patiently. Saying, boss, I want my ham.

And of course, what happens in the '60s was you picked up a brick and you smashed the window and you took your ham. So that is where the play is driving to. That is the closing image of the play. The last scene in the play as I see it is the guy comes in. His face is bleeding, his arms is bleeding, where he smashed his window and got cut by the window. And he's standing there with his huge ham on his arm.

But by that time, he no longer knows why it's his ham and why he wanted to do this.

BETH FRIEND: Wilson hopes to work on Two Trains Running this summer, along with his screenplay of Fences for Black comedian Eddie Murphy. Meanwhile, Fences is scheduled to open on a Los Angeles stage in the fall. And Ma Rainey will play at the prestigious National Theater in London next spring.

With all the productions, awards, and honorary academic degrees of the last year, Wilson's had little time for his work. He says the fame and attention churn up an even greater need in him to get back to Saint Paul and write.

AUGUST WILSON: I have all these things hanging on my wall. And they're nice hanging there and I look at them. And I look over and my typewriter's right there. I keep the focus on the work, is what I'm trying to say. I don't think of myself as famous. I just think of myself as this guy that wrote these plays and is struggling to write some more.

(SINGING) I'll be all right

I'll be all right

I'll be all right someday

And in my heart, I do believe

I'll be all right someday

BETH FRIEND: August Wilson's Sacred Book was written and produced by Stephen Smith and Beth Friend and edited by Dan Olson. Joe Turner's Come and Gone was recorded at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, California, with the help of Charlene Baldridge. Excerpts of Fences and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom came from the original Broadway cast. Actors featured were Mary Alice, Theresa, Merritt, Kimberly Scott, and Joe Seneca.

The music was performed by Bukka White, Ma Rainey, Cripple Clarence Lofton, and the Reverend Gary Davis. Technical director for the program was Jeff Walker. Executive producer, Rich Deetman. This is Beth Friend.

(SINGING) One more time and quit now

Yeah