Missourian Vikilyn Higginbotham recorded an album of self-penned fundamentalist Christian songs in 1991. In an attempt to stay current and get the message to the young folks, she included this rap number about the Prince of Peace.

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Vikilyn Higginbotham -"Jesus Went About Doing Good"

Among the countless unsolicited demo tapes Whit Waltman auditioned as an intern at Nashville's Bait 'n' Switch Publishing in the mid-80s, the songs of Lee Roy Slippard stood out in their unvarnished expressiveness. Little is known about Slippard other than his return address in tiny Jixville, West Virginia.

To learn more about "I Hear America Singing", see our main page.

Lee Roy Slippard - "She Comes To Me To Cry"

"It had been a real week from hell, spent on a custom album project for two middle-aged sisters from Oklahoma who knew how to fight and cry but not how to sing in time or in tune. The days were long and tortuous. I was finishing up the mixes and looking forward to getting out of there when Bud [studio owner] came in and said, 'I've booked a guy who wants to come in and record some of his songs this afternoon. Just guitar and vocal, should be quick.' Well, I wasn't too happy about this, because at this point, I was so fried I didn't even want to hear GOOD music, much less another clown from the sticks with his dumb songs.

"The sisters had no sooner left with the mixes of their crappy album than this fellow from the dark hinterlands of southern Missouri walked into the studio with a guitar case and a girlfriend in tow. He was stout and burly, but very timid, looking about the studio in awe and almost tiptoeing in. We introduced ourselves--his name was Larry Qualls--and I tried to get him to feel at ease (mostly so we could get this over with in a hurry, I admit). By the time I had the mics set up, he was feeling somewhat jovial and relaxed.

"I went into the control room where Larry's girlfriend, Rebecca, was sitting on the couch against the wall. At the console, I quickly got sounds up on the guitar and vocal mics. 'Okay, Larry,' I said, 'let's run a little bit of a song just so I can get the levels set.' 'Allrighty, then,' he replied, "Make me sound like Hank, Jr.!" He then proceeded to launch into a riotous tale of a misadventure with a sex toy. My eyes went wide. I began to laugh uncontrollably. I turned to Rebecca, who grinned and nodded knowingly, as if to say, 'You weren't expecting this, were you?'

"And so, like the shot of whiskey I'd been looking forward to at home, Larry Qualls cleared my senses and made me feel like things would be okay after all. Suddenly, I wasn't so anxious to leave work."

--Whit Waltman, from "Well, Somebody's Gotta Do It: My Quest to Root Out America's Neglected Under-Culture, Cut Through the Crapstorm of Pop Music, Give Native Genius Its Rightful Place in the Spotlight and, I Don't Know, Maybe Do a Couple Other Things I Haven't Thought of Yet"

Larry J. Qualls - "Love Doll"

"Larry Qualls [see previous song, "Love Doll"] came back to the studio to record a few more tunes. This time, along with his girlfriend Rebecca, he brought a friend by the name of Randall Bascomb. Randall was old and gray and quite weatherbeaten, and he had even more of the timid but humorous personality I'd seen in Larry. He was very quiet, but when he did speak, it was to insert a well-timed joke, after which his eyes would light up and his wrinkled face would break out into a wide grin. I got a kick out of Randall and enjoyed his presence.

"After laying down a few of his original songs, Larry came in the control room and looked over at Randall. 'You wanna try some o' yours?,' he asked. Randall shrugged and answered, 'Well, if y'all don't mind.' We all encouraged him to get out his guitar, whenceforth he uncased an old Guild with a place below the soundhole where the finish was gone and the wooden top almost worn through. 'I play differ'nt from most folks,' he offered. 'I have to tap the rhythm out on the git-tar body. It bothers some people, but I can't play no other way. I hope it don't mess up the recordin'.' I assured him we'd make it work and helped him get settled in front of the mics out in the studio.

