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 notion of The Martins's music as culturally transcendent—not despite but because of its particularized rusticity—is reinforced in another clip from The Best of The Martins in which the trio sings on the 1998 Hawaiian Homecoming. Timothy's Burden 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. This model "avoided conventional church approaches, using . The interplay of praxis and imagination is crucial. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_9').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_9', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); 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." "43Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 124. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_42').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_42', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Each video or concert is a variation on a format: Bill and Gloria Gaither invite many of the aging stars of southern gospel's mid-twentieth-century golden age to join them and their musical friends, peers, and rising stars from southern gospel and a range of subgenres on the more traditional and conventional sides of North American Christian music—country gospel, bluegrass, inspirational, and choral and hymnody. 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. Standing By "62 Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 5. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_62').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_62', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); The gestalt of Arkansas rusticity associated with The Martins serves to understand their sophisticated harmonies. O Holy Night Richard A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2000). 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. So we sang next day on the video [Precious Memories], "He Leadeth Me" . Be We also offer funeral pre-planning and carry a wide selection of caskets, vaults, urns and burial containers. DVD. See "Music Album Sales in the United States in 2012, by Genre,"Statistica.com, 2012, accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.statista.com/statistics/188910/us-music-album-sales-by-genre-2010/; Natalie Gillespie, "Gospel Music Sees Record-Setting RIAA Numbers," CCM Update, March 29, 1999; and Lindy Warren, "Top 15 Impact-Makers in 1997," CCM Update, December 22, 1997. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_6').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_6', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); 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). 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. They live in Columbus, Georgia, and have five children. Premillenialists espouse a literalist interpretation of scripture that foresees the imminent return of Christ to earth. 1 (1997): 75–82; and Harrison, "Grace To Catch a Falling Soul." 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. 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. Grove Music Online. In A Field Of Blue 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. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_14').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_14', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); 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. Courtesy of Douglas Harrison. "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), 1–5. She was preceded in death by her Husband , James H. Needles Jr., 10 Years ago, and were married in 1951 and shared 58 years of marriage; her Brothers Charles De Cou Joyce and Franklin Joyce, and Sister … What started in Hawaii more than a decade earlier ends in Studio A in Andersonville, Indiana, with Gaither presiding as witness to The Martins's musical authenticity—by sea, in the studio, (notionally) on command, at home among southern gospel's Homecoming Friends or in faraway lands. But this rejection of CCM also bespeaks the stance toward modernity that defines southern gospel culture and fundamentalism. Children of God Make Us One, Don’t Le me Miss The Glory Winter's Bone. Glasgow Daily Times - a place for remembering loved ones; a space for sharing memories, life stories, milestones, to express condolences, and celebrate life of your loved ones 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? ———. Such work is as welcome as it is needed. Nathaniel Crawford (Eugene: Wifp and Stock, 2011), 84. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_22').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_22', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Southern gospel is overwhelmingly a product of evangelical fundamentalism. Her arrival brought so much joy to our family. Absence of biographical detail about The Martins clears space for the Arkansas imaginary to operate. 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. Geography and biography merge in the Arkansas imaginary to redefine and authenticate The Martins's musical personae and southern gospel as a mode of fundamentalist and conservative evangelical experience. And see José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). From the start, the case of The Martins is linked to the state of their birth. to Cart, I Am, You Are (CD Track) - $10.00 - Add "51Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 5. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_51').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_51', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); 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. 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. Could Sing Of Your Love Forever, Great 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 Martins are the family from hell! The journey hasn’t always been easy, but Mae continues to face each day with her beautiful smile. Gaither Homecoming is a popular series built on themed video recordings, live concerts, and a host of related residuals-generating merchandise.42In the 1990s and early 2000s, Gaither Homecoming was popular on the now-defunct TNN cable channel. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_18').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_18', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); I explore the Arkansas imaginary through the state's most famous southern gospel sibling trio, The Martins, their music, and their reception since approximately 1990.191990 coincides roughly with the emergence of what would become the Bill and Gloria Gaither Homecoming Friends video (later concert) series. 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. O Come All Ye Faithful Directed by Tony Grounds. Now I'll Follow Be Still My Soul Rather than denoting a style or sound of vernacular sacred musicmaking, "southern gospel" as a term and a set of at-best partially unexamined social practices and religious beliefs "indicate the music and culture of those people who choose to associate themselves with this tradition. Major, Olive "Alice" Boutler (b. . Jesus, 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. 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. Because God's Good For The Love Of My Heart Nail to Cross Jewelry is designed & handcrafted by JW Martin, our dad. And both black and white gospel have "borrowed those aspects, reinterpreting them for their own cultures" and purposes. Edward was born on June 15 1853, in … If Angels Sleep, Standing Shelter Me, God’s Love Will Never Fail Joyce Martin Sanders (b. January 6, 1968) lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband Paul, and she has two children. Nor is its cultural function exclusively or even primarily of scholarly interest for what it may tell us about southern whiteness in an ever more racially diverse and pluralistic world. Mrs. Sanders was educated at Johnston County Training School, Smithfield, NC. More Like A Whisper (CD) - $5.00 - Add With Lee Evans, Eric Byrne, Lloyd Harvey, Kathy Burke. The Best of the Martins. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); 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. Many fans and most observers interpreted her actions and words as a rebuke of a mass wedding of gay and straight couples performed during the broadcast. Southern gospel has found itself in alliances with black gospel traditions and the black church. Shearon, Stephen, Harry Eskew, James C. Cowney, and Robert Darden. 28 Jan 1926 - d. 14 Jul 2016) [No reference as to where buried]. .52The Martins, interview by J. The Arkansas imaginary explored here is not a totalizing way of understanding the vernacular music of white fundamentalists. 