Still, the cultivation and creation of twentieth-century commercial black gospel's golden age (19451960) was largely rooted in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other urban centers in the Midwest and Northeast where many black southerners moved during the Great Migration. Before then the music was simply known to its practitioners and fans as gospel. A journal about real and imagined spaces and places of the US South and their global connections. Southern Gospel's Decline and the Sister-Bertha-Better-Than-You Effect, The Cultural Consolations of the Hillbilly, Tradition, Progress, and Cultural Instability, Music Album Sales in the United States in 2012, by Genre, The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut, Natalie Grant Responds after Leaving Grammys Early, National Quartet Convention Ending Long Run in Louisville, Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. Audiocassette. 'Cause it's worth every . tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_6', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_6').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); If, as Anthony Heilbut has noted, "gospel" is a vexingly "vague and inadequate" term for a wide and shifting range of sacred music within Anglo-European and African American Protestantism,7Anthony Heilbut, "Black Urban Hymnody," on Brighten the Corner Where You Are: Black and White Urban Hymnody (New World, 1978, NW-224). Dionne Dismuke, Joyce Martin Sanders, Judy Martin Hess, TaRanda Greene - Official Video for 'I Stand Amazed (Live)', available now!Buy the full length DVD/CD. Though the publication of "He Leadeth Me" predates the popularization of the term of "gospel hymns" (which is most commonly sourced to Philip P. Bliss's, While David Fillingim argues that "home" as a concept in southern gospel allows its participants to imagine and explore a flight from material hardship and social marginalization in this world (in favor of an eternal home of magnificence in heaven), my research suggests that in southern gospel "home" serves to give concrete, graspable shape to abstract theological concepts and spiritual experiences for ordinary Christians in the here and now. "Andy Griffith Dies." 5 [September, 1996]: 386405). Certainly there are southern and rural imaginaries writ large and available for scholarly scrutiny. The Willow Creek megachurch, under the leadership of Bill Hybels, is the most prominent example of a seeker-sensitive church. These were "places so divorced from the frenzied modernization of twentieth-century America" that they presented an easily caricatured type from which to generalize about the state as a whole.59Ibid., 516, 67. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_59', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_59').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The conflation of The Martins's southern Arkansas bayou background with upstate Ozark hillbillyism emerges through the rhetoric of Bill Gaither as host and interlocutor. The camera cuts back and forth between The Martins and Gaither, occasionally taking in the four of them in a wide shot. "The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut," interview by Douglas Harrison. The history and role of bluegrass, old-time, and mountain musics, particularly songs with pietistic lyrics that have found a home in southern gospel, is understudied. North American gospel history and the cultural realities of contemporary southern gospel defy further generalization. It is difficult to lend much credence to this account unless Gloria Gaither's opinion and judgment plays a much more determinative role in the Gaither image and Homecoming productions than is generally allowed or assumed. The collective effect forms the social imaginary, a way to understand self- and group-concepts in postmodern life.15Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 3. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_28', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_28').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Professional southern gospel emerged from a Reconstruction-era subculture of poor and working-class white southerners. Directed by Debra Granik. Siblings, Joyce, Jonathan and Judy, collectively known as The Martins, have enjoyed count- less radio hits and performances at concert halls, arenas, auditoriums and churches worldwide. Similarly, Gerald Wolfe, also originally a pianist for the Cathedral Quartet and subsequently the owner and emcee of his own professional trio, Greater Vision, was famously plucked from obscurity (or so the story went onstage in his early years as a performer) while singing with the Dumplin' Valley Boys.49References to Bennett's birthplace in Strawberry, Arkansas, were staples of Cathedrals concerts, several of which I attended, in the 1980s and 1990s. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_38', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_38').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Certainly this is true of southern gospel. So, we're in the little church in Anderson, Indiana, and they are rehearsing for the next day and we're in the foyer. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_36', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_36').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); This retreat from metropolis to outpost acknowledges that southern gospel is no longer a national phenomenon.37 Douglas Harrison, "Slouching Toward Pigeon Forge." Courtesy of Judy Baxter. This pan-stylistic hybridity was apparent in the group's repertoire before their Gaither affiliation. "62 Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 5. