Los Angeles, CA: Roadside Attractions, 2010. Although southern gospel is undoubtedly white, not all white gospel is southern, and not all gospel of the US South is white.11Following Harry Eskew's lead in the Grove Music entry for Gospel Music, Stephen Shearon uses "northern urban" gospel to designate commercial Christian music of and for primarily white Protestants that emerged in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century revivalism in urban areas outside the South. The values implied by customs and conditions are elemental in stereotypes of "Arkansas" as hillbilly territory. Jonathan Martin (b. "Northern urban" gospel is the historical forerunner of today's Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). Clearly this story of The Martins's beginning as Homecoming Friends is important to them because they are depicted in the narrative as so natively talented that Bill Gaither purportedly allows them to perform without ever having himself auditioned them. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. Judy Martin is married to Jake Hess, Jr., the son of the legendary southern gospel lead singer Jake Hess. Certainly there are southern and rural imaginaries writ large and available for scholarly scrutiny. Another person named Martin P. Joyce was a judge who passed away in October of 2013.. The Martins's success draws upon an Arkansas imaginary that features a racially unconflicted working-class identity as well as a constellation of musical associations, cultural affinities, and attitudes grounded in piety, rusticity, and close harmony. This model "avoided conventional church approaches, using . Today it designates right-leaning North American Protestantism defined in large part by its opposition to cultural, theological, and political liberalism. Lord, is this my heart. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_20', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_20').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); In its early decades, CCM's creative and cultural home was Nashville and many performers and professionals still work there. UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Movies. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_47', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_47').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Yet The Martins remain beloved members of the Homecoming cast and reputational avatars of gospel traditionalism carried on in the music of a new generation of songbirds. More conventional black gospel singers (such as Angie Primm and the late Jessy Dixon, both of whom have appeared on Gaither Homecoming videos) and black gospel choirs are generally held in high regard in southern gospel. She is divorced and has been for some time, but the date of her divorce is not listed. 1 (2008): 2758. Before then the music was simply known to its practitioners and fans as gospel. New York: Knopf, 2012. Directed by Bill Gaither. Joyce Martin Sanders is an American singer who, along with her siblings Jonathan Martin and Judy Martin Hess, is best known as a member of the Christian country trio The Martins. Southern gospel performers often emulate black gospel styleincluding arrangements, vocal techniques, and use of choirs as backing voices. "Fundamentalism" indicates evangelicals for whom militancy in resistance to liberalism is the defining feature of lived religion.22George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 15. "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. "63Emphasis added. From these materials emerge patterns of description, allusive gestures, cultural maneuvers, and possibilities for self-concept through which southern gospel identities are constructed and reimagined. Sometimes this includes, Sales of "Christian/Gospel" (which consists overwhelmingly of CCM and black gospel music, but also includes some southern gospel) reached a high point in 1998, totaling $836 million; in 2012, total sales in the same category were $24.2 million. My focus on professional southern gospel music is distinct from the avocational or amateur tradition, known as convention singing. For more on Gaither Homecomings and their role and appeal in southern gospel and beyond, see ibid., 110136. Their continuing appeal has involved a narrative about their Arkansas identity as proof of authenticity as individual performers and for the genre of southern gospel. 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. In addition to being the vehicle through which The Martins received fame, Homecoming marked an epochal shift in the reception and self-concept of southern gospel. 3,147) where they became a popular regional Christian music act. For more on The Martins's biography, see the following section and note 41. So we sang next day on the video [Precious Memories], "He Leadeth Me" . CCM is a broad category built around religious songs that, to the uninitiated, can sound virtually indistinguishable from a cross-section of mainstream American adult contemporary and Top 40.20Within southern gospel, "CCM" designates nearly all other forms of commercial Christian music deemed insufficiently pious or overly commercialized (marketed in ways different from southern gospel). "Andy Griffith Dies." The precipitous decline in "Christian/Gospel" has devastated most sectors of the market. Kevin Kehrberg generously included me on a panel he organized on shape-note gospel and its half lives in Arkansas and beyond, and Meredith Doster encouraged me to expand the paper into a submission for Southern Spaces. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Beyond the style it captures, this clip points to the structures of thought and feeling that underlie The Martins's appeal and southern gospel music more generally. It is in this tradition of pietistic, blood-bought, soul-saving, life-giving harmony of the one true way to Christ that The Martins were raised and trained. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2224388. But I'll say this: I've never been more honored to sing about Jesus and for Jesus. 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. For "homecoming" as a practice and concept in southern fundamentalism, see Jeff Todd Titon, Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in Appalachian Baptist Church (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988). I recommend this DVD highly. "Southern" gospel has its own difficulties, not least the fact that not all gospel from, of, or appealing to people in the South is a white enterprise. 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. Home; Labels; News; Engage. After that we did a few Gaither dates, then [we] were signed to Spring Hill Records [a recording company in which Gaither Music had substantial holdings at the time]. Recreational tourism is a cornerstone of Arkansas's economy and reputation.56For income distributions by state, see "Per Capita Income by State," Bureau of Business and Economic Research. You can take them anywhere. "I've many thoughts about the show tonight," she tweeted, "most of which are probably better left inside my head. But professional southern gospel has always been strongly grounded its history and identity in the male quartet. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_3', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_3').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The seven-shape notational system (and culture) of songwriting, singing, and music education that took root in the southern uplands in the late 1800s has heavily influenced the music of southern gospel and its values.4Here, following Loyal Jones, "Southern Uplands" designates the regions and people of trans-Appalachia and extends eastward into the Piedmont and westward to the Ozarks. The interviews are actually excerpts taken from long conversations filmed in a homey setting in which The Martins sit side-by-side on a large couch facing the camera and Bill Gaither sits in an overstuffed armchair to the right of the frame. Lower compositional sophistication, more uneven production quality, and rougher cuts by commercial standardsall defining features of the southern gospel sound of the past twenty yearscan function for many evangelicals and fundamentalists as indices of a more real music and catalysts for a more authentic experience of the religious self. Molly Worthen has mapped contemporary evangelicalism's uneasy relationship with post-modernity and religious self concept. 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. The basic details provided here derive largely from The Martins's disclosures on stage, press coverage, conservations I have had with industry professionals, and my experience. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_35', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_35').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The National Quartet Convention, southern gospel's annual flagship event that at its height in the mid-1990s drew crowds approaching 25,000 for four or five nights in a row, no longer attracts audiences or interest to warrant multiyear leases with the Kentucky Fair and Expo Center in Louisville. What is the birth name of Marty Joyce? The siblings all lived most of their formative years in Arkansas, where they learned to sing and with which their comments in public indicate a strong identification. They live in Columbus, Georgia, and have five children. See Goff, Close Harmony, 233236, 269274. It's a new day for Southern Gospel. Interestingly, Willow Creek leaders published a study conducted by the church in 2008 that indicated the seeker-sensitive model did not reliably lead to consistently reported levels of spiritual development or maturity among those who were attracted to the church by its seeker sensitivity (Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson, Reveal: Where Are You? Southern gospel's negotiation of them has often manifested in overt racism or a way of thinking, talking, and singing that renders whiteness falsely normative. Except [we didn't] know where to go, all the rooms were locked, too much going on in the auditorium, so Mark suggests we go into the bathroom. Mae is her 18-year-old daughter. When and where did baseball player Bob Joyce die? Morris Arnold, "The Significance of the Arkansas Colonial Experience,". Yes she is a gospel singer and her last name is now sanders Is Evangelist Joyce Rogers married? 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. She is divorced and has been for some time, but the date of her divorce is not listed. Christ's return coincides with the rapture of living Christians and the raising of the righteous dead to heaven. "30Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 67, 211. At face value, much of The Martins's stylistically hybridized and contemporary music would seem to commit many of the very musical sins that southern gospel culture has long cited as justification for disparaging most other major forms of Christian music entertainment (except, perhaps, bluegrass).47The 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. 