Crooked Road CD Series [Back]

Nat Reese:
Save a Seat For Me

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In 1939, at the urging of Reverend McClure of Itman, Nat joined his brother Thomas, and John and Walter Mozelle to form the Harmonizing Four Gospel Quartet.  This group toured throughout the region traveling to Nashville, Knoxville, North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Nat recalls that the group assiduously avoided South Carolina because of the intense racism there at the time: “Gospel (singing) was a form of therapy (against) a sick body of men. You had to have somethin’ to believe in. What you can’t change, you try to outlive it.” The quartet would typically appear on the radio in a town early in the morning, and then visit several churches in the afternoon and evening.  Nat remembers these churches as being so full “there was people cryin’ shoutin’ praisin’ God . . . peepin’ in the windows!”  And wistfully adds, “Those were some times.”  Poor congregations would put food in the collection in lieu of money, and the quartet would often trade donated food for gasoline.  The Harmonizing Four were contemporaries and friends of such notable groups as the Golden Gate Quartet, and the original Fairfield Four.  Nat also met a minister’s daughter, Bessie Smith, and the two were married by a white preacher, Reverend Jones – not the Reverend Jones that appears in “I Ain’t Gonna Throw It Away” Nat assures us! Nat and Bessie were blessed with three boys and a girl, and adopted a child in 48 years of marriage before Bessie passed away in 1996.

Nat always showed promise in visual arts as well, and he enrolled in commercial art classes at Bluefield State College.  It was then that Nat began to play his blues in more secular venues, sometimes playing behind chicken wire.  At one such engagement, Nat noticed two men in front of the stage arguing over a woman.  Nat heard a loud bang and looked down to see a hole in the front of his guitar.  He pushed the guitar forward to inspect the instrument and found a splintered hole as big as a golf ball on the backside, and blood on his shirt.  Nat checked himself to discover he had only been grazed, but quickly left the establishment telling the manager, “John more, Bill more, Jack more . . . but I ain’t playing here no more!”  In 1939, Nat first met and performed with multi-instrumentalist Howard Armstrong, who was traveling through and playing the coal camp circuit from his home in Tennessee. The duo was to perform together with increasing regularity over the next sixty-five years until Armstrong’s death in 2003.

The Harmonizing Four disbanded for World War II when Nat served in the Army and regrouped following the war.  In 1948, Nat went north to take advantage of the post-war boom and worked for Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna, New York for four years, before settling in Mt. Clemens, Michigan where he drove an excavator for a construction company and exercised his natural artistic talent as a sign painter.  During these years, Nat’s new gospel quartet – the Heavenly Gospel Singers -- participated annually at the Gospel Contest held in Detroit and frequently won 2nd or 3rd place.  The Reese home was a popular gathering spot for gospel singers from all over the country, and Nat met and befriended the legendary gospel composer Thomas A. Dorsey of Chicago.

In 1961, Nat and his family returned to Princeton, West Virginia. Nat went to work in local industry and repaired radios and television sets as a sideline. He also began to perform regularly as a duo with Howard Armstrong and the pair toured Europe in 1959, 1961, 1962, 1963, and again in 1980 performing in Switzerland, Belgium, France, and behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany. Since his retirement, Nat remains musically active, performing at festivals and as a guest instructor at universities throughout the US, and is a gifted painter.

John Maeder
Mendota, Virginia

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