Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,732
This is the grave of Sam Jones.
Born in 1847 in Oak Bowery, Alabama, Jones grew up fairly well off, the son of a lawyer and businessman. His mom died in 1855 and then family moved to his father’s home town of Cartersville, Georgia. The family was deeply Methodist, with ministers going back generations. This is what Jones became too, but only after a long personal journey. At the end of the Civil War he was up in Kentucky, so I suppose he avoided serving the traitors. He was admitted to the bar in 1868. But Jones, well, he didn’t take to the law, not because he didn’t have some skills but because he was a massive drunk. He basically drank away his practice and ended up working menial labor jobs for booze. In 1872, his father was on his death bed. He made his son promise to stop drinking. Now, we all know that death bed promises don’t mean much, and this sounds like a Louvin Brothers song. Jones would backslide too from time to time. But this was the beginning of a conversion experience for him.
Jones turned to his Methodist faith and went into preaching. He turned out to be a really good speaker and since that matters in most Protestant branches more than any other skill, especially during an era when preaching was entertainment as well as everything else, it really mattered. By the late 1870s, he became a regionally popular preacher. The North Georgia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (southern slaver branch of course) saw they had a talent here and they named him the fundraiser for their orphanage. He started holding revivals too. One he held in 1885 in Nashville made him nationally famous. He started getting press conference across the country and among those he converted was a notorious riverboat captain named Tom Ryman. You know him today because it was he who built the Ryman Auditorium, which became the long-time home of the Grand Ole Opry decades later and today still holds some Opry events, including when I went. But Ryman definitely did not build this for country singers, those devilish drunken bastards. He built it as a tabernacle for preachers.
Jones went on the road after this. He estimated that between the summer of 1885 and the summer of 1886, he gave about 1,000 sermons and preached to about 3 million people, though I assume a lot of these were repeat visitors. Still, that’s a big footprint. He slowed it down a little bit after that but basically spent the next twenty years more or less on the road, like a hard-touring rock band today. He now was out of the South as much as he was in it as well and held huge revivals in Chicago, Los Angeles, even Toronto. Other than Dwight Moody, he was probably the most famous American preacher by the end of the 1880s.
Jones’ theme was “Quit Your Meanness.” Now, what that really meant was quit all fun. Your meanness was not so much meanness to other people, though that was in there. It was meanness to yourself and to God. Yes, he also believed that people should be good community members and the like, so meanness meant different things here. But Jones loathed gambling, horse racing, cards, baseball, dancing, dime novels, theater, and especially alcohol. Fun guy! Of course he based this in his own previous failings and he was by no means immune from backsliding himself. But it worked because he was not boring. He was not really a fire and damnation guy. He used humor and he worked the edges of dirty jokes. He also really pandered to the people who go to revivals. He believed that the church had to take on the trappings of theater to compete with it in the popular mind. For example, one of his big talking points is how he was a real preacher unlike these educated men. He used to say:
“We have been clamouring for fifty years for an educated ministry and we have got it to-day, and the church is deader than it ever has been in its history. Half of the literary preachers in this town are A.B.’s, Ph.D.’s, D.D.’s, LL.D.’s, and A.S.S.’s.”
Comedy gold there Sam!
He would also take the piss out of fancy preachers who thought themselves above the crowd, who he always assumed were regular folks like him, not that he was actually regular, but you know what I mean. For example, when he went to preach in New York, a minister he didn’t much care for introduced him as “Rev. Samuel Porter Jones.” He came out and said “My name ain’t the Rev. Samuel Porter Jones. It’s just plain Sam Jones.” He then, in this case, proceeded to insult his audience. He stated, “I am afraid there is too much pride in this church for the Lord to do much for us. If you people and Dr. Talmadge (the preacher he didn’t like) had as much of the grace of the Lord in your hearts as you have pride you wouldn’t need a little sallow-faced Georgia preacher to come and preach to you.” This did not go over well and he was genuinely shocked that New York papers basically said he was a stupid redneck. Not everyone wanted to listen to his cornpone, not even Christians who would actually attend a revival, which in my book are generally not the smartest bulbs in the bunch.
In truth, it seems Jones probably suffered from depression as well. He worked off and on in the 1890s in part because of what has been described as “emotional instability.” The backsliding into booze here and there probably contributed too. Evidently, this ran in the family. His sister Annie was a morphine addict. Her son killed a guy while in a drunken rage. His younger brother was a preacher too but had suicidal moments. Jones was also sickly and people often commented on the fact that he worked himself ragged. Jones did hold to ecumenicalism and even had close relationships with rabbis, not so common among evangelicals then or now, but especially then. He even would hold revivals for Jews that stated that the differences between the two religions was just quibbling over creeds. I mean….that’s awfully broad minded for the time. I wonder how much his core audience knew about this.
If some of this sounds a bit specific given his long and varied life, it’s because there are very few scholarly discussions of Jones’ life until Katharine Minnix published a book on him with the University of Georgia Press in 2010 and I only have access to the parts on Google Books I can access, but this post is plenty long enough for a guy like this.
In 1906, Jones was coming back Georgia from a revival he held in Oklahoma City. He died suddenly, presumably of a heart attack. He was 58 years old.
Sam Jones is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, Cartersville, Georgia. I guess God likes a tall phallic grave.
If you would like this series to visit other American ministers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Billy Graham is in Charlotte, North Carolina and Dwight Moody is in Northfield, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.