Active Website available here – kept and preserved by The Gamble Rogers Memorial Foundation and still sells his six CDs.
Do you have memories of Gamble Rogers? Please email to info@storycrossroads.org.
Share favorite memory/memories:
Gamble Rogers died too young (at age 54 in 1991) in a heroic but unsuccessful effort to save a drowning man. Pete Seeger tells of a time at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough when he could not remember the words to a song and Gamble “saved” him by sitting beside him and feeding him the lines.
What place(s) did you know him:
I saw him perform in Atlanta. He was a Florida native and is honored there posthumously in St. Augustine, where a music festival and a middle school bear his name and at Flagler Beach, where he died, a State Recreation Area is named for him and invites visitors to “honor a great storyteller by making memories of your own.”
What was the Story Artist known for? Life Mantras?
He created a fictional community (Snipes Ford in Oklawaha County, Florida) peopled by an outrageous cast of characters (Agamemnon Jones, Sheriff Hutto Proudfoot, Narcissa Nonesuch, Miss Eulalah Singletary, Still Bill, and a host of others. According to Harold Fethe in “The Oracle of Oklawaha” in Fretboard Journal, Gamble’s unique delivery style consisted of “serpentine alliterative mock-scholarly” sentences delivered in “energetic bursts.” One interviewer, Rolly Brown, observed that Gamble’s style “smacks of the Southern evangelist preacher.”
–details shared by Wynn Montgomery
