11/6/2023 0 Comments Rhythm doctor sleeve paint![]() Rain or shine or whatever else the weather was, I did the work. If the weather was real bad, the contract I had then let me come in the house, clean up, paint the inside of the house. They didn't want me to go nowhere else to work. I used to paint on glass before I did wood. Painted on the back part of the glass of the television set you look at. I painted over pictures that I found too. When I got hurt, I had more time to paint, and wood was a whole lot easier to get hold of. The first picture I did on wood was a red bird. People brought me books to copy out of so I started doing that. Man from the state told me not to paint from the books, said it was wrong. I painted pictures from that plate, and this man Robert Bishop bought the first one. Said "I'll buy it but you gotta give it a name." I said, "I don't know no name." He say, "You got to think of one." I said, "All right, call it Mose T" He bought every picture I had. This material is derived from conversations with William Arnett in 19. ![]() Publicationsīorn Mose or Moses Ernest Tolliver on July 4, 1921, or '22, to tenant farmers Ike and Laney Tolliver in the Pike Road community southeast of Montgomery, Tolliver was one of twelve children. He remembers that his parents’ house was “just a shack, but my mama had pictures all over the walls.” He attended school until he was eight or nine, then moved to nearby Macedonia, where he worked for the owner of a dry-cleaning business in Montgomery who also operated a small truck farm in Macedonia. Too financially strapped to continue farming, the Tollivers, like so many others, left the farm for the city and moved in the 1930s to Montgomery, to a house on Sternfield Alley (later obliterated by the construction of Interstate 85). Tolliver supported himself and his mother by tending other people’s gardens he did general maintenance, house painting, light carpentry, and plumbing as well. In the early 1940s, he married a longtime friend, Willie Mae Thomas of Ramer, Alabama. Soon after his wedding he entered the army, and prompted his own discharge, he says, to return home to Montgomery. He fathered thirteen children, eleven of whom survive. To support this family, Tolliver did mostly unskilled maintenance work he admits that taking care of his progeny has always been difficult.
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