GLORY BE,LET'S GATHER AT THE RIVER- My mom let her next door neighbor at Enid Lake talk her into going to church with them one Sunday, and little did she know that she was going to hear this "Fire and Brimstone' preacher try to scare all those present into both a saintly and a tithing life. She was especially appalled when he called all the young people to the front of the church to publicly and tearfully confess their sins,i.e. "God, I told Mama I did my homework Tuesday and I hadn't done the last 3 problems." This whole deal left my mom more than a little angry, at what she perceived ,as the evil done in the name of religion. To express her lack of respect for the pseudo-devout, she told a story of a preacher whose sermon was a rant and a rave against all alcohol and whose final line was,"EVERY DROP OF BEER,WINE AND WHISKEY SHOULD BE POURED IN THE RIVER, THIS VERY DAY." After the preacher's fiery admonition, there was a long silence to let the impact of the preacher's words sink in. The choir director then, quite innocently, asked the congregation to open their hymnals to page 64 and join in singing,"Let Us All Gather at the River." My mom would then say, "I bet that if they all did gather at the river,some of them would get as drunk as Cooter Brown." After writing my mom's oft used reference to Cooter Brown, I did a google search for Cooter. Google says that, in the South, the saying"as drunk as Cooter Brown" goes back to the 1800's, but alas, no one knows who Cooter was nor do they know how or why his drinking bouts were of such legendary proportions.
