It Is No Secret
Claim: Billy Graham and John Wayne had a hand in the creation of the song "It Is No Secret."
Status: True.
Example:
Back in the 50's there was a well known radio host/comedian/song writer in Hollywood named Russ Hamblin who was noted for his drinking, womanizing, partying, etc. One of his bigger hits at the time was "I won't go hunting with you Jake, but I'll go chasing women".
And along came a young preacher holding a tent revival. Hamblin had him on his radio show, presumably to poke fun at him. And to gather more material, Hamblin showed up at one of the revival meetings. Early in the service the preacher announced, "There is one man in this audience who is a big fake."
There were probably others who thought the same thing, but Hamblin was convinced that he was the one the preacher was talking about (some would call that conviction), but he was having none of that. Still the words continued to haunt him until a couple of nights later he showed up drunk at the preacher's hotel door around 2 am. Demanding that the preacher pray for him. But the preacher refused, saying, "This is between you and God and I'm not going to get in the middle of it." But he did invite Russ in and they talked about 5 am at which point Russ dropped to his knees and with tears, cried out to God.
But that is not the end of the story. Russ quit drinking, quit chasing, quit everything that was "fun". And began to lose favor with the Hollywood crowd. He was ultimately fired by the radio station when he refused to accept a beer company as a sponsor. Hard times were upon him. He tried writing a couple of "Christian" songs but the only one that had much success was "This Old House", written for his friend Rosemary Clooney.
As he continued to struggle, an old friend named John took him aside and told him all your troubles started when you "got religion" and asked if it was worth it all. Russ answered simply, "Yes". Then his friend said, "You liked your booze so much. Don't you ever miss it?" And the answer was, "No". John then said, "I don't understand how you could give it up so easily." And Russ's response was, "It's no big secret. All things are possible with God." To this John said, "That's a catchy phrase. You should write a song about it."
As they say, the rest is history. The song Russ wrote was "It Is No Secret" - "It is no secret, what God can do. What He's done for others, He'll do for you. With arms wide open, He'll welcome you. It is no secret, what God can do." etc...
By the way, the friend was John Wayne, and the young preacher who refused to pray for Russ Hamblin was Billy Graham. And now you know "the rest of the story."
Origins: Many who find solace in spirituals find an additional measure of satisfaction in discovering that cherished songs were penned by folks possessed of colorful histories. Songs celebrating the mercy of God seem to mean more when they issue from reformed sinners, so stories that play up that aspect of a song's history are especially prized, even if key points are embellished.
As was the case with "Amazing Grace," though it is well grounded in fact, the history of "It Is No Secret (What God Can Do)" has been exaggerated at some points to make for better telling.
Carl Stuart Hamblen (the e-mailed account misidentifies him as Russ Hamblin) composed and recorded "It Is No Secret" in 1950. Born in Texas in 1908, Hamblen enjoyed a long and successful musical career as a singer/songwriter, with more than two hundred songs to his credit, before he passed away in California in 1989. Hamblen was a heavy drinker who swore off demon rum and made religion a central part of his life in 1949 after attending "Youth for Christ," a historic revival meeting held by the Reverend Dr. Billy Graham in Los Angeles.
Various biographies of both Hamblen and Graham support the claim of the songwriter's having gone to Dr. Graham's hotel room and insisted he be prayed for. According to Grady Wilson, a lifelong friend and associate of Billy Graham, after attending the revival meeting earlier that night coming away from it troubled, Hamblen and his wife did pay a call on Dr. Graham at the Langham Hotel, one block off Wilshire Boulevard, at 4 a.m., asking to be saved. Wilson reports the singer was "broken up and crying as Billy said, 'We've been praying for you for weeks.'"
Hamblen's daughter, Lisa Hamblen Jaserie, also supports the tale of the "dark of the night" conversion.
John Wayne's connection to the song does appear to be well established. According to Stuart Hamblen (and if anyone would know, it would be him) he did indeed gain his inspiration for "It Is No Secret" from a response he made to the movie star. Hamblen did appear in a number of minor westerns, including some that starred the Duke, so they knew each other, at least casually. The inspiration came from a brief conversation at a party: in reply to Wayne's comment "What's this I hear — you got religion?," Stuart answered, "It is no secret what God can do in a man's life." The movie star then reportedly drawled, "Well that sounds like a song," thereby planting the idea in the songwriter's mind.
Yet not all the claims made in the e-mailed version of the song's history hold up. This one, for instance, is clearly false:
And along came a young preacher holding a tent revival. Hamblin had him on his radio show, presumably to poke fun at him. And to gather more material, Hamblin showed up at one of the revival meetings.
According to Dr. Graham, he went on Stuart Hamblen's radio show as part of a media push to raise interest in advance of the revival meeting. He and the other organizers of the event were having trouble getting any advance press coverage, so his appearance on Hamblen's show was a boon to them. And rather than poking fun at the Reverend, Hamblen told his listeners to "go on down to Billy Graham's tent and hear the preaching."
