Tinney Chapel Today

To say that loyalty to Tinney Chapel is, for me, a music-based experience would be only a small part of a truth that began to take shape during the 1940s when I was a small boy in a small congregation here at the quintessential country church. It was not the sermons that motivated me, and my younger brother Tommy, to show up each Sunday, although we were both patient hearers of The Word.

Nor was I motivated primarily by Sunday school teachers, Aunt Lizzie Tinney and Uncle Bill Tinney, although my life was permanently touched by their patient insistence on committing to memory some of the Bible’s most memorable lessons. When Aunt Lizzie taught the Little Kids, she rewarded, with a copper penny, those of us who could recite The Memory Verse each week. A shiny nickel was reserved for those few who were sufficiently disciplined to memorize and recite The Golden Text. If her method amounted to bribery, all I can say is that it worked!

Congregational singing was the Big Draw for me during those years, and especially during my teens, when three Tinney Chapel boys usually sat and sang together: My brother Tommy, myself and Elmer Wayne Gearner (older brother of Gailya Gearner). Our devotion to full-throated song was enhanced in no small measure by Aunt Olma Tinney, who played the piano based entirely on her unerring ear and ability to sight-read music written in a then-popular seven-shape note system.

Our official hymnal then was World Wide Church Songs, published (in the seven-shape note system) by The Stamps Quartet Music Company. The congregation of that era sang more songs at worship than we do now, and Aunt Olma always called upon the congregation to select most of the songs. Tommy, Wayne and I were particularly fond of “The Royal Telephone,” a song that was at once fun to sing and proclaimed our comforting nearness to God.

“Music can be a powerful form of prayer, meditation and healing, as well as a source of entertainment and celebration,” says Arvinell McClaren in Going To The Chapel. “The folks of Tinney Chapel community and church have always known this, as did their ancestors before them.” Amen!

# posted by Joe Dan Boyd @ 12/30/2007