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Rev. Dwight St. Andre was ahead of his time for a small-town preacher back in the 1970s when he was the pastor of Westside Baptist Church.
National television was inundated in those days with evangelists like Billy Graham and Jimmy Swaggart, and TV church services and telethons were catching on at the local level.
Cable channels were selling time for churches to broadcast their preaching and gospel music, and churches were doing telethons on those stations to raise money to pay for the telecasts.
St. Andre had the flair and charisma to generate interest in the telethons. He could sing and preach and stirred up enthusiasm on the telethons as sort of a master of ceremonies.
My son Randy, who was in high school, was a guitar player and singer who performed in churches, schools, restaurants, and other places here and in surrounding towns.
Rev. St. Andre got Randy and other local musicians involved in the telethon. Folks would call in and make a donation to hear a certain hymn or some other song.
Country music star Tom T. Hall had written and recorded Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine a couple of years earlier, and it became a big hit.
Randy sang and played the song nearly every time he was asked to perform. People liked it, and an elderly-sounding gentleman phoned in to request it during the telethon.
He pledged $50, which was a pretty good offering for those days. But Rev. St. Andre was concerned that his church-going audience might be offended if Randy sang about wine during the fund-raiser.
The man called back two or three times to remind folks manning the phones that he had made a pledge for Randy to sing Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine, and he had not heard it yet.
Somebody finally informed him that a song about wine might not go over well on a religious telethon. They asked if Randy could do Old Rugged Cross or Amazing Grace instead.
After some thought, the gentleman agreed to honor his $50 pledge for one of the hymns but said he just loved Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine and would pay $100 to hear it.
That got Rev. St. Andre’s attention. He asked Randy if he could perform the song but replace the words “watermelon wine” with “watermelon rind.”
Randy changed the words, the donor sent in his money, and Rev. St. Andre was happy it all worked out. If Tom T. Hall was upset that his lyrics were revised, nobody ever heard about it.
Rev. St. Andre is up in his eighties now and is mostly retired. But he still does some laid back, laser focused preaching when he is asked to fill in for younger ministers at area churches.
Hall died last month at age 85. My friend Teddy Allen, the consummate newspaper columnist in this part of the country and an even bigger country music fan than I am, did a piece on Hall and included his usual “top 10” list of his songs.
We agreed on most of them like Margie’s at the Lincoln Park Inn, Harper Valley PTA, and Faster Horses, but I would have squeezed “I Love” in there somewhere.
“I love little baby ducks, old pickup trucks; slow movin’ trains and rain; I love little country streams, sleep without dreams, Sunday school in May and hay. And I love you too.”
But Teddy and I, the fellow who kept calling in to Dwight St. Andre’s telethon and everybody else who loved Tom T. Hall agree that the No. 1 song on his list of hits is Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine.
It’s still a great song even when a preacher changes the words to “watermelon rind” to keep from upsetting anybody.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES