Bob Sanders: Don’t mess with Chuck Wagon Gang

Every time I go to see and hear the Chuck Wagon Gang, as I do whenever they’re in the vicinity, I go with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Will it be the real Chuck Wagon Gang or will they have messed with it, tried to “modernize” it or something?

Of course the personnel has changed many times in the 70-something years the group has been around. But somehow, they have managed to keep the essential sound. And so it was this time. There were two guys, one of them playing guitar and acting as the spokesperson, and two girls, singing the “Rose” and “Anna” parts, and singing them well.

I once compared Anna’s alto voice to the sound of a warm tenor saxophone played by somebody like, say, Illinois Jacquet, and Rose’s soprano to a lead trumpet, straight ahead, dead on, like a cutting torch.

By the way, I’m always amused by the way Southern Gospel quartets label singers.

In four-part harmony, the parts are bass, tenor, alto and soprano. Most quartets are all male, and it seems that most men don’t like to be called a soprano or an alto; so you have these “lead” singers and “baritone” singers and “first tenor” and “second tenor” singers, etc.

The opening act finally got through, OK, but not what we came to see. And there they were, two men, two women, all relatively young. What to expect?

Then the guitar player hit the first chord and it was ... The Chuck Wagon Gang. I don’t know how many reincarnations there have been — the group officially retired a time or two, but they came back — or how they keep finding these singers, but they do. They may be not quite Rose and Anna, but they’re dad-blamed close.

I remember what Billy Tatum once said after we’d been to a CWG concert. I told him about the wonderful sense of relief when I knew the real CWG sound was alive and well. “Oh, I cried,” Billy said.

I know what he meant. I gotta omit (as Cousin Artie used to say), a big lump came up in my throat when “Anna” and “Rose” would sing with such confidence the parts the real Anna and Rose used to sing.

The spokesman explained that, overall, the group had recorded more than 700 songs, and that this incarnation couldn’t possibly learn all of them, and that sometimes, they just had to confess that they didn’t know a particular CWG song. Easy to see. Still, I wish I could have picked out a few, like “Higher,” and “Will You Meet Me Over Yonder,” and “God’s Gentle People,” and “Sunset is Coming,” etc.

Somebody said the spokesperson was Anna’s grandson. OK. The last time I saw them, a granddaughter was in charge.

Anyway, the beat goes on.

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.