Charles Arnold Clark interview on Funerals.

Charles Arnold Clark is being interviewed by Daniel Clark on Funerals. 

...Generally, most anymore, the funerals are held in the funeral home. We’ve had one person in the church and that was Brother Charlie Conley and we’ve hand nobody since we built and the new sanctuary...I take that back, we had Brother Proffitt’s daddy-in-law’s funeral. Danny, they were mountains, they were from the mountains in Southwest VA. and the thing about them was, they had funerals like even down there now, when they go to have a wake down there, they have it all night long. Like everybody goes to church and they stay all night long, and they sit here and they do everything, they sing, they preach and they do everything. Well, they had moved back here and they wanted something similar, but they didn’t want exactly that. So, we go over there, and they had a big house trailer and we go over there to have the funeral, to have the wake or so they call it. When we got over there the trailer was so small where they brought the body, they had to take the door off to get the body in, so we told them it would be best if they’d moved it outside if they wanted to have it out there because there wasn’t hardly no way we could have it in there. Some of them had agreed to it so we thought they had all had, and we go out on the front porch where they was going to have the service and some of us begin to sing, and we look and some of them went back into the house, so we stopped and they decided they wanted to have it in the house. So me, Linda and Larry were singing. We go in and they made us stand up next to the casket and sing next to the casket and if you look down and there he laid and here we stood in about 91 by 101 ft. room. So you can imagine, there was casket, flowers, and people with musical instruments playing, and I mean you were standing right on top of the body and it was hot in there and I mean it was an experience. So we went ahead and had it and this one girl, she repented and got saved and it was very very unusual wake and then they wanted Charles to preach and so he preached for them, it that’s what they wanted, you do what the family wants, so he preached for them and they were just everywhere, the people was. So we turned around and the next day they were to have the funeral, so they were supposed to be at the church at 1:00 down there, and they were bringing the body from Dublin. When we got down therem the family was already down there with the body, so we opened the church and let them in and they had come, and the first thing I know they had got a video camera and they begin to make all the daughters come up and stand beside their dad, that was who had died, their daddy. They made all the daughters stand beside their dad and put their hands on his face and stuff and then they made all the sons cone and then the mother got up and they wanted the singers that sang in the funeral and they wanted the preachers. I mean, hey, it was one more funeral! Then they had to turn around and take him back to Dublin, VA, and it poured down rain. But it was a very unusual funeral.

Before funeral homes, bodies, they was just wash and cleaned up. There was no embalmment to it. A lot of times, they would just put some kinds of ointment on them, they use to anoint the body with anointing oils, I mean, they’d call it anointing the body, it was just perfumed oils and that’s all they done. I can’t remember any funerals like that, I’m not that old....