Full Up No Vacancy

Time for a new blog! We won't promise to update this at any particular interval. There may be another post tomorrow, or maybe not until next week, next month, or even next year. All we will promise is that when there is a post, it'll be pretty cool. Also we expect that the design will improve over time, but we're itching to get started so here's the first post.

Here's what this blog is based on: We're both the kind of people who will drive an hour at 7 AM on Saturday morning, with hangovers, to dig through every filthy record in a box ridden with mouse excrement in a house full of outhouse-themed knick-knacks in some godforsaken Texas town. Sometimes we even find some good records that way. Sometimes those records are really unusual. This blog exists to document these unusual records, or anything else we find that seems worth mentioning. So today we bring you....... Dwayne and Melba Miller of Boles, Arkansas!

These two records were uncovered in a closed, unlabeled cabinet in an antique mall in Elgin, Texas:

These two LPs on Gospel Melody Records possibly represent the entire published recorded output of Dwayne and Melba Miller of Boles, Arkansas. The musical style is sort of a rough, homemade-sounding electric county gospel with some pretty raw vocal harmonies, a questionably-tuned piano, and a quirky sense of timing, meshing perfectly with the amazing hair, the crouching person in a Satan costume, the blood splatters, the motel-sign-themed religious lyrics of the Dottie Rambo-penned "Full Up No Vacancy," and three song titles in a row beginning with the word "Satan." Shekinah Glory continues the trend with more great hair and background imagery of the sun breaking through clouds in a cartoony style reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations. Notably, all of the songs on Shekinah Glory are credited to "D. Miller," while almost all of the songs on Country Gospel are covers. Possibly reflecting the home-grown authorship, the songs on Shekinah Glory tend to be a little quirkier than on its predecessor. For example, check out Satan's own laughing steel guitar on "Satan, I See You're Back again."

Scanning the internet didn't turn up much info on these folks. A blog entry from 2008 speculated that the cover of Dwayne and Melba Sing Country Gospel was based on the Louvin Brothers' album Satan is Real, and Dwayne and Melba do include a great cover of that song, along with numerous other Louvin Brothers songs, on the album. Unfortunately, I also found Melba's obituary, which indicated that she had died in 2008, and had worked in the Waldron, Arkansas Wal-Mart for 18 years. The obituary does not mention these records, but does say that she was an accomplished musician and had published six books. These two records stand as testimony to the fact that, at some point in the late 1960s or early 1970s, Dwayne and Melba Miller were really on a roll.

Dwayne and Melba Sing Country Gospel:

Full Up No Vacancy [mp3]

Satan is Real [mp3]

Full Album [zipped folder]

Shekinah Glory:

Shekinah Glory [mp3]

Satan, I See You're Back Again [mp3]

Full Album [zipped folder]