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. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_17').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_17', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Such an approach asks how southern gospel artists (most from beyond the state) use Arkansas's status as an imaginative resource to make sense of themselves and their music in late twentieth and early twenty-first century fundamentalist Protestantism.18I have in mind the period in American conservative and fundamentalist evangelicalism inaugurated by Richard Nixon's conjuring of the "silent majority" of cultural traditionalists who opposed the advance of liberal policies and social practices in the US. 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. The songs are structurally derivative and lyrically conventional, but this music is interesting for what it suggests about The Martins's cultural temperament and expressive style, best described in these early years as one of rustic post-teen southern evangelical angsty spiritual wonderment. The Word is Mercy Every Song Of Praise, You Saved Me (CD) - $5.00 - Add Unlike "northern urban" gospel (a phrase with no currency outside academe), it is the preferred way to self-identify within the culture and the most widely recognized way to describe the music to outsiders. Mercy Seat Is Joyce Martin gospel singer - The Martins a Sanders or a McCollough? I Can't Help Myself Wife of William Taylor. The Divine And both black and white gospel have "borrowed those aspects, reinterpreting them for their own cultures" and purposes. In addition, "many of the characteristics and stereotypes considered [representative of Arkansas as a whole]," Blevins concludes, are "extensions of broader regional and cultural images" applied by others to Arkansans.57Blevins, Arkansas/Arkansaw, 39, 9. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_57').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_57', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Arkansas is not unique in being treated as the home of the benighted white southerner, redneck, or hillbilly, and the Arkansas imaginary is but one sort of white, working class, rurality. featuring Uriel Vega, The Promise I Will Do the Same For more on southern gospel's shift within Christian entertainment from a "dominant" to a "residual" status, see Harrison, "Seeker" sensitive models of congregational development and worship emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as part of the so-called church-growth movement, an organized effort to expand church membership and participation beyond traditional populations. Above It All Lotta Life For a fuller discussion of "southern" as a racial signifier and readings of race and white gospel see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 96–103. 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. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_37').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_37', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); On the surface, these indicators suggest the clear shift in tastes within Christian music entertainment away from southern gospel's preference for close harmony sung in the ensemble. The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations. Except for Grace It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). 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. Amos, Lillian Joyce Hufham (b. Jonathan Martin (b. Still Standing Lead You To the Cross Explore Life Stories, Offer Condolences & Send Flowers. In its current, commercial form, this tradition "is most powerfully defined by common historical, economic, social, and cultural connections among professionals and fans to a constellation of corporate and professional organizations that anchor the creation, consumption, and commemoration of the music," Gaither Homecoming among them. Wife of Jesse Frank Luxton. 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). jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_54').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_54', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); connecting their identities, the group's history, and their Arkansas roots with the force of southern gospel music. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_53').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_53', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); 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. Modern Social Imaginaries. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_55').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_55', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); That legacy of subsistence and pervasive poverty persists. Beautiful To Me Rooted in the professional identity crisis Bill Gaither experienced in the late 1980s and early 1990s as an éminence 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. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_44').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_44', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); This performance is important not just because the group's knack for reimagining southern gospel harmonies in dazzling vocal arabesques led in short order to celebrity. Thou My Vision, Jesus, Martin & Castille - DOWNTOWN, 330 St. Landry Street Lafayette, Louisiana 70506 337-234-2311. The Martins. Toward the end of his life, Andy Griffith recorded multiple southern gospel albums. . God Will Make a Way Joyce’s daughter, Mae was born Amanda Marie on May 9, 2002. Is The Lord, Healer Essential Instrumental Collection "2Ibid., 2. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_2').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_2', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); This tradition is distinctive for its cultivation of close harmony sung in ensembles—traditionally 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. These denominations were most frequently represented in original ethnographic research I have conducted into the contemporary culture of southern gospel. "39Jennifer Lena, Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 2. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_39').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_39', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); My approach attends to southern gospel as a musical style,40Lower compositional sophistication, more uneven production quality, and rougher cuts by commercial standards—all defining features of the southern gospel sound of the past twenty years—can function for many evangelicals and fundamentalists as indices of a more real music and catalysts for a more authentic experience of the religious self. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_48').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_48', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); 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. Joyce: So we went into the bathroom. 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 Gospel Music Association (GMA), Christian music's umbrella professional organization that administers the Dove Awards (Christian Music's Grammys), classifies this type of black Christian music as "traditional gospel," as distinct from "contemporary gospel," which encompasses black gospel in the style of mainstream R&B. I Love to the Tell the Story: 25 Timeless Hymns, won a 1996 Grammy for Best Southern Gospel, Country Gospel, or Bluegrass Gospel Album. A Miracle In Every Pew 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. See David Fillingim, "A Flight From Liminality: 'Home' in Country and Gospel Music,". Get your Still Standing T-Shirts while they last! Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. But it also resonates with less militant but hardly less conservative evangelicals—mostly white—who respond powerfully to its organizing themes: proud piety, traditionalist notions of family, and unapologetic sentimentality about evangelistic faith and religious community. But professional southern gospel has always been strongly grounded its history and identity in the male quartet. to Cart, Stand Up And Be Strong (CD Track) - $10.00 - Add jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_63').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_63', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'bottom center', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); In considering The Martins's arrival "From Arkansas With Love," I have demonstrated how a network of religious, geographic, and cultural associations merge in the construction of imagined place.