Dottie Rambo

Singers, songwriters fondly recall queen of gospel music By Jennifer Hewlett

She wrote songs with verses that would make Shakespeare smile, and when she was on a stage, she owned it, her friends said Monday.

They were talking about Dottie Rambo, perhaps the most prolific songwriter of her time and the greatest songwriter to come out of Kentucky.

The death of Rambo, who was killed Sunday when her tour bus crashed in Missouri, has affected people throughout the world, especially those in the gospel music industry.

Rambo, 74, was known as the queen of gospel music. Not only was she widely known for her own recordings, but some of the more than 2,500 songs she wrote were recorded by artists such as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Whitney Houston, Vince Gill and Dolly Parton. It has been said that there’s hardly a modern hymnal that doesn’t have at least one Dottie Rambo song in it.

“It was hard to sing gospel music and not record a Dottie Rambo song,” said gospel singer Kenny Bishop, adding that his family’s first album included Rambo’s song Too Much To Gain To Lose.

“Everybody knew Dottie’s music,” he said. “I’ve been around Dottie when there were bigger celebrities in the room and she didn’t have to make her way to them — they made their way to her.”

Christian songwriter and comedian Aaron Wilburn said that Rambo broke barriers.

“She took gospel into country; she took it into pop ... I know in the Christian field she’s the greatest female writer, probably of all time,” Wilburn said.

“To me, she was the Dolly Parton of gospel music,” country music singer Wynonna Judd said in a statement. “She was effervescent and lit up a room when she entered it. Dottie had it — that charisma and ability to fill a space with her smile. ... Her gift will live on in the hearts of many.”

“She gave us many new songs, which had a major impact on our career at the time,” recalled Oak Ridge Boys lead singer Duane Allen.

Rambo, who was born Joyce Reba Lutrell in Madisonville, learned to play guitar while listening to the Grand Ole Opry on WSM radio in Nashville. She performed with The Gospel Echoes and later The Singing Rambos, then The Rambos, with her former husband, Buck Rambo, and their daughter Reba Rambo- McGuire. Early in her career, Dottie Rambo wrote songs under contract with a publishing company owned by Jimmie Davis, a former governor of Louisiana who was also a popular country and gospel recording artist.

Rambo had a “haunting” singing voice,” Bishop said. “She loved to speak when she sang, and that was one of her trademarks ... I think sometimes she just felt like what she had to say was more important than how she was saying it ... It had a very penetrating effect.”

Rambo’s 1968 album It’s The Soul Of Me won a Grammy Award. She was an inductee of the Gospel Music Hall of Fame and the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame. In 2000, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers honored her with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The Christian Country Music Association gave her the Songwriter of the Century Award in 1994.

She won a Gospel Music Association Dove Award for I Go To The Rock, which Whitney Houston sang in the movie The Preacher’s Wife.

“I have a hard time receiving awards or rewards,” she said in 2006, just before she was inducted into the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame. “But I can tell you this thing will be the one that drives me to tears because it’s my home state.”

Actress and comedian Lily Tomlin, a close friend, was especially distraught by Rambo’s death.

“You can imagine how shocking it is to lose her this way. She was just such a bright presence in our lives,” Tomlin said.

She said that Rambo visited with her mother when she was dying and sang at her mother’s funeral.

“She couldn’t have been more loving with my mother. She’d pray with my mother and look after her. They had a very similar spiritual sensibility.”

Tomlin said a lot of people don’t have any idea just how much of an impact Rambo had in the music industry.

Gospel performer Jeff Easter recalled Rambo talking about her mother asking her to sing one of her songs in church.

“She wrote a song called Mama’s Teaching Angels How To Sing. Her mama was still living ... Her mama would say, ‘I want you to sing that song about me teaching angels how to sing,’ ” he said with a laugh.