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. She keeps it real and points the way out of despair with an admonishing heart. See Shearon, email to H-Southern Music Network mailing list, March 27, 2009. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_11', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_11').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The rise of "southern" gospel emerged in response to a network of cultural tensions, social conflicts, and religious instabilities.12These longstanding conflicts precede the twentieth century. For an overview of southern gospel's history and development within the wider domain of American gospel music, see Shearon et al., "Gospel Music," and Don Cusic, The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel Music (Madison: Popular Press, 1990). 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). 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. The interplay of praxis and imagination is crucial. To see the King. And both black and white gospel have "borrowed those aspects, reinterpreting them for their own cultures" and purposes. 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. 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. 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. Instead, CCM performers and fans came together around a common commitment to reclaim the devil's music for God. Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music. . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2224388. Molly Worthen has mapped contemporary evangelicalism's uneasy relationship with post-modernity and religious self concept. For a recording of the set piece associated with Gerald Wolfe's time with the Dumplin' Valley Boys, see. 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. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_40', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_40').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); while emphasizing cultural texts and discourses. But professional southern gospel has always been strongly grounded its history and identity in the male quartet. The Martins's music signals that what makes this trio a southern gospel group is its commitment to a worldview and way of life that is place-based, class-bound, and consistent with values and assumptions that prevail in white, fundamentalist evangelicalism. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_63', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_63').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); 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. Home News Random Article Install Wikiwand Send a suggestion Uninstall Wikiwand Our magic isn't perfect Navigate. 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. Nominated in the "Gospel/Contemporary Christian Music" category, CCM soloist Natalie Grant attended the ceremony, only to leave before the show ended. See Jones, Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands (UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 9. That finally holds who You are. 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. Mae is her 18-year-old daughter. Fox, Pamela. Several prominent bluegrass and old time families have been mainstays of southern gospel since family acts began to emerge in the 1930s and 1940s: most prominently, The Lewis Family and The Chuck Wagon Gang, and later the Primitive Quartet, The Easters, and The Isaacs. For more on cultural-geographic conceptualizations of place, see John Agnew, The United States in the World Economy: A Regional Geography (London: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Cresswell, Place. John F. Mooney, review of The Best of The Martins, directed by Bill Gaither, Amazon.com, July 29, 2013, accessed October 15, 2013, http://www.amazon.com/review/R399G8O3TFUQHH/. 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. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. The Martins hail from Hamburg near the Louisiana border in Ashley County, in the southeast quadrant of the state, where the west Gulf coastal plain meets the Mississippi Delta. Joyce Rogers. Christian vocalists The Martins Joyce Martin Sanders, Jonathan Martin and Judy Martin Hess perform at the Missouri Theater at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 17. 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. Richard A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2000). 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. The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For (2017) is a collection of McCulloughs speeches. 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. 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 authenticityby sea, in the studio, (notionally) on command, at home among southern gospel's Homecoming Friends or in faraway lands. The videos still air regularly on many local-access religious television channels, but sales today are largely driven through merchandizing at concerts, the Gaither, "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." 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. 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. It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). Although the male quartet continued to dominate southern gospel's self-image, the genre as a commercial enterprise became home for strains of more traditional white evangelical vernacular sacred musics, including explicitly pietistic bluegrass and country gospel. 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. See Robert K. Whalen, "Premillennialism,". 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. Many southern gospel performers and groups incorporate covers of traditional black gospel songs and spirituals into their repertoire. "61Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_61', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_61').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Yet many of the white, conservative, and fundamentalist Christian consumers who are the target audience for this kind of Christian entertainment merchandise may well see something quite different. Grove Music Online. 3,147) where they became a popular regional Christian music act. Bob Joyce died December 10, 1981, in San Francisco, CA, USA. Such work is as welcome as it is needed. These longstanding conflicts precede the twentieth century. "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. 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. The most prominent, From Arkansas With Love, is full of original material, almost all written by Joyce Martin. You can take them anywhere. For a fuller discussion of "southern" as a racial signifier and readings of race and white gospel see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 96103. Joyce Martin is a well known gospel singer. When she came out, Mark grabbed her arm and said, "You have to hear these kids sing!" From Arkansas With Love demonstrates southern gospel's influence. 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. The Martins initially auditioned for Gaither in 1992; the video on which they appeared was not officially released until 1993. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_52', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_52').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The Martins's insistence upon their childlike wondermentthen and nowat the improbability of the audition's circumstances is overlaid with the immediately recognizable nature of The Martins's talent by music industry veterans. 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.