Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Homer Rodeheaver’s biography, titled “Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry” by Kevin Mungons and Douglas Yeo, begins with “Just before the start of World War I, Homer Rodeheaver reached the pinnacle of his national fame ... Rodeheaver played the trombone and led mass singing for the revivalist Billy Sunday, a gig that vaulted both men to national prominence.”
Homer Rodeheaver, the gregarious, loquacious bachelor with an outsized personality, rose to fame as the 20-year teammate of Billy Sunday, America’s enormously popular evangelist during the first years of the twentieth century.
Born in Cinco Hollow in Hocking County, Ohio, Oct. 4, 1880, Rodeheaver spent much of his childhood around the family’s lumber mill in Jellico, in eastern Tennessee.
Rodeheaver early showed a talent for music, learning to play drums and cornet. In his college days at Ohio Wesleyan College, he switched his interests to slide trombone. In 1898, he left college to serve in Cuba in the Fourth Tennessee Band during the Spanish–American War.
Around 1904, Rodeheaver joined traveling evangelist William Biederwolf as music director. Melton Wright, in his book "Giant for God" said, "One hot summer afternoon at Winfield, Kansas, in 1909, Mr. Sunday wandered into the event where Homer was leading the song service. As he sat there and watched this short, radiant young man ‘turn the sweating, soggy meeting into a pandemonium of song,’ he realized that here was the man for whom he had been seeking."
It took about a year of negotiations, but Rodeheaver joined Sunday as his musical teammate in 1910, thus beginning one of the most powerful and effective evangelist/songleader teams in American religious history.
Rodeheaver Purchases Rainbow Point
Rodeheaver purchased a small two-story Gothic Revival cottage in Winona Lake, built around 1900, which was situated at the south end of McDonald Island, close to the south mouth of the canal. Rodeheaver named the dwelling “Rainbow Point” and he rebuilt the building to look like a ship between 1939 and 1941. A distinctive “steamboat look” was achieved by flattening and surrounding the roof with iron railing. A 23-foot recreational slide enabled swimmers to soar from the roof to the lake below.
Though they worked together as a team for more than 20 years, Sunday and Rodeheaver had contrasting personalities. Sunday was introverted and reclusive, and surrounded his Winona home with tall shrubbery so he could retain his privacy.
Rodeheaver, by contrast, was often described as a “sanctified playboy.” An extreme extrovert, he drove a flashy convertible, freely offered boat rides and waterskiing to any and all, and frequently hosted parties of up to 200 persons on his porch and lawn. Famous personalities visited him at this home, including J. Edgar Hoover, Will Rogers, Billy Graham, Cecil B. DeMille, John D. Rockefeller, William Jennings Bryan and many popular gospel hymn writers. Rodeheaver was a lifelong bachelor but his half-sister Ruth and her husband, Jim Thomas, came to live with him at Rainbow Point and Ruth became the hostess for Homer’s gatherings.
Rodeheaver participated in many sports, but horseback riding was his favorite. He was instrumental in the formation of the Tennessee Walking Horse Association at Shelbyville, Tenn., of which Winna Lake resident Stanley Arnolt was at one time president. He also loved to fish, hunt, and play tennis and golf.
It is difficult to capsulize Rodeheaver’s long and illustrious career, but he began as songleader and choir director for the Sunday crusades. His primary skill was getting groups to sing, and he billed himself as the “world’s greatest songleader.” In addition to his religious meetings, he also was known to lead singing at political events. He wrote a campaign song for Teddy Roosevelt, led Christmas carols with President Herbert Hoover’s wife, Lou, and in 1940 led community singing for a Wendell Wilkie rally in Elwood, where an estimated 250,000 sang patriotic songs.
A Genius at Acquiring Copyrights
Rodeheaver never wrote many songs — perhaps 30 in his lifetime — but he was a genius at acquiring rights to poetry and lyrics from authors, then hiring composers to set the words to music. His hymn and gospel songwriters included B.D. and A. H. Ackley, Charles Gabriel, George Schuyler, and many others. In all, his copyright holdings were estimated to top 6,000 hymns and gospel songs. Any hymnal produced in the 1900s would likely include several hundred Rodeheaver copyrights.
Rodeheaver consolidated his publishing interests in the Rodeheaver Hall-Mack Publishing Company, which he headquartered in the Westminster Hotel in Winona Lake. He purchased the hotel in 1941. Today the Winona History Center occupies the former offices of the publishing company which became, by most estimations, the largest gospel music publishing company in the world under Rodeheaver’s leadership.
But his career involved so much more. He was a lover of Negro spirituals, and worked to introduce spirituals to much larger audiences. He was a pioneer in recordings, installing a recording studio in the second floor of the Westminster Hotel. He is credited with having a formative influence on licensing agencies such as ASCAP and BMI.
Later in life, he traveled widely, and filmed trips up the Amazon River and in the Holy Land, famously appearing floating on his back in the Dead Sea while playing his trombone.
At one point he had purchased nearly 30,000 acres of land in Florida, and there he established Rainbow Boys Ranch, which exists today to serve underprivileged or orphaned boys. His motto was “It’s better to build boys than to mend men.”
Having worked with Sunday for 20 years, Rodeheaver separated from the Sunday team and gave more attention later in his life to his publishing, recording and filmmaking interests.
Rodeheaver also conducted an annual Rodeheaver School of Sacred Music in Winona Lake each summer. Outstanding performers and teachers conducted classes and rehearsals and the school gave well-attended performances in the Billy Sunday Tabernacle at the conclusion of each school session.
Rodeheaver suffered several heart attacks in the early 1950s and he died at his home on Rainbow Point on Dec. 18, 1955, at age 75. Ruth and James Thomas continued to operate the publishing business until it was sold to Word Music of Waco, Texas, in July 1969. Ownership of the company’s intellectual properties continued to be bought and sold by organizations including ABC and Thomas Nelson Publishers, until copyrights expired and the gospel music tastes moved on to other musical genres.
Among Rodeheaver’s greatest publishing successes were “The Old Rugged Cross,” “I Come to the Garden Alone” and “Beyond the Sunset,” which is memorialized with a large granite monument at Oakwood Cemetery in Warsaw, close to where Homer and other Rodeheaver family are buried.