"Randall sang five songs he'd written. They were all good, solid, traditional country songs, sung in a strong and seasoned voice, but it was the next-to-last tune that struck me as pure, unvarnished truth. It was a straightforward, Hank Williams-style ballad about the desperation of a man whose life has been destroyed by alcohol. I felt a little shiver when I realized this was a song not meant to entertain anyone--it was simply a stark expression of its author's personal hell.

"Randall finished his set of songs and came back in the control room, still meek and quiet, but looking a little more relaxed. I made cassettes of the session for him and for Larry. As the group left, Randall looked me square in the eye, shook my hand and thanked me. I thanked him, too, and I watched the trio walk out the door to head back to their little hardscrabble corner of the Missouri backwoods. And that was the last I ever saw of Randall Bascomb."

--Whit Waltman, from "Well, Somebody's Gotta Do It: My Quest to Root Out America's Neglected Under-Culture, Cut Through the Crapstorm of Pop Music, Give Native Genius Its Rightful Place in the Spotlight and, I Don't Know, Maybe Do a Couple Other Things I Haven't Thought of Yet"

Randall Bascomb - "Alcohol"

Among the unsolicited song demo tapes screened by Whit Waltman in his publishing-house internship was this offering by Temperance Magby, who described herself in an accompanying letter as "Mechanicsburg, Indiana's Voice of the Lovelorn".

Temperance Magby - "Silently Crying Out Loud For You"

"Duane Hoerchler, from Chthonic Springs, Nebraska, is a professional wheat harvester. For several months every year, he lives a nomadic life, following the wheat harvest from its beginnings in Texas to its conclusion in North Dakota, covering all the Great Plains states with his hired crew and his combines. One weekend in 1992, when the work was done for a while, he came to take his shot at recording some demos in Branson, as hordes of others were doing at the time.

"'My wife likes to hear me sing,' he offered shyly, 'and the boys on the crew said I oughta make a tape for her.' The songs were all country standards, well-known to the gang of studio musicians we had on hand, and Duane, though nervous, seemed to be pleased as we quickly cut an album's worth of no-frills classics.

"It was when we finally reached Conway Twitty's masterpiece of fumble-fingered sexual exploration that Duane became overwhelmed. After struggling with lyrics and some high-register vocal lines, he asked that the band slow it down a little. The guitarist, Pat (what was his last name?...dang), suggested lowering the key by a step. We turned the studio lights down to almost complete darkness. Finally, for reasons he never really explained, Duane decided he didn't want to sing the "bum-bum-bums" at the end of each line--curious, as this was sort of a signature vocal lick in the song.  But it didn't matter, for this hard-working, humble, sunburned man was now at ease, singing for his woman back home in western Nebraska. And I'm pretty sure she loved it, even though I still grimace when I hear him reach for those high notes in the bridge."

--Whit Waltman, from "Well, Somebody's Gotta Do It: My Quest to Root Out America's Neglected Under-Culture, Cut Through the Crapstorm of Pop Music, Give Native Genius Its Rightful Place in the Spotlight and, I Don't Know, Maybe Do a Couple Other Things I Haven't Thought of Yet"

Duane Hoerchler - "You've Never Been This Far Before"

"The battered envelope, which looked like it had been through about a dozen mailings, had a return address of Distemper, Arizona. Inside was a grimy, unboxed cassette and a scrap of notebook paper with song information and a brief message from its author, Harlan Tvistig, written in all caps. The blue-inked letters leaned hard to the right, as though fighting their way across the page: 'THIS SONG CAN BE SUNG BY MAN (KENNY ROGERS) OR WOMAN (CRYSTAL GALE [sic]).'

"I placed the cassette in the deck, pressed 'play' and waited; nothing but silence for a minute. I thought maybe Mr. Tvistig had mistakenly sent a blank tape--it had happened before--and I felt a little sorry for his wasted effort, and annoyed for my wasted time. While reaching to turn the tape off and toss it in the trash, I was suddenly jolted by power chords from an electric guitar. There was, indeed, music here--primeval, stomping music supporting a voice filled with lust, anguish, guilt, betrayal, obsession and sin. Music as desperate as I imagined the sun-bleached Arizona crossroad trailer-town of its origin to be.