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_62', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_62').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The gestalt of Arkansas rusticity associated with The Martins serves to understand their sophisticated harmonies. Toward the end of his life, Andy Griffith recorded multiple southern gospel albums. Bill never comes out into the foyer but Gloria does. See Heilbut, "Black Urban Hymnody." The noticeable absence of non-whites in these films, like the assumptions at work in Blevins's account and Gaither video, suggests to the degree to which whiteness remains largely unelucidated as a structuring category of identity, ideology, and religious belief in southern gospel. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_8', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_8').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); So it is tempting to assume that the emergence of "southern" to describe the music since the 1960s matters only as an unsubtle substitute for the more racially antagonistic "white." Bob Joyce died December 10, 1981, in San Francisco, CA, USA. But professional southern gospel has always been strongly grounded its history and identity in the male quartet. 2014.grammys.criticized.as.political.stunt.to.push.gay.marriage.agenda.natalie.grant.responds.after.early.exit/35586.htm). This transformation left untouched only the Ozarks and Ouachita to the north and west. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_25', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_25').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); conservatives primarily in denominationally unaffiliated megachurchessouthern gospel has come to voice the revanchist critique of non-denominational evangelicalism offered by old-line denominational fundamentalists (namely, Southern Baptists, General Baptists, Free Will Baptists, and Independent Baptists; Nazarenes; Church of God; Church of Christ; Assemblies of God; and the more fundamentalist strains of Methodism).26These denominations were most frequently represented in original ethnographic research I have conducted into the contemporary culture of southern gospel. Several prominent bluegrass and old time families have been mainstays of southern gospel since family acts began to emerge in the 1930s and 1940s: most prominently, The Lewis Family and The Chuck Wagon Gang, and later the Primitive Quartet, The Easters, and The Isaacs. My reading sees race, racism, and a racialized concept of self and other in southern gospel as an important, not always dominant, factor in the emergence of "southern gospel" and the cultural function of the music. For an extended discussion of "southern gospel" see, Douglas Harrison. See Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford, 2013). UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Teaching, learning, and singing gospel to fashion a meaningful identity shares in the reconstitutive ambitions of the New South movement more generally.29For a cogent analysis of how shape-note gospel from the South mediated cultural conflicts and status instabilities of white, southern farmers, see Gavin James Campbell, "'Old Can Be Used Instead of New': Shape Note Singing and the Crisis of Modernity in the South, 18801920," Journal of American Folklore 110, no. Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music. Photograph by Judy Baxter. This movement was popular among (though not exclusive to) non-denominational evangelical megachurches. Even though I do not have a better name for it, I remain deeply ambivalent about "northern urban gospel." Nathaniel Crawford (Eugene: Wifp and Stock, 2011), 84. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_22', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_22').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Southern gospel is overwhelmingly a product of evangelical fundamentalism. Such work is as welcome as it is needed. In 2013, the Doves moved back to Nashville, not to the Grand Ole Opry House but to the auditorium of a small religious college in the suburbs (Dave Paulson, "Dove Awards Fly Back to Nashville," USAToday.com, October 14, 2013, accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2013/10/14/dove-awards-nashville/2984327/). She has two children. The hottest acts in Christian music appropriated the musical conventions and performance styles of rock, pop, adult contemporary, heavy metal, and later, jazz, R&B, rap, hip-hop, and punk. "Gospel Music." Christian vocalists The Martins Joyce Martin Sanders, Jonathan Martin and Judy Martin Hess perform at the Missouri Theater at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 17. [5] Jonathan Martin (b. When Gaither says, "You can take them anywhere," he seems to mean that in his role as producer and impresario he can rely on The Martins to stand and deliver whatever the show demands. The Martins appear to possess an unadorned, God-given popularity that abides in their embodiment of white tradition and progress. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_55', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_55').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); That legacy of subsistence and pervasive poverty persists. Most fundamentalists and many conservative evangelicals believe this return will be presaged by certain historical events, including cataclysmic conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land, the rise of Anti-Christ, and the emergence of a one-world order. As Stephen Shearon has noted, both white and black gospel have "liked aspects of what the other was doing" ever since blacks and whites began singing sacred music near one another in North America. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_9', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_9').