Sam Kinison & his Love Song

Samuel Burl Kinison was born in Yakima, Washington, on December 8, 1953, the son of Marie Florence (née Morrow) and Samuel Earl Kinison, a Pentecostal preacher. The family moved to East Peoria, Illinois, when Kinison was three months old. At the age of three years, Kinison was hit by a truck, which left him with brain damage and epilepsy.

His father pastored several churches around the country, receiving little income. Kinison had two older brothers, Richard and Bill, and a younger brother, Kevin. His parents divorced when Kinison was 11, after which his brother Bill went to live with his father, while Kinison stayed with the rest of the family, despite his protests. Bill described this as the root of much of Sam’s anger. Kinison later attended East Peoria Community High School in East Peoria.

Kinison and his brothers emulated their father by becoming Pentecostal preachers. Between 1968 and 1969, Kinison attended Pinecrest Bible Training Center, an interdenominational, unaccredited, three-year Bible school located in Salisbury Center, New York. His mother married another preacher and moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Kinison lived for a while.

He preached from the age of 17 to 24 and recordings of his sermons reveal that he used a “fire and brimstone style”, punctuated with shouts similar to the ones he would later use in his stand-up routines. His brother Bill noted, “ironically, he had no stage presence”, and he was not very successful at making money from preaching, as he was more concerned with making the sermons more informative than entertaining. After Kinison and his first wife divorced, he abandoned preaching and took up comedy.

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