"I still have fantasies of what country radio would sound like if Kenny Rogers or Crystal Gayle had taken a shot at this song, backed by a watered-down disco beat, background chorus and string section. Maybe even as a duet...hmm...."

--Whit Waltman, from "Well, Somebody's Gotta Do It: My Quest to Root Out America's Neglected Under-Culture, Cut Through the Crapstorm of Pop Music, Give Native Genius Its Rightful Place in the Spotlight and, I Don't Know, Maybe Do a Couple Other Things I Haven't Thought of Yet"

Harlan Tvistig - "Slippin' Around In The Dark Of Night"

"Merletta Pitkin and Loyene Brunk were two sisters from Amohalko, Oklahoma whose love/hate relationship was the animating force in their otherwise featureless lives. Merletta, the older of the two, was the dominator, the popular girl, the homecoming queen; Loyene, with her thick glasses and wobbly self-confidence, was her sister’s foil. Despite multiple fiascos--including three failed marriages, a financially disastrous foray into ostrich ranching and a decades-dead ambition to “get out of Amohalko and be a movie star”--Merletta could always lay claim to being “purtier and smarter” than her sister. Loyene, who grudgingly accepted her perpetual slot in Last Place at Everything That Matters, spent her life in a doomed and resentful struggle to gain her sister’s (and parents’, and peers’) approval.

It was this set of overstuffed baggage the sisters brought with them to the studio when, in their late fifties, they decided to make an album-length cassette of their favorite country songs. It’s bad when you have session musicians trying to work their way around singers who have eccentric notions of pitch and timing; it’s far worse when a lifetime of family dysfunction is a central ingredient in the stew; it’s pure misery when they’ve booked the studio for a whole week.

Attempting the old Ned Miller tune “Sunday Morning Tears”, Loyene broke down in tears of her own over her inability to navigate the song’s straightforward metrical structure. Several takes fell apart at the end of the first verse, and the session was nearly aborted by this impasse; a break was called after she yelled, “AH CAIN’T DO THIS!!” in response to Merletta’s sweetly poisoned question, “why don'tcha just sing it like the record, Sister?” It was during the break that fast-thinking bassist Jim “Donkey” Donahey figured out the places where Loyene was stretching and contracting the phrases and was able to scribble out a chart the rest of the band could follow. The session re-convened, and the guys nailed it on the first take.

After two long days with ten tracks cut, the players packed up and exited…leaving me to the grim and lonely task of keeping conflicts in check, while recording master vocals and mixing the songs, in the days ahead. Merletta waged a relentless war of charm to ensure I would have no doubts regarding which sister was “purtier and smarter”; Loyene trudged ahead and tried to enjoy the proceedings as much as she could under her sister’s oppressive shadow. At the project's end, the older sister unleashed a deluge of empty praise on her underling's "fine singin'"; tellingly, the studio was then paid with a check written by 'Mrs. Loyene S. Brunk'."

--Whit Waltman, from "Well, Somebody's Gotta Do It: My Quest to Root Out America's Neglected Under-Culture, Cut Through the Crapstorm of Pop Music, Give Native Genius Its Rightful Place in the Spotlight and, I Don't Know, Maybe Do a Couple Other Things I Haven't Thought of Yet"

Loyene Brunk - "Sunday Morning Tears"

This is the second of two songs submitted to Bait'n'Switch publishing by the mysterious Lee Roy Slippard (whose song "She Comes to Me to Cry" is featured on this page, as well). Both were winners, according to Whit Waltman, who preserved them for posterity so that we could present them to you, dauntless searcher of the internet.

Like an Old Testament prophet in the Book of Ecclesiastes, Slippard foresaw hard times ahead for his fast-living peers, and he wasn't afraid to warn them of it.

