Weird Religious Tract Number 7: "Hooked For Good: The True Story of Sammy Hall" by Life Messengers

Love that Groovy 70s font!

Troy Davis writes:

Life Messengers was a Seattle-based Christian publisher, founded in 1944, that churned out books as well as Chick-style comic book tracts until they faded away sometime in the late '70s or early '80s. They published over 66 million of the tracts, nowhere near the billion or so Chick tracts sold, but it's an impressive number. Life Messengers tracts, for the most part, were never as interesting or inflammatory as Chick tracts but some are good reads and have a '70s funky vibe (e.g., the "Hooked For Good" cover font). We will review more of the LM tracts in the future.

Others have reprinted the tracts after Life Messengers went out of business. When I visited The Institute for Creation Research in the '90s, they sold LM's creationist comic "Have You Been Brainwashed?" the story of Duane Gish (read the tract here). About ten years ago, Canadian street preacher Erik Fountas of A New Thing Ministries revived the tracts for a while (with updated covers--see the image at the end of this post).

Sammy's breakdown

"Hooked for Good," a 1973 tract, deals with Sammy Hall (1945-2013) a rock musician who, with The Birdwatchers, had the minor hit in "I'm Gonna Love You Anyway"  in 1966 (great raw garage rock beat kind of reminds me of The Sonics). The tract shows that Hall had some degree of success as a rock musician (and a rock star's decadent lifestyle full of drugs and groupies).  However, he had a psychotic breakdown and found Jeebus and founded the Gospel group The Sammy Hall Singers.

Notes:  The legacy of Duane Gish, the subject of the LM tract "Have You Been Brainwashed," is dim; his contributions to science are slim but he is a cultural icon; the term Gish Gallop, referring to his shady debate technique of drowning his "opponents in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument."

The Museum of Weird and Demented Religious Tracts is a project of Les Zazous Postmodern Art Galley of Bellaire, Ohio. Read the Welcome Statement of The Museum here.

For more on the gallery, check out the web site here and the gallery's Twitter handle is @ZazousLes.  The Twitter handle for the museum is @WeirdTracts

The index of tracts for the museum's website is here. 

Contributions of weird tracts to the museum can be made by mail: send your weird tracts to Les Zazous Postmodern Art Gallery 3475 Guernsey Street, Bellaire, Ohio 43906.