Another aspect of this e-mailed account rings false: it is inaccurate to say of Hamblen that "hard times were upon him" after his spiritual awakening. A year after his discovery of the Lord, Hamblen wrote "It Is No Secret," a tune that brought him tremendous
acclaim as it became the first cross-over gospel, country, and pop ballad, reaching the number one spot on all three charts. That same year, he wrote "Remember Me, I'm The One Who Loves You," a song which peaked at #2 on the gospel and country charts and held that position for a full nine weeks. As for "This Ole House," supposedly the sole bright spot in Hamblen's career during a period of professional reverses between his conversion and the success of "It Is No Secret," he didn't write that song until 1954, four years after he'd topped the charts with "It Is No Secret." ("This Ole House" shouldn't be dismissively described as "the only one that had much success" — it went to #2 in the country field and stayed on the charts for thirty weeks, while Rosemary Clooney's version went to #3 in the pop charts and was named Song Of The Year.)
In the early 1950s Hamblen did lose his radio show, the Cowboy Church of the Air, over his refusal to do a commercial promoting alcohol, but his principled stand led the Prohibition Party to nominate him as their candidate for President of the United States in 1952. Hamblen racked up nearly 73,000 votes and finished fourth in a field of twelve candidates despite appearing on the ballot in only twenty-one states.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Time to Reboot America
Thomas L. Friedman
I had a bad day last Friday, but it was an all-too-typical day for America. It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.
Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.
The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.
All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”
My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.
To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.
For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.
That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.
It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.
America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society — in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs.
John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.
I had a bad day last Friday, but it was an all-too-typical day for America. It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.
Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.
The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.
All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”
My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.
To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.
For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.
That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.
It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.
America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society — in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs.
John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.
Monday, February 23, 2009
I've Been Bad
You may have noticed there hasn't been any new posts here for a few weeks. I took a trip to Arkansas to visit my brother. I planned to keep everyone updated but when I tried to log on from my brother's computer I couldn't remember my password (my computer remembers it for me). So I was out of luck.
Since my return the news has been so depressing that I haven't been stirred to write much. The Democrats have discovered some of the Bush policies weren't so bad after all. They have continued them. After promising the Kool Aid drinkers that he would get out of the war, the messiah has ordered 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan. That's about half of what the generals on the ground said was needed but it was enough to set off the loony left. I guess Obama's "honeymoon" didn't last long.
He did manage to push the stimulus package through Congress. It was deemed an emergency measure that had to be passed before the Congressmen had a chance to read it. It was so important to get it passed quickly that he let it lay on his desk for three days waiting for a photo op in Denver to sign it. I think each one of us should find out how our Congressmen voted and for each one that voted for it without reading it, work for his defeat in the next election regardless of party affiliation. I know I will refuse to vote for anyone who votes a bill into law when he hasn't read it. These people are working for us and we would get fired for being so irresponsible.
Some of the governors are refusing to accept parts of the stimulus money. Some of it they have no choice but to accept. But they are refusing that portion that they can. It is no coincidence that most of these are southern governors.
This is all I have until I get over my pout. When I do we'll tackle the US Attorney General who called us a nation of cowards because we couldn't talk about race. He must be referring to whites (he is black) because that is all Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton talk about.
'Til then.............
Since my return the news has been so depressing that I haven't been stirred to write much. The Democrats have discovered some of the Bush policies weren't so bad after all. They have continued them. After promising the Kool Aid drinkers that he would get out of the war, the messiah has ordered 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan. That's about half of what the generals on the ground said was needed but it was enough to set off the loony left. I guess Obama's "honeymoon" didn't last long.
He did manage to push the stimulus package through Congress. It was deemed an emergency measure that had to be passed before the Congressmen had a chance to read it. It was so important to get it passed quickly that he let it lay on his desk for three days waiting for a photo op in Denver to sign it. I think each one of us should find out how our Congressmen voted and for each one that voted for it without reading it, work for his defeat in the next election regardless of party affiliation. I know I will refuse to vote for anyone who votes a bill into law when he hasn't read it. These people are working for us and we would get fired for being so irresponsible.
Some of the governors are refusing to accept parts of the stimulus money. Some of it they have no choice but to accept. But they are refusing that portion that they can. It is no coincidence that most of these are southern governors.
This is all I have until I get over my pout. When I do we'll tackle the US Attorney General who called us a nation of cowards because we couldn't talk about race. He must be referring to whites (he is black) because that is all Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton talk about.
'Til then.............
Monday, February 2, 2009
See? It's Not Just Me
It seems I'm not the only one peeved about Jerimiah Wright being invited to Selma's Bloody Sunday event.
Alabama Democratic Rep. Artur Davis is criticizing Selma organizers for inviting President Barack Obama's former Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to this year's commemoration of the "Bloody Sunday" civil rights march.
Davis said giving the pastor a prominent role in the event is inconsistent with its theme. Wright's comments about whites and racism in America sparked outrage during last year's campaign.
Organizers announced this week that Wright would be invited to the march.
Alabama Democratic Rep. Artur Davis is criticizing Selma organizers for inviting President Barack Obama's former Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to this year's commemoration of the "Bloody Sunday" civil rights march.
Davis said giving the pastor a prominent role in the event is inconsistent with its theme. Wright's comments about whites and racism in America sparked outrage during last year's campaign.
Organizers announced this week that Wright would be invited to the march.
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