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. Judy Martin is married to Jake Hess, Jr., the son of the legendary southern gospel lead singer Jake Hess. The peer reviewers for Southern Spaces provided generous feedback that sharpened my thinking and refined the essay's argument considerably. The conversation encourages audiences to understand The Martins's music as a cultural practice connected to the Arkansas backcountry. Joyce Martin Sanders is listed in the credits for the following albums: Year Artist Album Role ; 2013: Jason Crabb: Love Is Stronger: Guest Vocals : Joyce Martin Sanders. May 19, 1970) lives in Clive, Iowa with his wife Dara Makohoniuk-Martin and their youngest three of six children, including twin boys, one of which has cerebral palsy. It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). Rooted in the professional identity crisis Bill Gaither experienced in the late 1980s and early 1990s as an minence grise in Christian entertainment who was struggling to figure out what to do next, Homecoming "has succeeded and thrived by using religious music entertainment to address a wider crisis of relevance afflicting" southern gospel and contemporary evangelicalism. But I'll say this: I've never been more honored to sing about Jesus and for Jesus. Key figures include. And both black and white gospel have "borrowed those aspects, reinterpreting them for their own cultures" and purposes. The cultural difference between the Ozark/Ouachita and Mississippi Delta regions of Arkansas is aptly captured by/in two recent films. 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/). Today southern gospel is found in areas of the United States and lower Canada with concentrated populations of white fundamentalist evangelicals.5For more on the demographic profile of southern gospel see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 175180. The Arkansas imaginary explored here is not a totalizing way of understanding the vernacular music of white fundamentalists. 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. Researched in the 1990s and published in 2002, Close Harmony traces the music's development from the nineteenth century. These denominations were most frequently represented in original ethnographic research I have conducted into the contemporary culture of southern gospel. Even though I do not have a better name for it, I remain deeply ambivalent about "northern urban gospel." (Jennifer Jones, ", For 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,", Premillennial dispensationalism has been the dominant theological paradigm for fundamentalist evangelicals in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. Take, for instance, Joyce and Judy's 2001 telling of how The Martins scored the chance to sing "He Leadeth Me" on the Homecoming stage. Just as significantly, while From Kentucky With Love, or From the Smoky Mountains With Love, would probably be received with the same warmth and enthusiasm that greeted The Martins's music, the precise structure of a Kentucky imaginary or a Smoky Mountain imaginary would be located in the meaning-making of those places. 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. Judy Martin Hess lives in Columbus, Georgia with her husband Jake Hess Jr, and their four children. Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ole Boys Defined a State. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_54', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_54').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); connecting their identities, the group's history, and their Arkansas roots with the force of southern gospel music. We sang "He Leadeth Me" a cappella for Gloria Gaither, in the ladies bathroom, in Anderson, Ind. Business as Mission . For the past forty years or so, "southern gospel" has named a professional musical style associated with white fundamentalists and evangelicals in the US South.1For an extended discussion of "southern gospel" see, Douglas Harrison, Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music (UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 25, 80109. Through southern gospel, participants "develop the capacity to think and act as modern pluralists or situational relativists when necessary, while retaining their identification with antimodern religious traditions that notionally believe in timeless, unchanging absolutes. See ". His book Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2012. "The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut," interview by Douglas Harrison. Such work is as welcome as it is needed. ", References to Bennett's birthplace in Strawberry, Arkansas, were staples of Cathedrals concerts, several of which I attended, in the 1980s and 1990s. The music remains popular among white evangelicals and many African American Protestants, though its market sharelike that of most sectors of the music industryhas declined considerably.21Sales of "Christian/Gospel" (which consists overwhelmingly of CCM and black gospel music, but also includes some southern gospel) reached a high point in 1998, totaling $836 million; in 2012, total sales in the same category were $24.2 million. Consequently, much of conservative Christian culture challenged secular narratives and norms. The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For (2017) is a collection of McCulloughs speeches. More deeply, southern gospel functioned as a figurative space of cultural retrenchment against the music's loss of reputational capital within white evangelical popular culture.24For more on southern gospel's shift within Christian entertainment from a "dominant" to a "residual" status, see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 103109. