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THEY'RE 'SINGING ALL-NITE' IN DIXIE
Folks come by the thousands and stay till dawn at Wally Fowler's gospel sings.
by Allen Rankin
What Broadway or Hollywood showman would even try to hold a paying audience of thousands all night—from 8:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.? Yet big, bull-voiced Wally Fowler, from Possum Trot, Georgia, performs this feat almost any time he chooses. With his All-Nite Gospel and Spiritual Sing Concert, he is probably doing more than any other one man to convert old-fashioned gospel singing into big-time show business. Even his more usual "short" shows—which end around 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.—hold fans about twice as long as a screening of Gone with the Wind.
Not long ago Fowler and his sacred-singing quartets "of radio and record fame," as they are billed, arrived in Atlanta, Georgia, for a one-night stand. A week earlier, Lib-erace, the piano-playing idol of TV, had packed the city's 5,200-seat Municipal Auditorium with 5,520 admirers. Fowler drew a record 7,100 clamoring fans, and hundreds more were turned away.
Other cities and towns throughout the South and Midwest have had similar experiences. During the last five years, gospel singers as a group have drawn larger audiences more consistently in these areas than any other regularly scheduled, paid-admission attractions—including concert artists, road companies of Broadway plays, prize fights, and even ice shows.
Wally Fowler's All-Nite Sing is the largest and most successful of a dozen religious musical road shows that attract an estimated 2,000,000 paying fans a year. It plays to audiences of up to 15,000 a week in some 200 towns and cities in 38 states each season. A single such show at Montgomery, Alabama, drew 9,000 enthusiasts, and another at Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 10,018. |
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"Reprinted by permission of Allen Rankin from Collier's, Vol. 136, No. 4, August 19, 1955, pp. 26-7." |
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