Church of the
Holy Donut

The archive's first record of the band predates the band by eight years.

Before dawn on a Sunday in the fall of 1986, Gerald Pickett, a deacon at New Covenant Baptist Church in the Ardmore neighborhood of Winston-Salem, picked up roughly two hundred dozen glazed donuts from the Krispy Kreme on Stratford Road for the youth group's fundraiser. He loaded them into his brown 1984 Pontiac Parisienne Safari wagon. His son Danny, eleven, rode in the passenger seat with one box on his lap.

The wagon sat low on its springs the whole way back. The rear windows fogged from the warm boxes. They were back in the fellowship hall before the early service let out. Danny was told not to open the box on his lap. He opened it. His father did not mention it then or at any point afterward.

Danny would later describe this as "the whole testimony."

By the winter of 1994, New Covenant's youth group had no leaders. Four people in their early twenties who had grown up in it agreed to run it "for a year": Leigh Anne Carver, who had sung in the choir since she was eight; Marcus Bell, the church organist; Tracy Odom, who brought her own clipboard to the first meeting; and Wes Tilley, who worked the overnight shift at a Moravian bakery near Old Salem and arrived at most things directly from it. Danny Pickett, now nineteen, agreed to drive the van.

The Sunday donut sale was still the group's biggest fundraiser. The pickup run still left at five. The kids still slept through it, and then slept at the sale tables until the eleven o'clock service started. Marcus brought a keyboard down to the fellowship hall to keep them awake. Wes brought a guitar. Danny found the church's old donated drum kit under a tarp behind the stage, a silver-sparkle set with a cracked ride cymbal.

A ninth-grader named Kyle, asked by his mother where he was going at 4:45 on a Sunday morning, told her he was going to the Church of the Holy Donut. Pastor Vernon Whitley allowed the name on the condition that it never appear on the sign out front. It never did.

The first show took place on Sunday, March 13, 1994, at 9:30 a.m. in the New Covenant fellowship hall, as the early service let out and the spring sale opened. Approximately forty people stopped to listen, most of them still in their church clothes and holding their bulletins. The band played nine songs. The donuts sold out before the eleven o'clock service ended, for the first time in the sale's history.

The routine never changed. The pickup run left at five. Wes came straight from the overnight shift. The band played as the early service let out and again when Sunday School let out, and in between everyone worked the tables. They stayed until the donuts ran out or the clock reached noon, whichever came first.

That is where the rule came from: never after noon. The eleven o'clock service ran until a quarter past twelve on a good Sunday, and while it was still going the fellowship hall had to be turned into a dining room. The donut tables came down, the long tables went up, and the covered dishes came in from the kitchen. Pastor Whitley's second condition was that the band be unplugged and out of the way by noon. They kept the rule for seven years.

Other churches in Forsyth County began asking the band to play their own fundraiser sales, which were usually held on Saturdays: a Methodist congregation in Ardmore, a Moravian fellowship in Clemmons, an AME Zion church downtown, and one Catholic parish hall. The fee was coffee. The host youth group kept the donut money.

In 1995 the band released Six A.M., a cassette recorded live in the empty fellowship hall and sold from the tailgate of the Safari after church.

In March 1997, a youth-group family on Peace Haven Road lost their house to a fire.

This one could not wait for Sunday. The band booked the New Covenant parking lot for a sunrise benefit on Saturday, April 19, 1997, at 6:30 a.m., the only show they ever played at home on a Saturday. They expected two hundred people and ordered sixty dozen donuts. By 6:15 the lot was full and cars were parked down both sides of the street. Approximately six hundred people attended.

The donuts ran out before the second song. Gerald Pickett took the wagon and came back with two hundred dozen while the band kept playing. Nobody made a speech. There was a box and a coffee can by the fellowship hall door, and a line out to the road.

The family had a new house by Thanksgiving. Of everything in the archive's file on this band, it is the morning people still bring up. That September the band released Not Now, recorded in Greensboro. Its single, "Pull In," was the closest thing they had to a hit.

Nothing ended the band. Life arrived the way it does.

Leigh Anne Carver and Wes Tilley were married in the New Covenant sanctuary on a Saturday in June 1999. The band played the reception at ten in the morning. Tracy Odom finished nursing school and took nights in the emergency department at Baptist Hospital. Marcus Bell was offered a position as minister of music at a church in Charlotte. In 2000 they released Two Hundred Dozen, their final album.

The last show took place on Sunday, May 20, 2001, at 9:30 a.m., in the fellowship hall where the first one had been, as the early service let out. From the stage they introduced the new youth leaders and handed them the sign-up clipboard. The donuts were gone before noon.

That fall, Danny Pickett, twenty-six and still the van driver, borrowed his father's Safari for one more Sunday run with the new youth group. A boy in the back seat held a box on his lap. He was told not to open it.