averyfineline

For the long weekend ahead, an open thread for you holiday revelers looking for your gospel fix. Some things to get us started.

• Janet Paschal has the new No. 1 song. The Talleys had a No. 1 with “Life Goes On” in last month’s issue. Good to see good music at the top of the chart.

• Have we talked about this: Guy Penrod is billed as a “Gaither artist” for this benefit show (anybody know how Rector, AR, managed to land the Goodship Gaither?). Perhaps Penrod’s solo career all along was going to work out within the contexts of other Homecoming artists (just what the HC needs: another soloist!), so maybe I’m the one who’s off here. Anyway, and no matter, I’m always interested to see how and when Homecoming prodigals are rehabilitated.

• L5, Booth Brothers and Greater Vision are bringing out a joint project, Jubilee. KingsGold redivivus!

• Daniel Mount reviews Gerald Williams’ has released an autobiography, with the great title, Mighty Lot of Singing’.

What else?

Today’s round up is all about hellos.

• Randy Crawford is back with BFA (mostly random aside: I’m pretty sure I saw Crawford at Jacksons in Nashville a month or so ago, and if you’re ever at Jacksons, make sure you visit that delightful used and rare bookstore across the street while you wait for your late friends to arrive). It’s a curious choice in some ways. Crawford is not a bad singer, but neither is he anything to write home about, judging from his KM and Assurance days. And he doesn’t really seem like a BFA fit – not his look, not his vocal style, and not his vocal ability. And, as a friend of mine pointed out as well, Crawford tends to perform “way more energetically” than BFA. Then again, maybe that’s what they have in mind … someone who could energize their performance a bit.

•  Mark Trammell Trio has brought a downmarket tenor, Joel Wood, to replace Eric Philips. I have no knowledge of or exposure to this guy whatsoever, and neither do a lot of folks I’ve talked to. Of course, in sg when a more or less complete stranger to the national circuit gets a job like this, the cynics say, he must come with money somewhere. But then, that’s what cynics (as opposed to your always optimistic host) would say.

In an earlier post, I used a Gospeleer entry to explore some facets of economic populism in southern gospel. Here, I want to say a bit more about a related topic: aesthetic populism in sg.

By this I refer to that line of thinking that equates a thing’s popularity with its aesthetic/artistic value. Thus the Inspirations = popular, ergo Inspirations music = good.

But it need not be confined to such an easy target. Judging by the stream of mediocre music (whose flow is only occasionally interrupted by something insightful and exciting) that comes from most southern gospel acts these days, aesthetic populism is the operative mode of creativity in sg. Every time a songwriter or producer or performer or musician hears that nagging voice that says, really, ANOTHER cover of “Just a Little Talk With Jesus,” ANOTHER hook that rhymes “Cal-va-REE” with “you and me” … that little voice can be shouted down with the soothing old lie: nobody likes it but the people.

A version of this debate is going right now elsewhere on this site, with some commenters arguing that sg should stylistically move in the direction of the prevailing winds of country music, since that’s what the people like these days, and others (understandably) wonder, whither being led by one’s own lights?

Aesthetic populism is a syllogistic kissing cousin to Joyful Noise-ism, but more potent in a way, because the pietism is overlaid with a healthy dose of world-weary cynicism. So where the Joyful Noiser can run into a kind of utopianist pietism (everything done in the name of Christ is good!) that can turn off the religiously committed person who also values her reason, aesthetic populism signals its knowingness in that wry formulation: nobody likes it but the people.  (Bonus points if you refer to Rusty Goodman or whatever legendary figure to whom this axiom is attributed in southern gospel.)

In sg, you’ll hear this refrain often when a critique of form, content, style, or execution has been made. And if nobody likes it but the people, then that (in the populist’s mind) settles it.

Except of course American popular culture- secular and religious – is in some ways one fairly frequent testimony after another about “the people’s” crummy aesthetic judgment. John and Kate Plus 8, anyone? Those obnoxious blinking LED crosses at NQC? Jesus Got R Done t-shirts?

