APOSTLE MATT LINDSEY

Matt was raised an agricultural child. His mother earned her side of the family fortune chopping into cubes the little green gummy fillers that were baked into the world famous Claxton Fruit Cakes. In nearby Baxley Georgia, Matt was book learned in a small school house so under equipped it had sawdust floors.
As a virile barefooted teen in suspenders, Matt was exported to Tennessee to learn scripture. To this day Matt knows verse like a fire inspector knows his code book. You see, back in Baxley, Matt had begun experimenting with girls, and his parents felt him bound for the Devil’s Dutch Oven were he not to curb his urges. Yet after his Tennessee realignment, Matt rebelliously came to view his memorization of The Word as a virtual tourniquet of arousal. Anytime a beautiful Southern farm girl in a see through sun dress and a cowboy hat winked at him, his reeducated brain uncontrollably recited the Gospel as pertains to lust. Matt would lose interest like a sprinkler hose loses water pressure when it’s severed by a lawn mower blade .
When Matt returned to Georgia he met Walter as the two crisscrossed the southern part of the state looking for jobs of all sort. The bulk of time was spent doing county work oiling roads, branding chickens and clearing palmetto thickets near Jessup, Racepond and Soperton, Georgia. One could have probably counted a million beads of sweat on these young boys backs during those days of longing to become men.
It happens to most Southern males. If you do enough manual labor, somethin’ about the way the boss mistreats you just gives you a hankerin’ to become a musician. Walter got the idea to find someone to teach him and Matt swamp music so they could hit the honky tonks around Waycross. Problem was, back then, white folk hadn’t yet analyzed swamp music and therefore couldn’t teach it. Furthermore, the black folk, from whom Walter really wanted to learn were not to be associated with per southeast Georgia social protocol.
Time passed and Matt’s spiritual footing began to erode again. It became fashionable for wives to submit photos of the men who’d wronged them to the milk companies. At one time it was believed that Matt’s face was printed on every brand of milk carton in every south Georgia county.
Matt was forced to flee slightly northeast where, by The Lord’s seemingly anonymous blessing he happened upon the College of the Descendants of Deposed Criminals of Mother England in Yemassee, South Carolina, a facility designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The school was offering a two year degree Swamp Music. The day they graduated, they stuffed their dorm room pillow cases with a clean underwear, diplomas, Bibles and photos of favorite Civil War Generals. They strapped on their Guild Starfires and headed up Highway 17 to New York. Their only means of transportation was a John Deere back hoe. On it they triumphantly made it on the Jersey Turnpike and into Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel miraculously avoiding even one single traffic citation the whole journey up from the south. Up north, Matt has turned out to be a rather smart modern thinkin’ fella. One of the new ideas he’s picked up on since moving to New York is to oppose standardized testing.
That said, on occasion, Matt exhibits lapses in practical life skills. For instance he recently proposed to a girlfriend while he was gargling and whilst she was reading the Inquirer on the commode. The girlfriend beat him to a pulp and thereafter scolded him for his disregard for the institution of marriage and for his not having provided her with a more sentimental setting to which the moment could be committed to memory.
Had Matt not crawled his way to the emergency room that night, he would not have met Swamp Cabbage drummer to be Jagoda, who was there in need of immediate care for blood sugar issues.
Take a look at the Swamp Cabbage tour schedule. Matt’s success on the world stage has just about worn him out. He’s since moved “back home” to nearby Moultrie, Georgia where he remains an under spoken man who rarely leaves his pecan farm unless to tour with the band. Each morning, wearing slippers and robe, he pours over the previous day’s news from the local paper. Every afternoon, the bluebird hears Matt call his old blue tick hound “Cooter”. But that’s about all that happens.
What more we know of Matt is mere conjecture as he shares so little these days. However from band travels to the Atlanta area where his folks still have a plantation. All we know is that his folks welcome us on their front porch with sweetened sun tea when we arrive. They wave to us from that same front porch when we leave. It appears that he was well raised and should be, we all pray, at the core, a man at peace.