Dead Snake-Handling Preacher Left Behind Awesome Music
The possible jokes all write themselves: Jamie Coots, a Pentecostal preacher known for his flamboyant snake-handling, died late Saturday from – wait for it – a rattlesnake bite for which he refused to seek treatment. Coots served as the de facto public face of the dying art of snake-handling church, a tradition begun in rural Tennessee in the early 1900s and practiced mostly in Appalachia.
As head of a church in Middlesborough, Kentucky, Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name, he turned to media, one might surmise, to keep alive his splinter wing of Christianity. It arose based on taking one line of one bible verse from the King James bible literally, Mark 16:18: “They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.”
But after numerous snake-bite deaths over the past five decades or so, states like Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina have outright banned venomous snake-handling in church, and parishioner numbers have dwindled. And while similar churches have often shunned media, Coots leaves behind a string of interviews, even a star turn last year in the National Geographic series Snake Salvation.
Leaving aside any judgment about Coots’ gambling with deadly reptiles, a trip down a YouTube rabbit-hole of his church services reveals something else—an oddly rocking musical legacy. In fact, in his lifetime, Coots explained in this YouTube video that snakes weren’t even the centerpiece of each service, necessarily.
Instead, it appears that his services swung along like concerts, building to a kind of frenzied musical ecstasy that most indie rockers could only ever hope to achieve. The church band featured Coots’ daughter on keyboards, with her rollicking, bluesy style coming completely self-taught. His wife, Linda, meanwhile, manned both drums and vocals at the same time—take that, Rush!—while Coots and various other guests took turns on sliding, wailing electric guitar.