My point is not to hie myself to the ivory tower and preach down to the unwashed nabobs about their inferior tastes (you’ll have to take one of my classes for that! heheh). I like Golden Girls and Hee Haw and McDonalds french fries too. No, the point is that, at least as far as mass artistic or creative culture is concerned, it’s a balance between anticipating what your (potential) audience wants and judging what they might like to experience but wouldn’t have chosen by themselves, and sometimes (often?) the latter can and should trump the former.

But for some reason, even though we know empirically that the latter part of the equation is responsible for a lot of the best works of popular culture (John Lennon didn’t focus-group “Imagine” … “How Great Thou Art” wasn’t workshopped and poll-tested), “the customer is always right” remains a kind of sacrosanct incantation of late capitalism that gets whispered with ever more reverence over product development (and that’s what popular songwriting and album producing are, really, even and especially in sg) the more evidence that piles up to the contrary: in fact, the customer is often very, very wrong.

My suspicion is that business people/artists/executives like to fall back on the customer is always right when they’re too lazy, afraid, or unable to create themselves out of whatever rut they’re in. Thus, for instance, do we get “A Pile of Crowns.” Or, to shift industries, thus do executives from the automobile industry insist that it’s a folly bordering on insanity for car companies to make more fuel-efficient and alternative-energy vehicles. “American car buyers don’t want those cars,” they say, and point to the SUV craze.

Except that consumer taste doesn’t develop in a vacuum. In the car case, advertisements and other mass promotional campaigns have a huge, verifiable and transformative effect on consumer attitudes toward products. If automobile companies wanted to make fuel-efficient cars as attractive to consumers as Excursions and Escalades, they could (and would) do it. But change is hard, looking over the horizon even harder, and besides, a bird in the hand and all that.

In the case of music, all good artists encounter moments in their careers when they have (or ought) to leverage their credibility, fame, or connection with audiences to bring fans along with them to whatever new creative place their vision takes them. When they don’t, then the result is a world full of Kenny Chesneys,  half-sober Amy Winehouse imitators, and every southern gospel group (except the Dixie Echoes!) cueing up another pre-programmed encore of “Beulah Land.”

Or to put it another way: the customer may always be right, but sometimes they need help in arriving at that conclusion.

Judy Nelon’s GospelMusicUpdate.com is well on its way to becoming the go-to site for news from the world of southern gospel, inspo, and Christian country.

I actually find the site difficult to navigate (it’s a bit spastically designed and the recent news often gets lost on left).

But it’s such a welcome relief to see someone exercise some editorial judgment so that personnel changes and album releases and other news of interest from gospel music isn’t muddled in with the sick, dead, newly birthed, and infirm watch from the lives of every performer’s extended family. And by placing news from the top tier of sg alongside other headlines from the adjacent worlds of inspo, CCM, and Christian country, the site implicitly imagines a place for southern gospel beyond the parochial borders that other publications help build and police.

Meanwhile, an artist friend of mine writes:

I used to sell 400 subscriptions of the SN a month at my table. Now I’m down to about 50.  How the mighty fall.

Jason Crabb
Jason Crabb
Spring Hill, 2009
ALI: 83%

The first line of the first song, “Somebody Like Me,” on Jason Crabb’s new album says a lot about his debut solo album:

The congregation parted like the Red Sea,
When that old drunk stumbled in down the aisle
And took a seat, right in the middle of Amazing Grace

It suffers alone in print (for one thing, it comes off as triter than it sounds when sung), but the lyric captures the album’s general tendency to take familiar tropes and idioms of gospel music and torque the frame, distort the focus just a bit, skew the point of view so that that even as you’re investing emotionally in music that sounds reassuringly familiar, the song is busy undercutting the basis for that investment bit by marvelous, lyrical bit.

In the case of “Somebody Like Me,” the title has already prepared us to expect that, like a thousand tear-in-my-beer-for-Jesus tunes, the old drunk in the first verse will turn out to be a cipher for more ordinary spiritual struggles of the sort familiar to “somebody like me.” But something happens on the way to the Baptism of Jesse Taylor. 

You can listen to the song for yourself (thanks to a “listening party” going on over GospelMusicUpdate; btw, notice how giving something away online like this is likely to drive substantial sales of the album). But it won’t spoil anything to point out that those opening lines hint at the shift in perspective that’s key to the song’s hook: this repulsive drunk is no descendant of ole Jesse, everybody’s favorite alcoholic delivered from the drink, and there won’t be any beatific baptism here.

