The Gaither Homecoming video series was initiated to honor gospel music’s living legends. Though she was unable to be at that first video shoot, no one more exemplified that designation than Dottie Rambo.
Many of those gospel legends since have gone on to meet the one they sang about. Early last Sunday morning, Dottie joined them when her bus, headed through Missouri to a Mother’s Day concert with Lulu Roman and Naomi Sego at a church in North Richland Hills, Texas, encountered severe weather and was blown off the road. The bus, carrying seven people, struck a guard rail and went off an embankment; Rambo, 74, was pronounced dead at the scene.
“She was one of a kind,” Bill Gaither said of her in a statement released by his Alexandria office. “She was an original, a dear friend. This is a big loss.”
Indeed, while Bill and Gloria Gaither have penned hundreds of gospel songs themselves, Dottie, born Joyce Reba Lutrell, is reputed to have written as many as 2,500 songs since she spontaneously started singing her first original song at age 8 in the hills of Kentucky. Her songs have been sung by such well-known artists as Elvis Presley, Barbara Mandrell, Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash, Whitney Houston, Vince Gill, Dottie West, Pat Boone, Sandi Patty and the Oak Ridge Boys.
She married Buck Rambo at 16, and daughter Reba was born two years later. The three of them became known as the Singing Rambos, gaining wide exposure with the support of the Happy Goodman Family and then-Louisiana Gov. Jimmie Davis.
Her throaty-voiced singing and many of her songs carried the country flavor of her Kentucky background. But her songs’ exposure far transcended a single category of music. In fact, after her record company wouldn’t let her release “I Go to the Rock” because they originally felt it was too “rock and roll,” Whitney Houston recorded it for the movie “The Preacher’s Wife.” It won Dove Awards for Houston and Rambo.
Among the better known songs Rambo wrote were “Build My Mansion Next Door to Jesus,” “Come Spring,” “He Ain’t Never Done Me Nothing But Good, “He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Need,” “Holy Spirit Thou Art Welcome,” “I Call Him Lord,” “I Will Glory in the Cross,” “If That Isn’t Love,” “I’ve Never Been This Homesick Before, “Mama’s Teaching Angels How to Sing,” “Mary Was the First One to Carry the Gospel,” “On the Sunny Banks of Sweet Deliverance,” “One More Valley,” “Remind Me, Dear Lord,” “Sheltered in the Arms of God, “Tears Will Never Stain the Streets of That City,” “The Holy Hills of Heaven Call Me,” “Too Much to Gain to Lose,” “We Shall Behold Him” and “We’ve Weathered Storms Before.”
Dottie’s awards are almost too numerous to mention, including the Christian Country Music Association’s Songwriter of the Century and Living Legend awards, the Gospel Music Hall of Fame, four Dove Awards and a Grammy. She recorded 19 solo albums, some with other artists, and 47 albums with the Singing Rambos.
She also came through some very difficult times. In 1987 she suffered a ruptured disk in her back that led to paralysis in her left leg, leading to a series of surgeries over a period of years. It is no stretch to surmise this had an effect on her marriage, which dissolved in 1994, and a short time later Buck married her secretary. Soon after that her office manager disappeared along with much of her ministry’s finances. But as her health improved, she gradually made a comeback.
Homecoming videos on which she performed include “The Rambos — Jubilee Years,” “Reunion,” “Moments to Remember,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “Build a Bridge” and “Dottie Rambo with Homecoming Friends.”
In an account on the Singing News Web site, the pastor of the last church at which she performed in Granite City, Ill., reported Dottie had made many references to “going home.” The concert opened with “I’m Gonna Leave Here Shoutin’” and ended with “We Shall Behold Him.”
Now she has beheld him. And I imagine she is in the process of, as her song says, building her mansion next door to Jesus.
Jim Bailey’s column appears on Sunday. He can be reached by e-mail at jameshenrybailey@earthlink.net.
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JIM BAILEY: Dottie Rambo was a gospel legend
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