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); My own research has been the first to document at length how, throughout much of the twentieth century, the music's unsavory history of explicit racism, affiliation with supremacist ideas and politicians, and its largely unreconciled relationship to this past echo jarringly in any use of the term "southern gospel." Joyce Martin McCollough . "51Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 5. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_51', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_51').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); As The Martins achieved fame and renown, they did so less because of what and how they sang, and more because of the way in which they have presented themselves and their music, and the way the Gaither Homecoming appropriated them as children of traditional gospel values at a moment when the viability of these values was perceived to be in question. Mae is her 18-year-old daughter. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_53', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_53').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); If The Martins's Arkansas origins are not revealed in this story, their roots surface in a 2011 Gaither Homecoming video, The Best of The Martins, a collection of performances over the preceding nineteen years. Not least of all, The Martins's success has relied on the popularity within southern gospel of what I have referred to as backwoods virtuosiup-from-nothing children of the white US South able to create and perform distinctive arrangements of gospel songs and hymns whose lyrics are, as most southern gospel is, suffused with first-person struggles of ordinary Christians, striving after, struggling for, and faithfully pressing on toward greater assurance of belief and affirmative experience of the divine in their lives.48On backwoods virtuosi, see Harrison, "Grace to Catch a Falling Soul." . Judy Martin is married to Jake Hess, Jr., the son of the legendary southern gospel lead singer Jake Hess. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_40', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_40').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); while emphasizing cultural texts and discourses. Home; Labels; News; Engage. See Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 75180. Judy Martin Hess lives in Columbus, Georgia with her husband Jake Hess Jr, and their four children. Martin P. Joyce might be a juvenile justice worker in Youngstown, Ohio. But I'll say this: I've never been more honored to sing about Jesus and for Jesus. Premillenialists espouse a literalist interpretation of scripture that foresees the imminent return of Christ to earth. Joyce is married to Paul Sanders, a singer/songwriting musician, currently a member of the country band, Shenandoah where he plays bass and sings harmony. Fortunately, new and forthcoming work in the study of southern gospel is beginning to scrutinize Gloria Gaither's role as a Christian entrepreneur, thinker, and writer much more closely. Is Joyce Martin gospel singer - The Martins a Sanders or a McCollough? [4] Judy Martin Hess (b. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_11', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_11').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The rise of "southern" gospel emerged in response to a network of cultural tensions, social conflicts, and religious instabilities.12These longstanding conflicts precede the twentieth century. Researched in the 1990s and published in 2002. In this way, CCM musicalized the desires of many conservative Christians to perceive themselves as culturally relevant.23David Stowe, No Sympathy For the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011) notes that the poly-generic style that defined the emergence of CCM in the 1980s was linked with the politicization of Christian music as part of the broader mobilization of evangelicals and social conservatives (246248). Premillenialists espouse a literalist interpretation of scripture that foresees the imminent return of Christ to earth. Dayton, The Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Grand Rapids: Francis Asbury Press, 1987); and Dodrill, "Evangelicalism Examined . Anthony Heilbut, "Black Urban Hymnody," on, Stephen Shearon, Harry Eskew, James C. Downey, and Robert Darden, "Gospel Music,". During the 1990s, The Martins rose to national and international success, showcasing their stunning and distinctive harmonies before a vast array of audiences . With respect to The Martins, the same music on an album titled From Hyde Park With Love, or even From Hilton Head With Love, would likely not be considered southern gospel by most of its intended audiences. At one point in the interview with The Martins, Gaither describes their music as "sophisticated," and Judy Martin Hess jokes that Gaither was not saying The Martins themselves are sophisticated, only their music. "45Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 3. . The Martins grew up in Northeast Louisiana, where their parents encouraged them to make a joyful noise. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_33', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_33').