Nor is this album just a typical countrified collection of Christian crooning by an erstwhile front man of a defunct family act. It may be all that, but it’s also full of first-rate songwriting and singing of the sort rarely found in gospel music today.

Given the Crabb reputation for staging music with sharp hooks and trenchant tunes, you may think you know what I mean. And yes, there are Gerald Crabb lyrics here (including a rearranged “Through the Fire” that sounds like it went to the Middle East – or maybe just Paula Stefanovich’s house – and picked up a Persian leitmotif since it was last among us). But you’ve never heard Crabb Family music quite like this.

As befits a solo project, the album emphasizes songs about the ever-moving dawn of spiritual striving that preoccupies the individual religious life. Here’s the opening of “Hope for me Yet”:

I could bless the water
But it wouldn’t turn to wine
Paint a picture of a sunset
Hanging there in your eyes
But it’d be just some compromise.
I could write a million verses
Of words you’ve heard before
Steal some of Dylan’s best but it’d
Leave me wanting to say more

Purists will doubtless object to the song’s equivalence of romantic love in the first verse with the experience of Christian salvation in the second. But tell me, dear readers. When’s the last time a gospel song rhymed “your eyes” and “compromise” and made such a graceful (or any!) reference to Dylan lyrics? While you think, I’ll continue to giggle gleefully.

The album is full of this sort of vivid, deft imagery, like these lines, from “Sometimes I Cry.”

I look the part, blend in with the rest of the church crowd
I know the routine, I could list all the bible studies in town.
Watch Christian TV, I know all the preachers, their clichés
I been born again, and without a doubt I know I’m saved.

Hearing lines like this from a guy who regularly appears on Christian TV alongside  the people whose names and faces show up in the lexicon of modern evangelicalism next to “tv preachers and clichés,” I don’t know whether this is self-parody or a plea for dispensation. And I can’t tell how much we’re supposed to hear the use of stock phrases like “born again” and “without a doubt” and “I know I’m saved” in that last line as a parody of preacherly cliches spewing from the tv.

But it all makes for marvelous music. “Sometimes,” Crabb confesses with that achey twinge of tears and self-embattlement in his voice during the chorus, “I fall down, stumble over my own disguise.” Dear Lord, who doesn’t.

The album is not all written this well. The second verses of both “Hope for me Yet” and “Sometimes I Cry” are substantially weaker than the first (something about “Sometimes” feels like it was originally conceived as a straight-ahead country tune and then revised for a cut on a gospel album). But that’s rather like complaining that people only ever remember the first verse of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Spring Hill is clearly positioning this project as a country album, but it’s no more or less country (the marvelous “One Day at a Time” or “Walk on Water,” whose intro sounds remarkably like the melodic hook to “Whispered Prayer”) than it is also at times very southern (“Worth it All”), inspo (“Forever’s End”), and CCM (“No Love Lost” or “I Will Love You”).

In fact, the most obviously country tune, “Ellsworth” (about a family matriarch sliding into dementia after the death of her dear husband), is probably also the singly weakest tune on the album. The song will be immediately recognizable to contemporary country fans as a family-and-nostalgia number, but that’s the problem: like so many off the rack country ballads, it’s all sentiment with little of substance to elevate the song out of its emotional self-indulgence. Fortunately, the tune is an exception.

It’ll be too bad if southern gospel diehards spend a lot of energy fighting about whether or not to claim this album, because this is precisely the kind of work that suggests a way out of the wilderness for southern gospel: well-written, curious, warmblooded songs, arranged with originality, imagination and exquisite attention to detail, sung with the care of a craftsman … and infused with the lived experience of a spiritual struggler.

There are all sorts of reasons to call this Crabb’s Country Solo Album. But the truth is, its style is unclassifiable (I suspect Crabb is constantly labeled as “country” more because of his twangy vocal style than anything about the types of songs he sings).

Anyway, what you call it is hardly the point. What matters is the album’s masterful example of the very best pan-southern sensibility that’s at the heart of all good gospel music.

