Brian Kennedy - vocals, guitar
Andrew Hunt - mandolin
Jonathan Hunt - upright bass
From the album Mighty Deeds, recorded Nov. 2021/Jan. 2022 at the Double Stop Fiddle Shop in Guthrie, Oklahoma
“No single aspect of Southern California has attracted more attention than its fabled addiction to cults and cultists. ‘I am told,’ said Mrs. Charles Steward Daggett in 1895, ‘that the millennium has already begun in Pasadena, and that even now there are more sanctified cranks to the acre than in any other town in America.’ Writing in 1921, John Steven McGroarty said that ‘Los Angeles is the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, philosophies — no day passes without the birth of something of this nature never heard of before. It is a breeding place and a rendezvous of freak religions. But this is because its winters are mild, thus luring the pale people of thought to its sunny gates, within which man can give himself over to meditation without being compelled to interrupt himself in that interesting occupation to put on his overcoat or keep the fire going.’ ‘Los Angeles is full of people with queer quirks,’ observed Julia M. Sloane in 1925, ‘and they aren’t confined to gardeners. I haven’t had a hairdresser who wasn’t occult or psychic or something.’ ‘Every religion, freakish or orthodox, that the world ever knew is flourishing today in Los Angeles,’ wrote Hoffman Birney in 1930. ‘This lovely place, cuckoo land,’ wrote the editors of Life, ‘is corrupted with an odd community giddiness… nowhere else do eccentrics flourish in such close abundance. Nowhere do spiritual or economic panaceas grow so lushly. Nowhere is undisciplined gullibility so widespread.’ ‘Here,’ wrote Bruce Bliven in 1935, ‘is the world’s prize collection of cranks, semi-cranks, placid creatures whose bovine expression shows that each of them is studying, without much hope of success, to be a high-grade moron, angry or ecstatic exponents of food fads, sun-bathing, ancient Greek costumes, diaphragm breathing and the imminent second coming of Christ.’ Uniformly, these aberrant tendencies have been attributed to the climate. But are there other, and less hackneyed explanations?
“The first eccentric of Southern California was a Scotsman by the name of William Money, who arrived in Los Angeles around 1841. Married to a Mexican woman, Money was a quack doctor, an economic theorist, and the founder of the first cult in the region. Known to local residents as ‘Professor Money,’ ‘Doctor Money,’ and ‘Bishop Money,’ he had been born, so he contended, with four teeth and ‘the likeness of a rainbow in the eye.’ It is significant that Money should have been the first person to write and publish a book in the region, The Reform of the New Testament Church. Later, in 1858, he issued a dissertation in Spanish entitled, A Treatise on the Mysteries of the Physical System and the Methods of Treating Diseases by Proper Remedies. Of the 5,000 patients he had treated, only four, he said, had died. The cult that he founded was called ‘The Reformed New Testament Church of the Faith of Jesus Christ’ and was pretty largely made up of ‘native Californians.’ He once prepared a map of the world entitled ‘William Money’s Discovery of the Ocean.’ On this map San Francisco, a community that he detested, was shown poised on a portion of the earth that he predicted would soon collapse, precipitating the city into the fiery regions. Living in a weird oval structure in San Gabriel, the approaches to which were guarded by two octagonal edifices built of wood and adobe, Money was the leading Los Angeles eccentric from 1841 until his death in 1880. He died with ‘an image of the Holy Virgin above his head, an articulated skeleton at his feet, and a well-worn copy of some Greek classic within reach of his hand.’”
- Carey McWilliams, from Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946)
California Lies