For an extended discussion of "southern gospel" see, Douglas Harrison. Jonathan Martin and his wife, Dara, live in Des Moines with their six children (Craig Harris, ", In the 1990s and early 2000s, Gaither Homecoming was popular on the now-defunct TNN cable channel. Fox, Pamela. 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). tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_48', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_48').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); 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. 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. Updated: June 20, 2015 Biography ID: 102744141 And I've never been more sure of the path I've chosen." Today it designates right-leaning North American Protestantism defined in large part by its opposition to cultural, theological, and political liberalism. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_46', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_46').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The paradox of The Martins's Homecoming reputation as masters of classic gospel hymnody and their much wider stylistic reach and renown before and beyond the Homecoming stage suggests that there is more to their appeal to southern gospel audiences than can be accounted for by their music. 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. 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). Its fans and participants aspire to transcend or dissolve regional expectations, theological boundaries, and denominational classifications. 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. 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. Sometimes this includes black gospel, particularly the performers who take inspiration from the mainstream music industry (pop, rock, R&B, and hip-hop). Is Joyce Martin gospel singer - The Martins a Sanders or a McCollough? Joyce Rogers. [South Barrington, IL: Willow Creek Association, 2007]). 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). The Martins's family narrative emphasizes anti-modern, unsophisticated, and materially modest childhoods, reinforced with a washed-out photo of the family's ramshackle cabin. 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. Jonathan Martin lives in West Des Moines, Iowa with his wife, and their six children, including twin boys, one of which has cerebral palsy. 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. Judy Martin Hess lives in Columbus, Georgia with her husband Jake Hess Jr, and their four children. More deeply, the decline in market share and cultural capital has eroded southern gospel's self-concept and induced a crisis of authenticity. Southern gospel performers often emulate black gospel styleincluding arrangements, vocal techniques, and use of choirs as backing voices. 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_17', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_17').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); 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. From the start, the case of The Martins is linked to the state of their birth. That finally holds who You are. "2Ibid., 2. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_2', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_2').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); This tradition is distinctive for its cultivation of close harmony sung in ensemblestraditionally 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. 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. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. Stowe, David. Examples 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. Arkansas, writes Brooks Blevins, "has become in many ways indistinguishable from concurrent stereotypes of backwoods southerners or of southern mountaineers and hillbillies," despite the geographical, cultural, and social differences between the Ozark and Ouachita hill country to the north of the state, the Mississippi River alluvial region to the east, and the "primeval swampland" in the state's southern half. Before then the music was simply known to its practitioners and fans as gospel. 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. 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). 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_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. 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. Menu. For a fuller discussion of "southern" as a racial signifier and readings of race and white gospel see Harrison, Following Harry Eskew's lead in the Grove Music entry for Gospel Music, Stephen Shearon uses "northern urban" gospel to designate commercial Christian music of and for primarily white Protestants that emerged in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century revivalism in urban areas outside the South. It was Mark, Mike, of course the three Martins, Gloria and two or three other people. Bill never comes out into the foyer but Gloria does. 1 (2008): 2758. . Photograph by Judy Baxter. When and where did baseball player Bob Joyce die? 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. See also Other Works | Publicity Listings | Official Sites View agent, publicist, legal and company contact details on IMDbPro Getting Started | Contributor Zone Contribute to This Page Edit page Personal Details There was no love lost between southern gospel and the "Queen of Christian Pop" to begin with, but after Grant's rise to fame, she became a galvanizing symbol for southern gospel of cultural accommodation run amok in doctrinally compromised music. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_18', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_18').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); 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. 827-2340 or reach Martin R Mccullough at (253) 720-5263. His interview enacts a modern gospel version of the venerable Arkansas Traveler colloquy in which a high-born southerner (the Traveler) engages an Arkansas Squatter in a dialogue about the differences of class and geography.60Bill Clinton's presidential campaign used the Traveler name and image as a way to strengthen his populist appeal running against a Washington insider. 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." Movies. The Martins. 