Mickey Gamble has an interesting post up over at Gospeleer about what he calls “the poverty mentality” of southern gospel:

There is a widely held belief in our genre that degrades both the value of the artist and the level of support that fans will indulge.  That belief is that our fans live lives of economic struggle and are not willing or not able to support the artists’ work at a level equivalent to other genres of music.  In addition, artists are restrained from appearing wealthy or talking about wealth as a positive thing (with a few exceptions, notably busses and clothes).

Mickey’s post is worth reading for what he has to say about the implications of this phenomenon. One thing you get is a self-fulfilling spiral toward inferior product quality:

If a promoter follows a pattern of putting on concerts in gyms with poor sound and lighting, he is going to draw crowds that are only comfortable with very low ticket prices and looking only for “bargains” at the record table.

But it goes deeper than this, too. I recall watching Connie Hopper sing  the second verse of “Thank You, Lord” at NQC. She sang: “You know I’m not wealthy, these clothes they’re not new, I don’t have much money, but Lord I have you.” All the while looking, as I wrote at the time, “like a million bucks” in obviously not old clothes (and the Hoppers are definitely not on the list of sg people without much money).

The story both bears out what Mickey says and complicates it. Big hair, caked-on make-up, plastic surgery, bejeweled clothing, coordinated costumes, pleather furniture settees on remnants of plush carpet at the NQC exhibition hall (emphasis on exhibition),  buses worth more than the value of several decent homes … even the conspicuous parsimony of the sort Claude Hopper is not coincidentally known for … these  are all ways of indirectly signaling wealth - or, more often, someone’s attempt to match unwealthy people’s idea of what wealth looks and acts like - to a culture that, as Mickey notes, can’t openly appear to prize material wealth the way the rest of the world does.

Thus do performers get on stage - trailing clouds of AquaNet, with their industrial strength make-up melting in the spotlights, a $500,000-bus idling on $4-a-gallon  fuel in the parking lot, and five figures worth of product out at their table - and then stand there and regale their audience with tales of how they care nothing for this ole world of sin and materialism and the seductions it affords … they just want to sang for Jesus.

To outsiders, this paradox is so much obvious charlatanism, and this is undoubtedly true in some cases. But it’s easy to dismiss something as entirely hypocritical on the basis of a few frauds. Far more difficult to try to understand the underlying dynamic.

Compared to most artists in other genres of professional music, southern gospel is musical bankruptcy.

Nobody knows that as well as the folks trying to keep fuel in the bus and make payroll  every week (lots of time to consider the balance sheet when you’re applying make up and fixing your hair before a set). And measured against the conspicuous prosperity of CCM and country music (to take the two nearest neighbors to sg), professional southern gospel artists may not have as hard a time as you might think telling themselves (and really believing) that the conspicuous consumption required to keep their show on the road really is (to quote myself) a ministerial pillow of stone.

As Dolly Parton is fond of saying, it takes a lot of money to look this cheap. And when you don’t make much more than it costs to meet expenses, this pricey cheapness can begin, after a while, to feel like a genuine sacrifice for the kingdom.

Update: Only because it intersects in very general ways with questions of faith, wealth, and the conflicts the two engender, I’d bring this story to your attention. It’s apples and oranges in many ways, but interesting for our purposes all the same, if only because money is being used as a proxy to scrimmage over a whole range of cultural and political issues, which isn’t entirely unlike what happens in southern gospel culture.

Later update: Daniel Britt and his morning show colleagues try to take up this topic this a.m.

Last week, you may recall a discussion on this and other sites about the Perrys streaming a concert live via the internet. Mickey Gamble praised it as a stroke of great foresight … by “someone.”

Indeed.

In the mailbox this a.m., a note from Libbi Perry Stuffle:

We had nothing to do with video streaming the youth conference. That was the people who booked us that did that.

Admirable modesty. I asked Stuffle if, given the apparent success of the video,  the Perrys might do more of this type of thing, even if they didn’t have the idea themselves. She replied:

Yes. […] We might would like to try it once a month at a really good venue where you know quality would be good. I don’t think it would be something we would want to do all the time. The response that we got Monday night was from all over the country. That’s a plus for people and areas that we don’t get into much.

There you go.

