An ol’ friend loved gospel music

“GIVE A Holmes Countian half a chance, and they’ll do well,” local broadcaster J. Harvey Etheridge often said on his morning radio program while bragging about a neighbor’s accomplishments.

For decades his distinctive warm voice came booming into homes in the tri-county area six mornings a week on WBGC 1240 from Chipley. (The station’s call letters stood for Bonifay, Graceville and Chipley.)

“Hello everybody everywhere, this is your old friend Harvey Etheridge, bringing you the news of Bonifay and Holmes County,” he always began.

He presented a mix of newsy items he’d heard or read or gathered on the tape recorder he always took with him on his travels around the area selling Liberty Mutual life insurance. Etheridge was the county’s chief spokesman and booster, sharing notice of birthdays, family get-togethers and local events small and large — especially Bonifay’s annual rodeo and all-night gospel sing.

J. Harvey Etheridge Street in downtown Bonifay — the address of city hall, the public library and his longtime office — is named in his honor.

Even before Etheridge moved to Holmes County in the 1950s and became a leader of the “World’s Biggest All-Night Gospel Sing” every Fourth of July weekend at Memorial Field in Bonifay, he was involved as a young man in promoting gospel music in Dothan, Alabama. For a time he was a member of a gospel group called the Alabama Four.

He had a powerful singing voice. For decades, he was a member of the choir at Bonifay’s First United Methodist Church. He led the singing during Sunday night services and often sang solos just before the sermon.

“He loved gospel music,” says his daughter, Lygia Etheridge Tisdale. “He had a beautiful bass voice. I always told my Mama she fell in love with Daddy’s voice first.”

For a week in the spring of 1972, Etheridge was lured across town from the Methodist church to First Baptist Church to lead the singing at a spring revival. Recently, retired educator and longtime First Baptist organist Kenneth Yates unearthed and digitized recordings that capture portions of the week’s services.

Etheridge’s distinctive voice and gentle sense of humor are on full display. He prays and sings and even hums favorite old gospel hymns.

Etheridge says in the recording that he was kidded all week about being a Methodist in a Baptist church, but found they weren’t that different.

“I thought I’d sing out of the Methodist hymnal tonight,” he says during one service. “And, lo and behold, the same song is in the Baptist hymnal.”