![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Davis encountered Rambo's music because other performers had begun to sing her songs-he heard the gospel group Happy Goodman Family sing one of her songs, and asked who had written it. In the early 1960s Rambo's career as a writer saw a breakthrough: she was signed to a publishing company headed by Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis, who had gone through successful musical careers as a raunchy bluesman and singing cowboy movie star (the latter while serving as governor) and embarked on a gospel career of his own. The group became known for its so-called inverted harmonies, in which members traded off lead vocals over the course of a song. At first they performed in front of the same small religious groups that had hosted Rambo before her marriage. They later began touring as the Singing Rambos, and when daughter Reba was 13 she joined them to form a trio. Dottie and Buck Rambo formed the Singing Echoes (later the Gospel Echoes) and spent $600 making an album, quickly recouping their investment by selling 1,000 copies out of the back of their car. Rambo's powerful alto voice, smoother than but evocative of country gospel star Martha Carson, gained her fans wherever she went. The two were married when she was 16, and the couple's daughter, Reba, was born 18 months later. It was at a revival where she was performing that she met Buck Rambo, who had come to hear her sing. Music provided a positive aspect to her life, as she won applause from audiences at churches, Sunday schools, and revivals. Petersburg Times, she had to hide in closets from preachers who tried to molest her. But often, she told Waveney Ann Moore of the St. Rambo, aged 12, departed on the bus for Indianapolis, where she had been invited to sing.Ībuse from older men continued to mark Rambo's life living as a teenage Christian singer on the road, she found lodging mostly in the homes of preachers, doing housework in exchange for a room. In order to help her daughter, Rambo's mother altered her own favorite dress so that it would fit her daughter's body, and walked with her for seven miles to the nearest bus stop. As Rambo's commitment to Christianity deepened, her father's anger grew into physical abuse of Rambo and her mother. Just pulled it all up by the roots!" He hoped instead that she would become a country star who could appear on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. "He was so mad, he went outside and destroyed a whole acre of corn. "He says he didn't want any Holy Roller in the house," she told the Tribune. "Just washed over me and set everything on fire." From then on, despite various offers to sing secular music when she became famous, she performed gospel exclusively. "The Holy Spirit did a number on me," she told the Tampa Tribune. At age 11 or 12, Rambo had a conversion experience in a local Pentecostal church. It was secular, and soon she had taken up the guitar and learned country songs that came over the radio from Nashville, Tennessee, like Ernest Tubb's "Walkin' the Floor Over You." Her performing debut came on a local radio station. When Rambo was eight, she composed, to her mother's disbelief, her first song. Her father sometimes worked as a prison guard. In her composition "Mama Always Had a Song to Sing," she wrote that "I've seen my daddy tracking swamp rabbit in our back holler/More than once that was all we had to eat," and whether or not the line was directly autobiographical, she certainly knew poverty at an early age. Her family suffered hard times during the Great Depression, and moved several times between towns and failing farms. According to her Kentucky Music Museum Hall of Fame biography, "Dottie ranks with the beloved Fanny Crosby among the women who have had the greatest impact in the field of gospel music."ĭottie Rambo was born Joyce Reba Lutrell in Madison-ville, Kentucky, on March 2, 1934. Yet her greatest impact has been as a songwriter, with several major gospel classics among her more than 2,500 published compositions. Rambo has released award-winning recordings and appeared on numerous television programs and video recordings. As a solo artist and as a member of her family group the Rambos, Dottie Rambo has exerted a fundamental influence on the development of modern Southern Gospel music. ![]()
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