What’s on your mind? Some things to occupy the time while you think.

• Mickey Gamble over at Gospeleer thinks the Perrys have the right idea streaming live feeds of their concerts for free. My question to anyone who caught the recent webcast: what was the quality? And if you’re a diehard (what Mickey calls “followers”), does the quality of the feed matter, and how much?  I’m actually asking.

• Speaking of Gospeleer, why does the main blog page only show one post at a time? Sort of makes it onerous on the non-daily visitor who’d like to see the most recent posts without digging into the archive. FWIW.

• Daniel Mount has some clips of the new Inspirations. DBM says they sound better than the old Is. I’d say they sound less bad.

• There’s going to be a big choral extravaganza - Fire in the Choir - at NQC to promote Daywind’s new choral music line (must everything rhyme?). About the same time I saw this, I noticed Roy Webb is playing the SBC convention this year. Which made me wonder, is DW doing a similar choral event for the Baptists at their big get-together? Certainly would make at least as much, maybe more, sense than doing it at NQC.

• The oldest known instruments have been uncovered in an ancient trash pile in Germany. They’re primitive flutes made from bird bone and mammoth tusks some 75,000 years ago. You can listen to the sound of a replica here.

• The SN is confirming what regular readers of this site have known for a while now, Terah Penhollow has left Crabb Revival.

• Kyle must be bored. He’s back at it with another installment of recording oddities.

What else?

Via Avery’s old pal, Dean Adkins, and apropos the “what’s lost with overproduced band tracks” conversation:

Plus, you gotta love orange suits and shag carpet.

A while back, I mentioned having wished for some time for an effective remake of “God on the Mountain.” I think, via Adam Edwards, I may have found it.

The audio is crap (sorry, Adam), and the quality is what you get when Uncle Bob or whomever at the family gathering does the video work, but this is really the kind of natural musical goodness that somehow seems to almost benefit from the grungy quality of the recording … it’s the effect that people strive for when they use sepia tones on photoshop or make their recordings sound like old phonographs. Age as a proxy for authenticity. Skip all that. Here’s the real deal:

Those of you who prefer to feel this sort of thing sans commentary, stop reading now.

The rest of us will talk for a minute about how this could be a tutorial in gospel music style, rightly understood. Allman doesn’t sing out of his range. He seems to intuitively understand that tasteful augmentation of certain notes and phrases can convey a greater sense of power and more forceful effect (both musically and psychospiritually) than would vocally crossing a wide range of registers or contorting the diaphragm in faulty flights of head tones and dog whistles.

Plus, he’s just, you know, sitting on a couch … with a guitar (and frankly he kinda looks like someone who’s lived and learned alot about living since we last saw him with Greater Vision, in his focus on the family hair and those reverential suits … maybe I’m just likin the song alot, but it’s almost as if you can hear the wisdom of experience in the song).

At any rate, you want to tell the people chatting and bustling about and talking over the music, hey … STFU be quiet, can’t you tell there’s glory coming down on the other side of the room over there. But then I guess that’s the way grace usually arrives, when Uncle Bob forgets his tripod and somebody’s brother-in-law is about to nod off from too much turkey.

I had a post up here earlier this evening about Greater Vision and popular taste vs being led by your creative lights. But it turns out the post was based on a bogus reading of the facts, so I took it down. The point I was trying to make about the limits of the “nobody likes it but the people” dogma in sg is worth making, but I’ll do that some other time, when I’ve got my facts right. Mea culpa. H/t, NonInsider.

This may not be of interest to you if you A) don’t know what DRM is and/or don’t care, or B) don’t own a Kindle. But given our regular discussion of new media and digital commerce, this story about DRM nightmares with Amazon’s popular new ebook reader sure does feel like a cautionary tale about the kind of roadblocks that may spring up on the information superhighway as we get further and further into the age of digital culture (and technological advances and planned obsolescence begin to create legacy issues with all the digital products we own like music, and books, and downloaded software).

Or maybe the story is just a good example of how much digital commerce is still like the wild-west in many ways. I’m no economic historian, so maybe the development of ecommerce infrastructure is right where you’d expect it to be, or  maybe even ahead of what historical models would predict.

