Internet Confession: I Owned This Album
When Facebook was more popular, it used to be fun to share links to lists of album covers that made one laugh or otherwise feel uncomfortable. On one such list, I found an album cover that once received a lot of play in my collection.
During the 70’s and 80’s, the Baptist church my family attended would have regular summer Revival sessions which were week-long evening services. I won’t go into a discussion about whether churches needed yearly “revivals”, but it was something we attended faithfully. Most of these services were led by an outside preacher, and many of the preachers had an entourage of singers, performers, etc. This one year, the outside talent was Charles Massegee.
“Erick” is, as the cover suggests, a collection of songs, jokes, and other bits performed by the ventriloquist dummy “Erick” and his handler Beverly Massegee, wife of the speaker. Each night of the revival, there would be a “children’s time” where Erick was brought out to entertain with riffs on the local preacher, songs, and Bible stories. Most services were all-ages, so it was nice to have something interesting for the kids as the rest of the services would be taxing for their attention.
Our parents bought this album and the other Erick album “Amen”. Having all the vignettes in together was simultaneously entertaining and disappointing when you realized that what appeared to be a spontaneous act was actually something that had been performed repeatedly with the same timing as when we saw it live. This latter feeling was compounded when another member of the church attended a revival at another church that was lead by Massegee to find that it was a complete replay of the services at our church. That’s not to minimize the content of the message, but it does seem less inspired as services are presented in the Baptist Church.
While I can’t recall if this revival series occurred before or after the movie Magic was released, I’m certain that us children in the church had no information about that film or other reasons to find ventriloquist dummies frightening at that age. Nowadays, thanks to that movie and the “Goosebumps” series, ventriloquist dummies are synonymous with evil. But not at this time. Later the albums became novelties for friends when they would visit, but eventually the albums ended up in storage along with Herb Albert and Sesame Street collections.
Interesting fact one: you can still purchase the album here:
[https://massegee.org/product/erick/]
Interesting fact two: Beverly Massegee (Oliver) was a witness to the Kennedy assassination and was portrayed in the movie “JFK”.