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. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_25', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_25').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); conservatives primarily in denominationally unaffiliated megachurchessouthern gospel has come to voice the revanchist critique of non-denominational evangelicalism offered by old-line denominational fundamentalists (namely, Southern Baptists, General Baptists, Free Will Baptists, and Independent Baptists; Nazarenes; Church of God; Church of Christ; Assemblies of God; and the more fundamentalist strains of Methodism).26These denominations were most frequently represented in original ethnographic research I have conducted into the contemporary culture of southern gospel. The overwhelming majority of fans and professionals in contemporary southern gospel are white Christians who are "culturally southern, socially conservative, and Anglo-American. "39Jennifer Lena, Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 2. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_39', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_39').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); My approach attends to southern gospel as a musical style,40Lower 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. Structural Info Filmography Known for movies Saved! 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. They live in Columbus, Georgia, and have five children. 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. "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. 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"). The popularity of Homecoming derives from its emergence duringand its response tothe declension crisis in southern gospel. They live in Columbus, Georgia, and have five children. But professional southern gospel has always been strongly grounded its history and identity in the male quartet. 'Cause I've waited my whole life. For more on the demographic profile of southern gospel see Harrison. Bill Clinton's presidential campaign used the Traveler name and image as a way to strengthen his populist appeal running against a Washington insider. 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. "Southern gospel" remains the preferred term in the study of white gospel music of the South. 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. 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. Douglas Harrison is Associate Professor of English and Assistant Director of the Center for Faculty Innovation at James Madison University. 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. Start the wiki Similar Artists Charlotte Ritchie 703 listeners Bill & Gloria Gaither 10,674 listeners The Isaacs 11,665 listeners Show more . Kim Hopper, Joyce Martin Sanders, Shane McConnell - Official Video for "Love At Home (Live)", available now!Buy the full length DVD/CD 'Give The World A Smil. Pamela Fox has noted that "while academia has for the most part abandoned the authentic as any kind of meaningful analytic category," the vernacular music of southern, white, rustic life and experience has "tended to preserve it. The Willow Creek megachurch, under the leadership of Bill Hybels, is the most prominent example of a seeker-sensitive church. Family, friend, or fan, this family history biography is for you to remember Joyce E. (Sanders) Martin. The interplay of praxis and imagination is crucial. 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. Judy Martin is married to Jake Hess, Jr., the son of the legendary southern gospel lead singer Jake Hess. [4] Judy Martin Hess (b. 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. Moreton, Bethany. She has two children. "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. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_9', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_9').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); 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." See Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford, 2013). 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 Gospel Songs [1874] and Bliss and Ira D. Sankey's Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs [1875]), the song's style anticipates the dominant features of the gospel hymn and is customarily treated by gospel singers and fans as part of the corpus of gospel hymns that remain popular in southern gospel. While growing up poor in rural Arkansas, the three often practiced singing together, and released their self-titled debut album in 1994 on Chapel Records. The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations. 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. The peer reviewers for Southern Spaces provided generous feedback that sharpened my thinking and refined the essay's argument considerably. Between highlights, Bill Gaither interviews Joyce, Judy, and Jonathan,54The interviews are actually excerpts taken from long conversations filmed in a homey setting in which The Martins sit side-by-side on a large couch facing the camera and Bill Gaither sits in an overstuffed armchair to the right of the frame. Home News Random Article Install Wikiwand Send a suggestion Uninstall Wikiwand Our magic isn't perfect In addition to being the vehicle through which The Martins received fame, Homecoming marked an epochal shift in the reception and self-concept of southern gospel. Even though I do not have a better name for it, I remain deeply ambivalent about "northern urban gospel." 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. And see Jos Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 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. 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). Joyce Martin Sanders is an American singer who, along with her siblings Jonathan Martin and Judy Martin Hess, is best known as a member of the Christian country trio The Martins. Martin Jarvis; Randy Edelman; David Jason; Michael Hordern; Oliver Williams; Community. Joyce Martin is married to Paul Michael Sanders, who has had periodic jobs as a southern gospel singer. July 30, 2013. http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/culture/6221/the_gospel_ church_and_the_ruining_of_gay_lives__an_interview_with_anthony_heilbut/.
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