by Bob Bilyeu

It was the year before I turned four and seven months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor when our family was attending a brush arbor meeting down where Dry Holler met the Watered Fork that I learned that something important was about to happen.  As the meeting came to a close, everyone was telling my dad “goodbye” and “good luck in California.”  I didn’t understand what was happening.  Dad explained that he was leaving the next morning with friends to go to California to find work. He said he would be gone for a while and that I should be good boy and take care of my mother and sister until he got back.

“Surely you’re not going to leave me” I cried….and cried, and cried.

“I wish now that I had planned to take you with me,” he said to my mother. 

“I can be ready to leave in the morning,” she said, and we did—all four of us in Dad’s friend’s car plus along with his family of three and our entire luggage.”

    The 1931 Chevy somehow got all of us to Suisun City, California, where my Dad started working in the fruit.  We moved into an old tent that we put up inside a barn on the outskirts of town.  A man who was also living in the barn invited us to attend his church.  The church was literally a “storefront church” in the middle of town.  I had been in church before, but this was really different.  It was my introduction to gospel music.

    Where we had sung hymns with a piano, they sang gospel songs with guitars.  Where our services had been quiet, theirs were exuberant.  Where our congregation members had all been Ozark hillbillies, theirs were a mixture of nationalities and colors.  I absolutely loved it and I was hooked on gospel music.

    My favorite at that church was “Oh Say, But I’m Glad.”  My Dad and Mom learned it and sang it as a duet all of their life. It is special to me because it was my introduction to the music that has so enriched my life.  Its words say: 

There is a song in my heart today,

Something I never had.

Jesus has taken my sins away.

Oh, say but I’m glad. 

    In late October of 1941 Dad bought a 1929 Model A Ford and brought us all back to Missouri.  We never went back to California, but we came home with a new kind of music.  Before the year was out, Pearl Harbor was bombed and I turned four.  It was a great year in my life.  

Oh say, but I’m glad.