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Southern gospel product sales also experienced what now appears to be a last-gasp micro-surge of popularity, with market shares reaching an inflection point somewhere in the mid1990s, followed by a precipitous sales decline by as much as 90 percent in the decade between 2000 and 2010.34Goff's remains the most extensive and influential account of southern gospel's market decline. See Shearon et al., "Gospel Music," and Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News in Bad Times (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2001 [1979]) and Harrison, "Why Southern Gospel Music Matters," Religion and American Culture 18, no. 33 Southern gospel product sales Business as Mission . tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_48', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_48').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); What continues to distinguish The Martins is their acoustic style full of complex harmonies, modulations, and voicings that reflect influences of country, bluegrass, folk, old-time, choral, black gospel, and vocal jazz styles and arrangements. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_49', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_49').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Even if The Andy Griffith Show had not made small, rural towns with earthy-sounding names synonymous with culturally unsophisticated, plainspoken provincialism,50Toward the end of his life, Andy Griffith recorded multiple southern gospel albums. His book Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2012. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_60', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_60').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); What emerges in The Martins's interview echoes Anthony Harkins's observations about constructed hillbilly rusticity: "Middle-class white Americans [can] see these people [hillbillies] as a fascinating and exotic 'other' akin to Native Americans or Blacks, while at the same time sympathize with them as poorer and less modern versions of themselves. Joyce Martin Sanders lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband Paul, and she has two children. She has Angelman Syndrome and is the happiest girl you will ever meet. As Stephen Shearon has noted, both white and black gospel have "liked aspects of what the other was doing" ever since blacks and whites began singing sacred music near one another in North America. May 3, 1971) lives in Columbus, Georgia with her husband Jake Hess Jr. and their four children. Black gospel draws heavily on southern lifeways, many of its biggest stars have been from the South, and it has always found a good portion of its audience there. "Home" functions primarily in southern gospel as a meaning-making tool for experience in this life, not the next. Biography Mini Bio (1) Joyce Martin-Sanders is known for Gaither's Pond (1997). Taylor's development of the social imaginary builds on (but also departs from) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006). Today it designates right-leaning North American Protestantism defined in large part by its opposition to cultural, theological, and political liberalism. Bill Gaither sighs contentedly, then adopts an avuncular, lightheartedly admonishing tone, commenting that The Martins had only sung the first verse and indicating, as if unplanned, that the trio should "finish it" on the couch at that moment. Media releases promoting The Martins tout this diversity and eclecticism. They live in Nashville and have two children (Martin Sanders was married previously to Harrie McCullough, with whom he had a child). The camera cuts back and forth between The Martins and Gaither, occasionally taking in the four of them in a wide shot. For more on Gaither Homecomings and their role and appeal in southern gospel and beyond, see ibid., 110136. The Martins initially auditioned for Gaither in 1992; the video on which they appeared was not officially released until 1993. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_52', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_52').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The Martins's insistence upon their childlike wondermentthen and nowat the improbability of the audition's circumstances is overlaid with the immediately recognizable nature of The Martins's talent by music industry veterans. Professional black gospel, which has a historically longstanding relationship with African American worship traditions to a much greater extent than commercial white Christian music has with white Protestant churches, has remained creatively vibrant. Religion Dispatches. Finally, I'm grateful to The Martins and so many other southern gospel performers for making music that has held me in thrall and demanded to be taken seriously. When was singer Joyce Bryant born? In addition to these sources, my own use of social imaginary theory is indebted as well to Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). These bonds seem heavily predicated on shared assumptions that performers' professional legitimacy and artistic authenticity arise from a God-given prodigiousness untainted by the artifice of formal education or the contrivance of worldliness, which in southern gospel culture is associated with urban(e) or cosmopolitan ways of life. Kim Hopper, Joyce Martin Sanders, Shane McConnell - Official Video for "Love At Home (Live)", available now!Buy the full length DVD/CD 'Give The World A Smil. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_26', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_26').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); From this traditionalist perspective, CCM's project of reclaiming the devil's music for the Lord amounts to little more than evangelical apologia set to music in "Jesus is my boyfriend" songs: notionally Christian tunes that overlay the stylistic trends and tastes of secular music with lyrics about a love beyond all measure, directed toward a pronominally vague beloved who could be divine, or more sublunary.