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_4', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_4').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); This musical culture subsequently spread across trans-Appalachia, and then later throughout the Midwest, Southwest, and, after the Great Migration of white southerners in the postWorld War II era, into other parts of the United States influenced by southern migration. From Arkansas With Love. Is Joyce Martin. This reputation is curious, because most of the music the group has written, recorded, and performed outside Homecoming merrily mixes and merges stylistic features from adjacent genres and traditions: most notably, CCM, country, southern and urban gospel, choral music, inspirational, light rock, pop, and classic hymnody. Grove Music Online. The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations. She released her . Winter's Bone, set in the rural Ozarks, vividly portrays the psychosocial costs of geographical isolation, lack of economic and educational opportunity, and sense of cultural confinement associated with life in the deep woods of Ozark hill country. See Shearon et al., "Gospel Music." . tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_45', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_45').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); In this light, and flowing from this initial performance of "He Leadeth Me," The Martins established a reputation as the pure-hearted "songbirds" of southern gospel, to borrow a description that Bill Gaither offers on a Homecoming video, The Best of the Martins. Who is martin p joyce? Joyce Martin is a well known gospel singer. 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. : Gaither Music, 2011. But it also resonates with less militant but hardly less conservative evangelicalsmostly whitewho respond powerfully to its organizing themes: proud piety, traditionalist notions of family, and unapologetic sentimentality about evangelistic faith and religious community. In the early 1990s, two sisters and their brother, Judy, Joyce, and Jonathan, then in their late teens and performing as The Martins, began appearing with the Gaither Homecoming Friends. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_1', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_1').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); In its modern, commercial form, southern gospel emerges "from a broad-based, post-Civil War recreational culture built around singing schools and community (or 'convention') singings popular among poor and working-class whites throughout the South and Midwest. Mud, set in the Arkansas Mississippi River Delta, powerfully evokes the fluidity of class, ethnicity, and geography as defining features of identity in a region where the flux of life is so heavily dependent on, shaped by, and intertwined with the flow of the river. Premillenialists espouse a literalist interpretation of scripture that foresees the imminent return of Christ to earth. He just finished getting a tech degree in musical engineering. 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. For more on cultural-geographic conceptualizations of place, see John Agnew, The United States in the World Economy: A Regional Geography (London: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Cresswell, Place. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_58', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_58').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Blevins links the emergence of the Ozark image to the cultivation of cotton, which transformed the lowlands and delta of Arkansas's east, middle, and south into vast mechanized agricultural zones. Harrison, Douglas. See Heilbut, "Black Urban Hymnody." 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. While CCM is less fundamentalist than southern gospel, it participates in the long drift of conservative evangelicalism toward separating itself from the wider world of American life and culture. 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. 436 (1997): 169188. This period was followed by the mobilization of right-leaning Protestants (and many conservative Catholics) into a political base for the Republican Party in the Reagan Era and a power base for evangelical leaders (including Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Pat Robertson'sand later Ralph Reed'sChristian Coalition, and, more recently, Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, and Tony Perkins's Family Research Council); and the not-entirely unrelated realignments within conservative and fundamentalist Protestantism wrought by the rise of non-denominational evangelical mega-churches and the Tea Party. Within southern gospel, perhaps the most polarizing figure thought to embody this accommodationist dynamic is Amy Grant, who began as a CCM ingnue ("Father's Eyes," "El Shaddai" and "Angels") and subsequently landed crossover hits in American pop during the 1980s (her debut outside of CCM came in a duet with Peter Cetera, "The Next Time I Fall In Love"). And I've never been more sure of the path I've chosen."
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