Rusty's Blog

God, Family & Country

A couple of months ago in an antiques store in Chamblee, I stumbled upon this LP titled God, Family & Country, recorded by the “irrepressible” former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox in 1971:

This was the same store where I saw Malcom X air fresheners, and where we bought a turn-of-the-century bookshelf. It’s probably about time to take another trip over there to see if there’s any other neat furniture or unintentionally hilarious artifacts.

I don’t have a record player (I am about to remedy that), so this just sat on my shelf for a couple of months unplayed. Last night, I found out psychedelicatessen posted an MP3 archive of God, Family, & Country back in April, along with scans of the front and back album covers.

The back cover is chock full of pearls of wisdom from the former governor. Here are a couple of my favorites:

I never took a trip on drugs and got turned on for crime, anarchy, alcohol, drugs and immorality because I took a trip down the aisle of my church in 1932 and got turned on for God.

I will avoid obvious jokes. Next:

Not until recent years have I learned that I lived in twenty-five years of poverty, underprivileged and disadvantaged and didn’t know it. I just thought I was poor… And knew that I was privileged to be born an American… Under the private enterprise system where regardless of my material or social environment that I could make it.

Yes, the guy who shooed a black restaurant patron away by waving a gun at him and didn’t go to jail for it because he was a white man wrote that anybody can make it in the private enterprise system regardless of social environment.

So, how is the album itself? Here’s a sample track called Common Man which best encapsulates the rest of the record (from the psychedelicatessen rip, click over to his site to listen to the rest):

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The content is about what you’d expect: vague opining about the Yew-Ess-Uv-Ay’s plummeting morality and how the path to salvation is through God, Family and the Free Enterprise System. Unsurprisingly, the governor doesn’t have much of a singing voice. He was, however, a hell of a whistler and did at least have a passable backing band. Some of it borders on surreal in its unbridled earnestness, like overhearing a group of middle class teenage white boys talk amongst themselves after they read their first Ayn Rand novel.

Paul Wilson 45: Hippie Invasion and Poison Gas

Paul Wilson was a guy who did not take too kindly to the hippies I mentioned in my last post invading Byron, Georgia for the second edition of the Atlanta International Pop Festival in 1970. He was so mad he put out a record called “Hippie Invasion”:

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Rips of these songs from the original 45 were posted earlier today by Greg at the “irrepressible” Atlanta Time Machine. As a bonus treat, it had a B-side called Poison Gas which has an equally interesting story behind it that even includes a Lester Maddox tie-in. Click over to the Atlanta Time Machine for the full scoop.

Perhaps I only called Lester Maddox’s backing band passable on God, Family & Country because I had listened to Hippie Invasion a few moments earlier.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 11:05 pm. It was tagged atl, atlanta, atlanta history, atlanta time machine, audio, god family & country, hippie invasion, History, irrepressible, lester maddox, music, paul wilson, poison gas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.