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Guitar Evangelist Cora Fluker. Marion, MS 1996
Cora Fluker lives at the end of a dirt cul-de-sac in Marion, MS surrounded by her children and their families. She built herself a small church with scrap building materials next door to her home where on Sundays, she still sometimes preaches using her guitar to play repeating riffs beneath emotional, spontaneously-created songs that preach the word of God. She is equally adept at the traditional vocal technique she calls "moaning" which mixes heartfelt testifying with a hummed and moaned melody. This type of singing was common in African-American churches in the South until modern hymns began replacing it starting in the 1940's. Fluker said she also sang blues when she was a girl, until her mother told her to quit singing the devil's music and get saved. So she went into the woods and prayed on her knees until the Lord saved her, and she's been singing for him ever since.