Ministry with song: Gospel singer Nancy Rooney will be filling the old Union Baptist Church daily with her musical offerings she says she was "ordained generations ago" to do. (Tribune-Star photo/Jim Avelis)

Most of the year, the old Union Baptist Church sits quietly on the east side of the green at Parke County's Billie Creek Village.

Its simple rectangular structure, white shingled walls, and old-fashioned hard pews fit right in with the quaint turn-of-the-century ambiance for which the restored buildings in Billie Creek Village are noted.

But come Covered Bridge Festival time, the old Baptist Church is anything but quiet. Three times a day during each and every day of the festival its walls shake with the powerful, heartfelt singing of Nancy Rooney.

Passers-by strolling near the village green from all over the world can't help hearing Rooney's resonant soprano voice beckoning from the church's outside sound system.

"What a Friend We Have in Jesus" lilts melodically from one end of Billie Creek Village to the other, a siren song for the curious, the very call of the Lord himself for other visitors who are not able to hide their troubled souls in the festivities of the moment.

Impromptu congregations large and small, from 15 to 150 people per service, make their way into the historic church to see who is the woman with the powerful voice.

They are greeted by a throwback personage wearing an outfit and hairdo that are as memorable as her voice is mesmerizing.

Rooney makes her way around the pulpit belting out her gospel music in a black-plumed hat that she made when she was 13. Her hair is ratted and so difficult to keep in place with hairpins that she leaves her 19th century hairpiece in place for the length of the Covered Bridge Festival; moreover, Rooney conducts her Billie Creek Village church services in a long skirt that gives her more the look of Miss Kitty tending bar in the Longhorn Saloon in old Dodge City than a sweet lady of the Lord.

Why, even Festus T. Hagen, Matthew Dillon and the other rough-and-ready cowpokes from the television series "Gunsmoke" might want to come down to the altar and give their life to Jesus if they could hear Nancy Rooney sing.

"I think it was ordained generations ago that I would be singing in Billie Creek Village's Union Baptist Church," Rooney says. "As a matter of fact, I went there often as a child because it was my grandmother's church."

Rooney traces her roots back to the very beginning of Parke County, at a time so long ago that the covered bridges themselves were a futuristic concept.

Her great-great-great-great grandfather, David Logan Cunningham, was a merchant whose father had come to the Carolinas from Scotland. David Logan hated the slavery culture of the Carolinas so much that he sold off all of his merchandise inventory at a great loss and moved north to Indiana, where he settled in the early 1800s in the northeastern part of Parke County in Portland Mills (which is now buried by Mansfield Lake).

As time passed and the people of Parke County began building covered bridges with the same enthusiasm that beavers make dams, most of the Cunninghams moved west, but Rooney's great-grandfather Francis stayed on in the area.

Even in those bygone pioneer times, the Cunninghams were musical. Her grandfather scrimped enough money up to buy a piano, and her father grew up to become a square-dance caller.

Rooney's mother's family owned the picturesque old grain mill where folks around Portland Mills got together on Saturday nights to kick up their heels at a hoe-down. Her mother and father met at one of the square dances and soon were wed.

"My first memory is singing in church," Rooney recalled. "I was so little that my dad had to hold me up on the railing in the church where I would sing 'Jesus Loves Me.' "

Before long, Rooney's folks were shuttling her around to bereaved neighbors' houses trying to cheer up people who had lost loved ones.

"One of my big childhood hits was 'I've Been Workin' on the Railroad,'" Rooney recalled.

By the time Rooney was a student at Rockville High School, she was winning awards and singing the national anthem at most of Rockville's home games.

After high school, most of Rooney's singing was local, but in the mid-1980s she started traveling around the Midwest with a gospel group called The Charity Trio.

Rooney's renown as a gospel songstress attracted the attention of Billie Creek Village's manager, Doug Weisheit, who asked her if she would be willing to put on three 45-minute gospel music shows a day throughout the length of the festival at the Union Baptist Church. (The church was donated to Billie Creek in the late 1970s and moved to the restored village from Hollandsburg in the eastern part of Parke County.)

"Being the Billie Creek Village gospel singer sounded like a good thing to do," Rooney said. "I grew up in Parke County and though I now live in Terre Haute, I loved the idea of getting back home to do the festival on a regular basis."

Rooney now counts the time she is the Union Baptist's festival singer as the annual highlight of a busy life that includes being the wife of William Rooney Jr., mother of three children, active in various community groups such as the Terre Haute Rotary, being an ambassador for the Greater Terre Haute Chamber of Commerce, selling radio advertising for radio station WLEZ, writing her column Gospel Notes for the Tribune-Star, and whenever possible, going to watch her granddaughter Brittney sing at public events such as the half-time show in Hulman Center when the Harlem Globetrotters were in town.

"I try to have a positive, Christ-centered, mainline message ministry that stays away from doctrine," Rooney said. "I start my services with a sing-along. Then when I start talking, I hope to reach the average person who might have a problem.

"My main theme is that the God you know when you're on the mountaintop is the same as the God you can speak to when you're down in the valley.

"It can be exciting to be on a mountaintop, but often the thin air up there does not nourish life as well as down in the lush green valley.

"When you are walking through God's valleys, you lean more on God and gain character and strength. Sometimes your experiences in the valley can make it possible for you to be the only person able to minister to another person with special problems."

Rooney has a favorite story about the impact of her ministry on visitors to the Covered Bridge Festival. One day a professional-looking couple came up to her after she finished one of her services.

"Both of these people were crying and I was concerned," Rooney recalled. "But they told me that their tears were not of sorrow but of joy because they felt that God had used me to speak to them.

"The husband and the wife had big problems. She had just lost her mother and was fighting a serious illness herself. His business partner had just left him, and he was facing financial disaster. After hearing me sing and speak, the people believed that God would show them the way through their valley.

"It's experiences like that which make my days at the Union Baptist Church in Billie Creek Village worth all the hard work, including wearing my hair up like Miss Kitty for 10 long days and nights."

Services at Billie Creek Village's Union Baptist Church start at noon, 2 and 4 p.m. daily throughout the Covered Bridge Festival.