William Marrion Branham was born on 6 April 1909 in a log cabin in Burkesville, Kentucky. He worked as a Public Service of Indiana lineman and Jeffersonville game warden while pastoring a small Baptist congregation, before publicly beginning an itinerant healing ministry after what he described as an angelic visitation on 7 May 1946.
His June 1946 St Louis meetings drew the first crowds; by 1947 he was filling civic auditoriums in Vandalia, Illinois and Pensacola, Florida. His discernment gift — calling out the names, addresses and illnesses of strangers in the audience — became the pattern for the traveling salvation-healing revival of 1947–1958.
The Voice of Healing magazine, edited by Gordon Lindsay, effectively canonised Branham as the movement's initiator and gathered around him the second-generation evangelists — Oral Roberts, T.L. Osborn, A.A. Allen, Jack Coe, Kathryn Kuhlman — who would carry the same platform into the 1960s.
Branham's later years grew doctrinally erratic; his "Message" teachings on the Seven Church Ages and Serpent's Seed alienated most mainstream Pentecostals. He died on 24 December 1965 from injuries sustained in a Texas car crash six days earlier. His preserved tape sermons remain the sacred text of a distinct global "Message" movement estimated at several million adherents.