Lee Roy Slippard - "Lonely Old Man"

In what he must have considered a no-miss combination of yuletide novelty with a controversial celebrity, Dale Rotterdam sent forth this missive in the hopes of landing a Christmas 1984 hit. Alas, it made it no further than the mountainous "reject" pile of tapes at Bait 'n' Switch Publishing--and, of course, Whit Waltman's private collection of singular oddities.

A native of unincorporated Carbuncle, Tennessee, Dale Rotterdam made numerous attempts to capture the public ear with celebrity-themed tunes, including an entire album of paeans to actress Markie Post of "Night Court" fame.

Dale Rotterdam - "I Saw Daddy Kissing Boy George"

"I want to preserve and promote the authentic voices of this land, voices that otherwise would never be heard--the joyful whoops and mournful wails from the shit-out-of-luck hollers of Appalachia, the left-for-dead industrial wastelands of the Rust Belt, the sun-blasted deserts where only lunatic prophets dare live. I want to broadcast the dreams of the Great Unwashed, or, as they would say themselves, the Great Unwarshed!”

So wrote the late Whit Waltman in his unpublished autobiography/manifesto, "Well, Somebody's Gotta Do It: My Quest to Root Out America's Neglected Under-Culture, Cut Through the Crapstorm of Pop Music, Give Native Genius Its Rightful Place in the Spotlight and, I Don't Know, Maybe Do a Couple Other Things I Haven't Thought of Yet". This SoundCloud page, dedicated to Waltman’s vision, presents recordings from the material this amateur folklorist collected during his all-too-brief career in the hardscrabble fringes of the music industry.

Whit Waltman came to Nashville, Tennessee in 1984, at the age of 21. Obsessed with records since boyhood, he was looking for a chance to learn the trade of audio engineering. He quickly secured an internship at Bait ‘n’ Switch Music Publishing on the city’s Music Row, where he was put to work in the tape room, making copies of demo recordings by staff songwriters to be pitched to prominent country artists.

A secondary part of Waltman’s internship involved auditioning unsolicited tapes sent in by amateur songwriters. “These were people who didn’t have a grasshopper’s chance in a hen house of getting their songs cut,” he recalled, “but Bull (Bait 'n' Switch owner Rayford "Bull" Schissel) showed me the big, messy box full of cassettes and said, ‘Well, somebody’s gotta do it.’ And so I did. I was bored and resentful at first, but every now and then, I would come across something so raw and emotional, it seemed to leap out of the speakers at me.” Waltman soon concluded that many of these amateur demos contained a passion not to be found in the cynical radio fodder being cranked out by the professional writers who were getting stoned in the room next to where he worked. He began keeping his own cassette copy of some of the most outstanding work, which he would share with trusted friends.

After a while, Waltman became a recording engineer in his own right. As with the internship, most of the music he recorded for a living consisted of dreary and dull attempts to make “something commercial”. And yet, there were instances in which these attempts could not remotely be considered commercial, where the eccentricities of the artist were too strong for the marketplace. “The outsider folk-artists who were unaware of their outsider-ness--those were the best,” Waltman stated, once again asserting his love of underdog, left-field creativity over easily-formatted pablum. He continued to cherish and collect these recordings, with the eventual goal of presenting them as part of a broad survey of unique American voices that persisted in an age of assimilation and conformity.

Alas, he was not to see his goal realized. His obsession led to endless hours in the studio, reviewing tapes, hunching over the editing block and digging through dusty tape vaults. Eventually, he contracted magnetosis, an extremely rare condition caused by repeated exposure to iron oxide particles. The walls of Waltman’s lungs became so filled with these particles that they became magnetically attracted to each other, making breathing difficult. He struggled for years until, in 1999, at the age of 37, his lungs slammed shut for good. He had breathed his last.

'I Hear America Singing' is a project of the National Repository for the Collective Unconscious, as we attempt to share Whit Waltman’s dream with those who mindlessly surf the internet in search of amusements, instead of doing something productive with their lives—in short, with people just like you.

I Hear America Singing

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