WESTOVER – On a rainy autumn evening 15 years ago, The Gospel Singing Koon Family was doing what it does: punching holes in the clouds (absolutely) with an unbridled joyful noise.
A joyful noise that happened to be on key and in perfect harmony.
“… Well, I’m still feelin’ fine after all this time I’m feelin’ mighty fine today
I’m just a little bit higher, walkin’ up the King’s Highway
I still wanna go where the milk and honey flow and I’m not gonna change my mind
Happy on the journey and I’m still feelin’ mighty fine …”
Said tune they rose to the rafters that evening, “Still Feelin’ Fine,” was written and first performed by Southern Gospel stalwart Mosie Lister in the 1940s.
The above musical assemblage from Westover – which just got its own exhibit at the Morgantown History Museum — made it theirs, with their harmonies and their arrangement.
“History in Harmony: The Gospel Singing Koon Family,” is the name of the exhibit that opened Friday and runs through May at the museum on Kirk Street.
Visit www.themorgantownhistorymuseum.com to learn more about the exhibit and many others there chronicling the life and times of the University City and surrounding region.
The singing siblings, with their mother and father, Lottie and George Koon setting the tunes and the tone, were north-central West Virginia’s Christian music equivalent of the Partridge Family.
George, the patriarch who died in 2018, grew up in the town across the Monongahela River and went to West Virginia University to study music before enlisting in the U.S. Navy.
After his hitch was up – he got hitched.
He and Lottie married and started having a passel of Koon kids, who, as it turned out, could carry a tune like their old man.
George and Lottie found that out in 1966, after everyone went to see the Blue Ridge Quartet, the musical purveyors of the Word and stars of their own syndicated TV show, in an outdoor concert at Marilla Park.
The delayed reaction that would occur … was no less than a divine earworm.
In the backseat of the station wagon a week later, the Koon kids began belting out “Glory, Glory, Glory,” a rouser that had brought the Marilla crowd to its feet.
George had long dropped out of WVU to work and support his family, but he still had his music major’s ears.
And what he was hearing while behind the wheel, he told The Dominion Post, was sonic sophistication – by a progeny that hadn’t done any serious singing before, while certainly never having had a musical or vocal lesson of any kind.
“They were picking out harmonies,” George said, still marveling all those years later. “They were naturals at it.”
You’ve got to hear this family sing, people began saying.
Churches in Morgantown and Monongalia County began asking for the kids to sing at their services – which led to other invites across West Virginia, and then surrounding states across the Northeast, South and Midwest.
Church suppers. Sunday morning guest slots with the choir. Radio and TV appearances.
Eventually, The Gospel Singing Koon Family would open shows for the Blue Ridge Quartet, the group that got them on their own musical road to glory.
George bought an old bus and fixed it up the same time Lottie was teaching herself how to drive a stick and play piano. The family hit the road in 1967. In that Summer of Love, with all the hippies and Jimi Hendrix and “Hey Joe,” they held onto the Holy Ghost.
Homework on the road (and a Whopper, or several, in Ohio)
Looking back, the Koon kids had to laugh warmly at the innocence of it all.
Hey: the most daring thing they did at the time was ordering Whoppers from that Burger King in Cincinnati – hailing from a then pre-fast food West Virginia as they did, said restaurant was a revelation.
Book reports and algebraic equations ensued on that bus. Bedtime was upheld on that bus. And not once did a Koon kid miss school to make a gig.
Still on the journey, still feelin’ fine
On that rainy night back in 2011, they were rehearsing for a special show that coming weekend that would celebrate their 45th anniversary as performers.
Lottie by then had passed on.
So did her and George’s grandson Johnny, who had just started singing with the group when he got the cancer diagnosis and waged a brave battle.
David Koon, among the eldest of the Koon kids, smiled and wrapped his baritone in summation.
“We don’t claim to be a ‘perfect’ family,” he said then.
“But we do have this music. It is uplifting, and it will get you through. Faith isn’t easy.”
Faith may not be easy, as the big brother said, but going back to this particular evening, it sure was fun.
The family dissolved into giggles and guffaws with salvo after salvo of insulting one-liners leveled at each other – as only siblings can do – while inventing on-the-fly choreography that probably never had a prayer.
Happy on the journey, they were. Still.
