"The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut," interview by Douglas Harrison. 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. 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. Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 5. 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. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 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. Indeed, specific aspects of a performer's biography usually only come into play for southern gospel when an instance of individual characteristics, crisis, or great fortune serve to point audiences toward notionally transcendent truths of fundamentalist theology. 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. 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. 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. A notable elision in this storyand it points to more general (mis)understandings about the Gaithers's personaeis the role of Gloria Gaither. "Gospel," as Heilbut has noted, is "the favored term for what working-class black congregations [do,] often to the exclusion to white traditions." But professional southern gospel has always been strongly grounded its history and identity in the male quartet. 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. Sometimes this includes black gospel, particularly the performers who take inspiration from the mainstream music industry (pop, rock, R&B, and hip-hop). The MartinsJoyce Martin McCullough, Judy Martin Hess, and Jonathan Martingrew up in Hamburg, Ark., (pop. At the end of the nineteenth century and into the first three decades of the twentieth century, southern white gospel was dominated by convention singings that relied on the regular release of small octavo shape-note songbooks such as Crowning Day. It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). Grammy.com, July 3, 2013, accessed October 1, 2013, http://www.grammy.com/blogs/andy-griffith-dies. The interplay of praxis and imagination is crucial. Mike Joyce was born February 12, 1941, in Detroit, MI, USA. (See Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 182183). The values implied by customs and conditions are elemental in stereotypes of "Arkansas" as hillbilly territory. Morris Arnold, "The Significance of the Arkansas Colonial Experience,". Recording companies experienced similar contractions. Photograph by Judy Baxter. This pan-stylistic hybridity was apparent in the group's repertoire before their Gaither affiliation. . With the dissolution of the "Christian-cultural synthesis," fundamentalists, Noll concludes, "made a virtue of their alienation. Sign up for updates about Better Together on TBN. 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]. 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. And I've never been more sure of the path I've chosen." "Northern urban" gospel is the historical forerunner of today's Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). Stowe, David. Joyce Rogers. 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/). Richard A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2000). UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Southern gospel has found itself in alliances with black gospel traditions and the black church. Heilbut, Anthony. "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. Bob Joyce died December 10, 1981, in San Francisco, CA, USA. 3,147) where they became a popular regional Christian music act. She keeps it real and points the way out of despair with an admonishing heart. Modern Social Imaginaries. October 14, 1928 in San. "Gospel," as Heilbut has noted, is "the favored term for what working-class black congregations [do,] often to the exclusion to white traditions." 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. The Martins singand their fans enjoya fairly broad range of musical styles and an innovative pastiche of old and new that is often indistinguishable from some of the very CCM sounds southern gospel has long denounced as immoral and worldly. 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. The trio performed an a capella arrangement of the 1862 gospel hymn, "He Leadeth Me," a standby in the culture of Homecoming's fan base.44"Gospel hymns" refer to a repertoire of American sacred songs that "first appeared in religious revivals during the 1850s, but which flourished with the urban revivalism that arose in the English-speaking world in the last third of the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth century." Goff, Close Harmony, 264282, traces these and other important bluegrass groups in southern history. 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? In commercial Christian music, this transformation foregrounded oft-blurred distinctions between "evangelicals" and "fundamentalists." Created by: siremidor on 28-March-2013 - Last Edited by admin on 07-January-2016. Here the Arkansas imaginary is in operation. 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). For more on links between country and gospel, see Douglas Harrison, "Grace to Catch a Falling Soul: Country, Gospel, and Evangelical Populism in the Music of Dottie Rambo," in Walking the Line: Country Music Lyricists and the American Culture, edited by Roxanne Harde and Thomas Alan Holmes (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 7796. See Harrison. This dynamic was captured in the 2014 Grammys. This essay is interested in how the imagining of a place shapes and is shaped by understandings of vernacular sacred music and the shifting identities this music contains. . EIN: 95-2844062. These two tropesinnocence and prodigious talentinteracting with the publically retold stories of their backcountry upbringing, suggest an authenticity that speaks across generations, professional accomplishment, and even the cynicizing forces of the entertainment business.53A notable elision in this storyand it points to more general (mis)understandings about the Gaithers's personaeis the role of Gloria Gaither. Joyce Martin was married to Alton G. Martin on October 1, 1983 in Rockwall County, Texas. Yet it is a mistake to treat southern gospel as wholly synonymous with white gospel. Who is martin p joyce? 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. See Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 75180. Roger Bennett played piano for the Cathedral Quartet for nearly twenty years, and throughout his career, he was introduced as a child prodigy at the keyboard from Strawberry, Arkansas. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Is Joyce Martin. Navigate. CCM emerged as the musical avatar of those conservative evangelicals who believed it was a mistake for Christians to concede entire swaths of popular culture to secular tastes and values in the name of resisting worldliness and impiety. Religion Dispatches. Examining the rise of the gospel singing trio The Martins and the deployment of their rural Arkansas roots to shape their popularity in Christian music entertainment, this essay reveals how an evocation of place functions in the practice of religious life within commercial southern (white) gospel music and fundamentalist Protestantism. 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. "38Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 7. Gaither Gospel Series DVD cover. 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. Evoking Arkansas as a state encompassed by the southern gospel tradition signals my interest in exploring ways that large-scale changes in conceptions of religion, geographical identity, and social status play out and are revoiced in subcultural and local registers. Mae is her 18-year-old daughter. 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. Michael actually took us there and Mark and Mike tried to figure out a way for Bill [Gaither] to hear us sing. Spring Hill, 2005, CMD 1807. Joyce: We went to Indianapolis [in 1992] with Michael English and Mark Lowry [of the Gaither Vocal Band and the Gaithers' inner circle]. 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." A journal about real and imagined spaces and places of the US South and their global connections. Decade. Joyce Martin Sanders lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband Paul, and she has two children. Toward the end of his life, Andy Griffith recorded multiple southern gospel albums. My sources include celebrity interviews of performers, DVD bonus features, album covers, and online press coverage. Jonathan Martin lives in West Des Moines, Iowa with his wife, and their six children, including twin boys, one of which has cerebral palsy. 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. 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). So, we're in the little church in Anderson, Indiana, and they are rehearsing for the next day and we're in the foyer. See David Fillingim, "A Flight From Liminality: 'Home' in Country and Gospel Music," Studies in Popular Culture 20, no. 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. In this case, we can buy coal protein shakes for weight loss from Russia in keto diet Joyce Martin Sanders: "My Childhood Christmas Miracle" Joyce Martin Sanders: "My Childhood Christmas Miracle"https://www.youtube.com watchhttps://www.youtube.com watch We sang "He Leadeth Me" a cappella for Gloria Gaither, in the ladies bathroom, in Anderson, Ind. The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations. Bill Clinton's presidential campaign used the Traveler name and image as a way to strengthen his populist appeal running against a Washington insider. 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. 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. She has two children. See Heilbut, "Black Urban Hymnody." Any Arkansas setting becomes synonymous with the Ozark hillbilly. 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. Copyright 2023 TBN - Trinity Broadcasting Network. 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. 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.