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. He just finished getting a tech degree in musical engineering. 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. 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. April 13, 2013, accessed October 15, 2013, http://bber.unm.edu/. These denominations were most frequently represented in original ethnographic research I have conducted into the contemporary culture of southern gospel. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. For an analysis of the cultural and religious tensions between southern gospel traditionalists, who founded the GMA, and the CCM fans and performers whose tastes have dominated the GMA for nearly forty years, see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 9196. A fan's review of The Best of The Martins video on Amazon.com captures this dynamic succinctly: "I wouldn't consider the Martins southern gospel," the reviewer writes, "as their sound is more contemporary but they have a love of the Lord and that comes across strong in their work and their lives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Such work is as welcome as it is needed. Sometimes this includes black gospel, particularly the performers who take inspiration from the mainstream music industry (pop, rock, R&B, and hip-hop). 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. 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. There is also the sense that The Martins's appeal reaches across the spectrum of religious beliefs and musical tastes that form the conservative end of the white Christian music entertainment market. 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? Rather, I aim to map a specific hot spot within the psychosocial terrain of contemporary professional southern gospel as an instance of a broader phenomenon that could be explored in US southern and rural imaginaries. Compact Disc. 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. Representative scholarly studies include Nancy Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Politics and Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011); Mark Hulsether, Religion, Culture and Politics in the Twentieth Century United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). This transformation left untouched only the Ozarks and Ouachita to the north and west. Heilbut, Anthony. Averyfineline.com, September 24, 2012, accessed October 1, 2013, http://averyfineline.com/2012/09/24/slouching-toward-pigeon-forge/. "Southern gospel" remains the preferred term in the study of white gospel music of the South. For branding of the natural state, see Arkansas.com, Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism, accessed October 15, 2013, http://www.arkansas.com. When she came out, Mark grabbed her arm and said, "You have to hear these kids sing!" Help; Joyce Martin-Sanders View source History 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. 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. 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. Another person named Martin P. Joyce was a judge who passed away in October of 2013.. 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. Updated: June 20, 2015 Biography ID: 102744141 Instead, CCM performers and fans came together around a common commitment to reclaim the devil's music for God. "30Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 67, 211. 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. 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. Man, Crosswalk.com. In commercial Christian music, this transformation foregrounded oft-blurred distinctions between "evangelicals" and "fundamentalists." . 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 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. During the 1990s, The Martins rose to national and international success, showcasing their stunning and distinctive harmonies before a vast array of audiences . You can take them anywhere. Navigate. And see Jos Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). : Gaither Music, 2011. Joyce Martin-Sanders photos, including production stills, premiere photos and other event photos, publicity photos, behind-the-scenes, and more. Joyce is married to Paul Sanders, a singer/songwriting musician, currently a member of the country band, Shenandoah where he plays bass and sings harmony. Joyce Martin is married to Paul Michael Sanders, who has had periodic jobs as a southern 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. 33 Southern gospel product sales 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. Blevins, Brooks. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_15', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_15').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Arkansas has undergone considerable stereotyping in the US imagination.16Brooks Blevins, Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ole Boys Defined a State (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2009), 4. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_16', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_16').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); To speak of an "Arkansas imaginary" in this essay is to conceptualize Arkansas as a siteparticularly among poor and working-class white evangelicals and fundamentalistsfor the practice of religious life, or "lived religion. This dynamic was captured in the 2014 Grammys. Key figures include. With the dissolution of the "Christian-cultural synthesis," fundamentalists, Noll concludes, "made a virtue of their alienation. The most prominent, From Arkansas With Love, is full of original material, almost all written by Joyce Martin. 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. "The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut," interview by Douglas Harrison. Goff's remains the most extensive and influential account of southern gospel's market decline. 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." The Martins grew up in Northeast Louisiana, where their parents encouraged them to make a joyful noise. 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. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_50', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_50').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); southern gospel audiences have historically bonded with performers who come to fame through place-based narratives of discovery. "13Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 103. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_13', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_13').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Consequently, in what follows, "southern gospel" stands as shorthand for professional, commercialized white gospel from, or culturally aligned with, the evangelical fundamentalist South. Who is martin p joyce? New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. 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. Sign up for updates about Better Together on TBN. The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For (2017) is a collection of McCulloughs speeches. Researched in the 1990s and published in 2002, Close Harmony traces the music's development from the nineteenth century. 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"). 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). 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). Menu. This movement was popular among (though not exclusive to) non-denominational evangelical megachurches. See full bio . The core of this essay began as a conference paper for the 2013 conference of the Society for American Music. 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. 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. Gaither's remark associates a universality to The Martins, who are legitimated by the origins their music is purported to transcend. 