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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. [5] Jonathan Martin (b. So, we're in the little church in Anderson, Indiana, and they are rehearsing for the next day and we're in the foyer. Premillenialists espouse a literalist interpretation of scripture that foresees the imminent return of Christ to earth. Religion Dispatches. 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. There is an associationalas opposed to primarily musicallogic to this appeal that tracks with broader "patterns of cultural experience and affiliation." This essay is interested primarily with professional southern gospel, which descends from convention singing but has been distinct from it since the 1930s and 1940s. Explored through the Martins, how do non-musical categories of knowledge, patterns of affiliation, and cultural valuessuch as sense of placehelp clarify, sustain, or revalue religious music traditions, identities, subject positions, and the ideological commitments those traditions encompass? Following the rapture is Tribulation, a seven-year period during which Anti-Christ reigns on earth, Millennium (during which time Satan is bound), and ultimately the establishment and eternal reign of Christ's kingdom. He was very busy and was getting ready for the next day's video. Today it designates right-leaning North American Protestantism defined in large part by its opposition to cultural, theological, and political liberalism. She is divorced and has been for some time, but the date of her divorce is not listed. Is Joyce Martin. Bill never comes out into the foyer but Gloria does. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_46', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_46').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The paradox of The Martins's Homecoming reputation as masters of classic gospel hymnody and their much wider stylistic reach and renown before and beyond the Homecoming stage suggests that there is more to their appeal to southern gospel audiences than can be accounted for by their music. "Home" functions primarily in southern gospel as a meaning-making tool for experience in this life, not the next. The Martins grew up in Northeast Louisiana, where their parents encouraged them to make a joyful noise. 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." The southern gospel condemnation of CCM has long and deep roots.28Although CCM borrows heavily from mainstream secular music and performance styles, it does so to cultivate a canon of popular music that signifies Christianity's cultural relevance and the music's evangelistic savvy, while claiming a special status derived from CCM's pious commitments to conservative evangelical values and theological positions. Recording companies experienced similar contractions. For an extended discussion of the psychodynamics of southern gospel, see ibid., 149. "Gospel Music." The conflation of "southern" and "white" to describe this music circulates widely among scholars and non-specialists, but has only been tentatively stated in scholarship. Modern Social Imaginaries. Since at least the late 1970s, southern gospel's fortunes, measured by market standards, have trended downward, a decline attributed to broader trends within commercial Christian music entertainment and more broadly within fundamentalist and evangelical Protestantism.As the fortunes of southern gospel have declined, those of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) have risen. 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. Los Angeles, CA: Roadside Attractions, 2010. The Martins Biography by John Bush A brother-sisters trio of a cappella gospel harmonizers, the Martins consist of Joyce Martin McCollough, Jonathan Martin and Judy Martin Hess. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_34', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_34').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); For the past fifteen years or so, professional southern gospel groups, including The Martins, regularly dissolved and re-formed, or disbanded outright under the constant pecuniary strain of small crowds and even smaller free-will love offerings, and the upheavals these instabilities introduce into private life. Premillenialists espouse a literalist interpretation of scripture that foresees the imminent return of Christ to earth. 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. See Shearon, email to H-Southern Music Network mailing list, March 27, 2009. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_12', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_12').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Of course, race is never far from any discussion of southern cultures, but it is also true that, in southern gospel, "overmuch emphasis on black-white polarities diminishes our understanding of cultural dynamics submerged beneath the surface of the music. 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. 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. Pamela Fox has noted that "while academia has for the most part abandoned the authentic as any kind of meaningful analytic category," the vernacular music of southern, white, rustic life and experience has "tended to preserve it. 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. They live in Nashville and have two children (Martin Sanders was married previously to Harrie McCullough, with whom he had a child). Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music. And both black and white gospel have "borrowed those aspects, reinterpreting them for their own cultures" and purposes. Examples of changes and shifts within professional southern gospel since 1990 include the disbanding of numerous groups as well as the retirements and deaths of many of the mid-twentieth century singers who anchored the genre's golden era. Music publishers of seven-shape notational gospel music and the convention singing tradition to which these publishers catered were familiar with the term for much of the twentieth century. "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. Joyce Martin-Sanders is known for Gaither's Pond (1997). July 30, 2013. http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/culture/6221/the_gospel_ church_and_the_ruining_of_gay_lives__an_interview_with_anthony_heilbut/. By leveraging anxieties about cultural authenticity and relevance roiling conservative evangelical and fundamentalist culture, Homecoming creates "a musical screen onto which people from a wide range of Christian cultural traditions within the American middle class can project their own religious concerns and spiritual aspirations. More at IMDbPro Contact Info: View agent, publicist, legal on IMDbPro. 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. Joyce Martin is a well known gospel singer. 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. 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. 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. In its resurgence, one hears from the gospel stage and in other acts of self-representation an intensification of emphasis on social resentment and cultural grievance. The videos still air regularly on many local-access religious television channels, but sales today are largely driven through merchandizing at concerts, the Gaither Homecoming Magazine, syndicated radio shows on terrestrial and satellite radio, and not least of all through the Gaither online store. In this context, gospel music functions as a style of vernacular religious entertainment and a form of evangelical cultural experience transcending denominations or confessional traditions. Who is martin p joyce? Trey is 20 and lives and works in Nashville only a few miles from his mom. "2Ibid., 2. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_2', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_2').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); This tradition is distinctive for its cultivation of close harmony sung in ensemblestraditionally male quartets, a formation that dominated the commercial sector of southern gospel through roughly the first half of the twentieth century, and more recently, mixed-gender foursomes and trios, often comprising family members.3Today's professional southern gospel includes many family and mixed gender foursomes and trios, configurations that were and are common in the singing convention world that dominated southern gospel in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.