The Eyes of Suzy Moppet

 

It’s been more than seven years since I last wrote about the career of the late Tammy Faye Bakker (born Tamara Faye LaValley in 1942), and when I did I concentrated on her career as a solo singer. But before she set out to be a solo sensation, she and her husband – the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker – began their recording career with the 1969 release Jim and Tammy and their Friends: Songs and Stories

 

The ‘friends’ included glove puppets Allie the Aligator, Muffin the Talking Dog, Mr Clown, Zippy the Talking Mailbox and the shrill-voiced Susie Moppet, who sounds for all the world like Little Marcy with a head cold. This couple had absolutely no shame: Susie Moppet is clearly a Porky Pig doll in a cheap dress and a wig made of yellow wool, but the money-grubbing Bakkers had the audacity to market Susie Moppet dolls as their own creation.

                                                             

At the time they recorded Jim and Tammy and their Friends: Songs and Stories the couple were broadcasting six days a week on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. The show was wildly popular (so they claim) and a Jim and Tammy Friendship Club was set up, giving the huckster couple their first real sense of how easy t was to fleece the gullible. Jim and Tammy (and their friends) became the breakout stars of Robertson’s channel and were soon following the trail of all of that filthy lucre: in 1973 the couple joined with disgraced televangelists Paul and Jan Crouch to help co-found the Trinity Broadcasting Network, before moving to Charlotte, North Carolina to set up their own money-making megalith. During that time Tammy issued her own solo debut, 1970’s Tammy Tammy Tammy, but building an empire had to come first, and she would not revisit her solo career until 1977.

 

In 1975, following the Bakker’s defection from the Trinity Broadcasting Network  to establish their own multi-million dollar generating Praise the Lord Network (PTL) Jim and Tammy and their Friends resurfaced, with their sophomore release, the idiotically-titled Oops! There Comes a Smile, the ‘friends’ first album for six years.

The same year as Oops! There Comes a Smile was issued the ‘difficult’ third album, Building on The Rock, also saw the light of day. Two years later saw the release of the band’s fourth and final album Clap Your Hands, before Tammy put the dolls back into the toy chest and resumed squawking for God without her hand up a puppet pig’s arse.

 

The Bakkers' control of PTL collapsed in 1987 when it was revealed that Jim had been a bit naughty with the company secretary, Jessica Hahn, and reportedly used $287,000 of the church’s funds to buy her silence (that was a waste of money!). Further investigations into the Bakker’s extravagant lifestyle questioned their dodgy, and vastly oversubscribed, Christian hotel time-share scheme and the funds they had poured into their Christian theme park, Heritage USA.

 

With the couple in disgrace and Jim facing a stretch in jail, renowned Christian fraudster, fellow televangelist and friend (not of the puppet kind, you understand) Jerry Falwell offered a lifeline, but under his stewardship PTL soon went bankrupt. In 1989 Bakker was sentenced to 45 years in prison on 24 fraud and conspiracy counts. Falwell and the Bakker’s fell out, primarily it seems because Falwell was only interested in using PTL to boost his own television career, but also no doubt because the equally self-absorbed Falwell had the temerity to call our Jim a liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and ‘the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history’.

 

Jim and Tammy Taye divorced in 1992; a year later she married former PTL bigwig Roe Messner – the man who provided Jim with the cash to pay of Jessica Hahn and who claimed, during the bankruptcy hearing for PTL, to be owed $14 million by the church. Messner filed for bankruptcy himself in 1990 and, just like his former friend Jim, wound up being convicted of fraud. Tammy and Jerry both died in 2007. Sadly Jim is still with us (just: he had a stroke in May but was back at work fronting The Jim Bakker Show with second wife Lori in July), knocking out fake Covid cures and, as news site Christian Today put it, preying on ‘the most vulnerable kinds of people’.

 

Here is the entire Jim and Tammy and their Friends album, Oops! There Comes a Smile. The whole thing is only 25 minutes long, so I’ve simply broken it down to Side One (10 short songs: The Joy Of The Lord, What A Wonderful Day That Will Be, Oops! There Comes A Smile, Happiness Is The Lord, God Is Watching You, Do Lord, I Wonder, Heaven Is A Wonderful Place, Praise The Lord and God's Not Dead) and Side Two (two stories, The Pearl Of Great Price and Noah's Ark).

 

Enjoy!

 

Download Oops 1 HERE 

Download Oops 2 HERE