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. My use of "evangelical" follows George Marsden's, denoting Protestant thought and action shaped by Reformed theology. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_42', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_42').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); 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 musiccountry gospel, bluegrass, inspirational, and choral and hymnody. . 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. My sources include celebrity interviews of performers, DVD bonus features, album covers, and online press coverage. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_6', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_6').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); 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). 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. Southern gospel denotes "an overlapping, commercialized national network of musical products, professionals, and their fans, commonly referred to as 'the industry'" (Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 45). It's a new day for Southern Gospel. 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. The cultural difference between the Ozark/Ouachita and Mississippi Delta regions of Arkansas is aptly captured by/in two recent films. So, we're in the little church in Anderson, Indiana, and they are rehearsing for the next day and we're in the foyer. July 30, 2013. http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/culture/6221/the_gospel_ church_and_the_ruining_of_gay_lives__an_interview_with_anthony_heilbut/. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_19', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_19').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The emergence of The Martins as a national touring group relied strategically on their Arkansas roots. Goff, Close Harmony, 264282, traces these and other important bluegrass groups in southern history. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_37', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_37').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); 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. Michael actually took us there and Mark and Mike tried to figure out a way for Bill [Gaither] to hear us sing. Trey is 20 and lives and works in Nashville only a few miles from his mom. 'Cause it's worth every . 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. 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. The interplay of praxis and imagination is crucial. This movement was popular among (though not exclusive to) non-denominational evangelical megachurches. Finally, I'm grateful to The Martins and so many other southern gospel performers for making music that has held me in thrall and demanded to be taken seriously. Sunday services to reach the unchurched through polished music, multimedia, and sermons referencing popular culture and other familiar themes. "17On "lived religion," see David D. Hall, Lived Religion: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 321. . The notion of The Martins's music as culturally transcendentnot despite but because of its particularized rusticityis reinforced in another clip from The Best of The Martins in which the trio sings on the 1998 Hawaiian Homecoming. Arkansas ranks forty-fifth in median income in the United States and, by official self-description since the 1970s, is culturally "the natural state." "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. Joyce Martin is a well known gospel singer. October 14, 1928 in San. + Add or change photo on IMDbPro . Winter's Bone. For more on The Martins's biography, see the following section and note 41. Taylor, Charles. I Love to the Tell the Story: 25 Timeless Hymns, won a 1996 Grammy for Best Southern Gospel, Country Gospel, or Bluegrass Gospel Album. "I've many thoughts about the show tonight," she tweeted, "most of which are probably better left inside my head. Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ole Boys Defined a State. Jonathan Martin and his wife, Dara, live in Des Moines with their six children (Craig Harris, "Martins Storm Back onto the Scene," sgnscoops.com, December 17, 2013 [accessed January 31, 2014)]. 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. 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. Decade. 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. "63Emphasis added. See Shearon et al., "Gospel Music," and Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News in Bad Times (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2001 [1979]) and Harrison, "Why Southern Gospel Music Matters," Religion and American Culture 18, no. The Martins's performance of pious authenticity plays out in public in ways that take common celebrity narratives (the underdog or, as in the story below, the innocent) and recodes them within the logic of the Arkansas imaginary. At one point in the interview with The Martins, Gaither describes their music as "sophisticated," and Judy Martin Hess jokes that Gaither was not saying The Martins themselves are sophisticated, only their music. Again: Continuing the Debate between Donald Dayton and George Marsden," in The Continued Relevance of Wesleyan Theology: Essays in Honor of Laurence Wood, ed. These congregations structured worship, congregational culture, and church outreach to target "those who had never established a relationship with Christ and the Church, and those trying to reconnect" (Lester Ruth, "Lex Agendi, Lex Orandi: Toward an Understanding of Seeker Services as a New Kind of Liturgy," Worship 70, no. 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. Southern gospel's cultural sustainability turns out to be an urgent matter of concern, even if southern gospel people themselves do not tend to speak about it that way. All Rights Reserved. See Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 13. And both black and white gospel have "borrowed those aspects, reinterpreting them for their own cultures" and purposes. Martin Jarvis; Randy Edelman; David Jason; Michael Hordern; Oliver Williams; Community. 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. A journal about real and imagined spaces and places of the US South and their global connections. 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. 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. For more on the demographic profile of southern gospel see Harrison. 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. 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. 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. GMA has drastically shifted its outreach and marketing emphasis toward black gospel artists and groups, going so far in 2011 as to move the Dove Awards from Nashville's Grand Ole Opry to Atlanta, the unofficial capital of black gospel music. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_33', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_33').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Southern gospel product sales also experienced what now appears to be a last-gasp micro-surge of popularity, with market shares reaching an inflection point somewhere in the mid1990s, followed by a precipitous sales decline by as much as 90 percent in the decade between 2000 and 2010.34Goff's remains the most extensive and influential account of southern gospel's market decline. When and where did baseball player Bob Joyce die? 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. The overwhelming majority of fans and professionals in contemporary southern gospel are white Christians who are "culturally southern, socially conservative, and Anglo-American. Everyone sits on risers around a piano and sings: old songs, new songs, gospel songs, hymns, inspirational ballads, spiritual anthems, praise and worship choruses, even a few secular tunes now and then (Bill Withers's "Lean on Me," or an arrangement of Barry Manilow's "One Voice").
Henry Hager Laurel Hollow Ny,
Articles J
