Not that "southern gospel" never made an appearance before the 1970s and 1980s. Marquee ensemble singers who once would have driven a group's fame and success today leave ensemble work and go solo to cut costs and stay viable.35Examples 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. She is divorced and has been for some time, but the date of her divorce is not listed. 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. Again: Continuing the Debate between Donald Dayton and George Marsden," in The Continued Relevance of Wesleyan Theology: Essays in Honor of Laurence Wood, ed. Yes she is a gospel singer and her last name is now sanders Is Evangelist Joyce Rogers married? In cultural geography, "sense of place" refers to the feelings and emotions a place evokes and that help constitute it.14Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 169. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_14', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_14').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); More than just feelings or emotions, such sense of place encompasses perceptions, assumptions, and habits of thought and behavior of people who are part of a place. Here the Arkansas imaginary is in operation. "30Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 67, 211. Bill Gaither, Tallahassee, Florida, 2006. 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. For discussions of the Traveler trope see ". Fox's work on rusticity and identity suggests that any crisis of authenticity in popular music from the South will register across a range of cultural texts and products. . Mark Noll has described this process as one focused on the formation of a parallel but separate evangelical culture meant to preserve pietistic thought and action perceived to be under attack and threat of extinction by secularization. Sometimes this includes black gospel, particularly the performers who take inspiration from the mainstream music industry (pop, rock, R&B, and hip-hop). 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." 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. 32 Their success in the late 1980s and early 1990s coincided with the resurgence of cultural separatism that has come to dominate southern gospel discourse. It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). November 13, 2001, accessed September 23, 2013, http://www.crosswalk.com/1108828/. "The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut," interview by Douglas Harrison. (See Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 182183). The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For (2017) is a collection of McCulloughs speeches. The Willow Creek megachurch, under the leadership of Bill Hybels, is the most prominent example of a seeker-sensitive church. Its fans and participants aspire to transcend or dissolve regional expectations, theological boundaries, and denominational classifications. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. After Grant's divorce from Gary Chapman, her symbolic function in southern gospel expanded to include the corrupting effect of musical compromises on personal morality and the heternormative family.Southern gospel's disdain of CCM can come off as a kind of "Sister Bertha Better Than You" self-righteousness.27Here, I am borrowing an image first popularized by Ray Stevens in "Mississippi Squirrel Revival," on He Thinks He's Ray Stevens (Universal, 1987, MCAC-5517). Copyright 2023 TBN - Trinity Broadcasting Network. 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. Martin P. Joyce might be a juvenile justice worker in Youngstown, Ohio. Compact Disc. . October 14, 1928 in San. 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_31', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_31').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); 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.32For more on The Martins's biography, see the following section and note 41. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_32', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_32').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Their success in the late 1980s and early 1990s coincided with the resurgence of cultural separatism that has come to dominate southern gospel discourse.33This element of cultural separatism has reemerged in the past generation within southern gospel. This movement was popular among (though not exclusive to) non-denominational evangelical megachurches. The interplay of praxis and imagination is crucial. Alexandria, Ind. 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. NQC's leadership recently announced that the event will take up residence in a regional conference center at Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.36Sheldon Shafer, "National Quartet Convention Ending Long Run in Louisville," Louisville Courier-Journal.com, September 3, 2013, accessed October 1, 2013, http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20130903/SCENE04/309030069/. In the final decades of the twentieth century, these disagreements opened up a fault line between southern gospel and CCM, with each camp pursuing styles of music that implied divergent theories of musical evangelism. 827-2340 or reach Martin R Mccullough at (253) 720-5263. See full bio . 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. "8Stephen Shearon, Harry Eskew, James C. Downey, and Robert Darden, "Gospel Music," Grove Music Online, July 10, 2012, accessed October 15, 2013,http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2224388. "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. This dynamic was captured in the 2014 Grammys. 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. Today it designates right-leaning North American Protestantism defined in large part by its opposition to cultural, theological, and political liberalism. Today'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. 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. Any Arkansas setting becomes synonymous with the Ozark hillbilly. Claiming a home in southern gospel grounds The Martins in an imagined identity that they in turn hold out for fans seeking models of stability and reassurance in an extended moment of great cultural change and instability for white evangelical fundamentalist religious culture. Richard A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2000). 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. 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. 3,147) where they became a popular regional Christian music act. Joyce Rogers. 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. Fox, Pamela. 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. See Shearon et al., "Gospel Music." But I'll say this: I've never been more honored to sing about Jesus and for Jesus. To see the King. 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? . For an extended discussion of "southern gospel" see, Douglas Harrison. Joyce: So we went into the bathroom. O ' cine d'aventuras ye un chenero cinematografico caracterizau por a presencia d'un heroi (ficticio u real) inspirador d'un mito, a on gosa haber-ie scenas d'aventuras y batallas, asobn de tipo caballeresco y que gosa tamin estar ambientau en epocas pasadas que se presentan de forma exalzadora, en presentando sin . They have won several Dove Awards (Christian music's Grammy) in the southern gospel, inspirational, and Christian country categories, and received a Grammy nomination in the Best Southern, Country, or Bluegrass Gospel Album category. 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. 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. 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. Evangelicals and fundamentalists have never agreed on how best to live out the scriptural directive that Christians be in the world, but not of it. 'Cause I've waited my whole life. However, a 1993 appearance on the Gaither Homecoming series helped transform The Martins from an avocational regional trio into a professional act with a national following in fundamentalist Christian entertainment. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_23', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_23').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Within commercial Christian music, most white fundamentalist fans and professionals left cold by CCMand committed to traditional modes of evangelistic outreachcoalesced around "southern" gospel. Directed by Bill Gaither. He just finished getting a tech degree in musical engineering. Such an assumption would not be wholly unjustified.9The conflation of "southern" and "white" to describe this music circulates widely among scholars and non-specialists, but has only been tentatively stated in scholarship. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Slanted Records and The Martins. For more on the demographic profile of southern gospel see Harrison. Judy Martin is married to Jake Hess, Jr., the son of the legendary southern gospel lead singer Jake Hess. 33 Southern gospel product sales 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. 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. Lord, is this my heart. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, The Martins performed mostly in the southern half of the Mississippi Delta region and recorded self-financed albums. Key figures include Ira Sankey (the evangelist Dwight Moody's song leader), Homer Rodeheaver (Billy Sunday's music director), and George Beverly Shea (Billy Graham's most famous soloist). 1 (2008): 2758. For more on The Martins's biography, see the following section and note 41. 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. 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. Courtesy of Douglas Harrison. From Arkansas With Love. And see Jos Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Updated: June 20, 2015 Biography ID: 102744141 The Martins appear to possess an unadorned, God-given popularity that abides in their embodiment of white tradition and progress. Nominated in the "Gospel/Contemporary Christian Music" category, CCM soloist Natalie Grant attended the ceremony, only to leave before the show ended. "I've many thoughts about the show tonight," she tweeted, "most of which are probably better left inside my head. Start the wiki Similar Artists Charlotte Ritchie 703 listeners Bill & Gloria Gaither 10,674 listeners The Isaacs 11,665 listeners Show more Taylor, Charles. See Robert K. Whalen, "Premillennialism,". 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.