The last few years have seen a revival of interest in Pappy “Gube” Beaver. He’d been written about plenty before, featured in several Bert Vincent News Sentinel columns in the 1950s and mentions in Billboard magazine in the 1940s. Bluegrass Unlimited profiled him in the 1980s, and every so often local newspapers would catch up with the country-music recording artist turned singing preacher. A recent documentary has stirred a new interest in Beaver, and a new edit of the film makes its debut this Friday at the Knoxville Film Festival.

Parlin Kenneth Beaver was born in Cocke County in 1919. The nickname “Gube” was derived from an uncle who called him Peanut because he was such a small child. Beaver moved to Knoxville in 1940, taking a job washing dishes in a boarding house his grandmother ran on Winona Street, off Magnolia, before moving on to Campbell Service laundry, where he met his wife, Mildred.

Hailing from a musical family, the guitarist and singer appeared on Cas Walker’s Farm and Home Hour radio show with his brother in the 1940s, and later with his wife and children when the program transitioned to television. It was Walker who started calling him “Pappy,” following the birth of his first child.

In 1945, Lee Gillette, a talent scout/producer from Capitol Records, saw Pappy and His Gang perform on WROL radio and invited Beaver to cut some records for the label. Traveling to Atlanta, he recorded four sides for Capitol, including “You Can Be a Millionaire With Me” b/w “Automobile of Life,” featuring a young Chet Atkins on fiddle. It was the first commercial record on which Atkins appeared. Six months after this session, a trip to Chicago yielded four more sides.

Beaver was open about the struggle with alcohol he had as a younger man. A taxi driver by profession, he was arrested for driving drunk outside of Greenville, S.C. There he underwent a jailhouse conversion and soon started hosting a family radio show on gospel station WKXV in the early 1950s, something he would keep up for more than 60 years. Leading tent meetings and revivals soon followed, and eventually he opened the Bible Church of God on Western Avenue.

Two hours of video documenting a 1976 meeting in the church are in the Eleanor Creekmore Dickinson Collection at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center. Dickinson was born and raised in Knoxville, earning an art degree from the University of Tennessee before heading out to San Francisco to study painting and filmmaking. She was fascinated with the variety of Protestant worship services and revivals in Appalachia, devoting much of her art to the subject, including extensive audio and video field recordings. The Beaver videos have just about everything you could ask of a nondenominational church service of the time: testifying, speaking in tongues, laying on of hands and, of course, singing, with Beaver leading the congregation in a charged medley of “Jesus on the Mainline” and “Somebody Touched Me.” He also appears in Revival!, Dickinson’s 1974 book of drawings, photographs, and oral history.

In 2012, an hour-long documentary on Beaver was produced. The filmmaker, Dwight Swanson, actually set out to make a film about Cas Walker (his production company is named Thumpin’ Good, after the grocer’s watermelon ad campaign), and became sidetracked when he encountered Beaver.

“I was in the reading room of the Library of Congress, reading old issues of the News Sentinel on microfilm,” Swanson says. “In the article on Cas’ funeral, the reporter interviewed Pappy, who was at the cemetery. It was really his name that jumped out at me at first. I just knew that anyone named Pappy “Gube” Beaver had to have had a good story of his own.”

I Open My Mouth and Let ’Er Fly premiered at the East Tennessee History Center in April 2012, with Beaver appearing in person to perform. Three years later, Swanson has made “Rev. Pappy,” a short film incorporating unused footage from the original production as well as archival film and photographs from the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound.

“The first film really was aimed at people from Knoxville who knew Pappy and his story,” Swanson explains. “After showing it to a few people, I didn’t get the feeling that a long biography of Pappy would have much of an audience outside of Knoxville, so even before that History Center screening I had planned to work on a shorter version that could resonate with wider audiences.  There is still some of Pappy’s biography left, and some discussion of his musical career in the 1940s, but I really wanted to focus mostly on the service that we filmed when Pappy returned to preach at his church following a serious car accident that he had had in 2011.”

Beaver continued to hold services for as long as he was able, and died on Sept. 21, 2014, at the age of 97. A website dedicated to him is still active. If you click on the page for Pappy’s church you will be greeted with the message, “Pappy and the Bible Church of God would like to thank its members and visitors for your support over the years. The church has closed.”

“Rev. Pappy” premieres at the Knoxville Film Festival at Regal Downtown West Cinema 8 on Friday, Sept. 18, during a block of films running from 1:45-3:45 p.m. Tickets are $10-$75.  

Inside the Vault features discoveries from the Knox County Public Library’s Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, a collection of film, video, music, and other media from around East Tennessee.

Eric Dawson

Eric Dawson is Audio-Visual Archivist with the Knox County Public Library's Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, and with Inside the Vault combs the archive for nuggets of lost Knoxville music and film history to share with us. He's also a longtime local music journalist, former A&E editor of the Knoxville Voice and a board member of the nonprofit performance venue Pilot Light.