But no matter. I liked the story. Or rather, it intrigues me (in a baffled sort of way) to read about a company like Amazon, a real pioneer of online bidness, struggling so basically to get DRM right with a product as popular and genuinely revolutionary as the Kindle.

Basically, it turns whatever it touches to trash, according to David Sessions (h/t, RDB). Money quote:

[A]s long as the lumbering Salem monopoly controls the Christian music press, what Christians read about God’s music will be just as bad as the websites in the Salem network look.

[snip]

For now, the Salem monopoly’s presence is here to keep Christian music’s quality in the toilet. I’m not saying they shouldn’t go after every dime they can make in Christian music media, just that someone should stay around to keep it real. Here’s hoping a few good artists—and good writers—outlast the dynasty.

The whole thing is here.

The writing has never been very good at the SN, but that has more to do with the cultural differences between conservative Christianity in the southern tradition than it does with who’s owned it. Certainly the SN has drifted appreciably toward the Salem aesthetic in the past few years, especially the new website, but many of those changes improved the situation.

Of course you could argue persuasively that that says more about what we started with than the quality of what we’ve got now. But the main thing to take away from the SN’s evolution as part of Salem, I think,  is that the differences between southern and the rest of the Christian  music world seem to have insulated the Singing News from the more intense Saleminization techniques that a product or property from CCM would have experienced. Plus, the SN just isn’t that big a part of the Salem pie, when it gets right down to it, so there’s not a huge payoff to do more than tinker.

It’s official. Facebook is making the world go completely, solipsistically insane. Avery just received this message:

Kyle Boreing became a fan of Kyle Boreing on Facebook and suggested you become a fan too.

I’m no Facebook hater, but WTF. Reminds me of that Conan O’Brien joke from a few weeks ago. “In the Year 3000 … all social networking will be done on one giant site: www.youtwitface.com.”

In the course of a discussion going on here about BFA’s failure to launch, reader SE diagnoses the group’s problem this way.

I think their last few projects are so pitch perfect and so sonically maximized that they leave the listener aurally tired after listening to an entire project. They electronically tweak the vocals to the point that they are pitch perfect and in some spots sound subtly robotic or mechanical. … Also, they mix and/or master the project with no headroom in the waveform so that there is very little or no difference between the “soft” and “loud” parts of the songs. Everything is pushed up to just before the point of distortion. … After listening to this pitch-perfect, sonically-maximized recording, when people go see BF&A in concert they leave disappointed. Why? Because even with stacks, they can’t reproduce that exact pitch-perfect sound that is on the CD. And unless they have the sound system cranked WAY up, it’s not going to sound as “loud” as the sonically-maximized CD. The end result is that people subconsciously walk away thinking BF&A aren’t as good as they thought they would be.

Very insightful. You should read the whole comment before rushing to conclusions about the reader’s point. As SE says later on in his post, this is not just a problem confined to BFA (though they are a particularly unfortunate example of it). Southern gospel is overrun with groups trying to create Special Spiritual Moments (SSMs) with music whose effectiveness decreases in inverse proportion to its digitally perfection technological enhancements. Which is to say, though it may seem counter-intuitive, technology has  in some key, subtle ways, made it more (not less) difficult to connect with audiences.

SSMs are a difficult enough thing to achieve under ordinary circumstances, and the decline of the live band (or any live instrumentation whatsoever in a lot of cases, including BFA’s) has only exacerbated it. Sure, stacks, tracks, and other technological enhancements have made it much easier for almost any group to sound better.

But as SE notes, it also subtly and permanently reshapes the sonic (and, I’d argue, psychospiritual) expectations we bring to the live concert. Ever since, through the miracle of technology, almost any group can sound like a million bucks on stage, a million bucks suddenly doesn’t seem like much money, and everybody just sounds cheap. In turn, you have try to sound more and more expensive (without spending any more money) to make your musical point. Welcome to the southern gospel arms race for bigger, showier, more flamboyant music.

I have long thought the lush orchestral tracks that are the norm in sg these days have created a low-grade cognitive dissonance that is too subtle to seem like much to worry over in any particular moment, but across time exerts an enormous, reshaping pressure on how we hear music and understand its effects on us. And about halfway through the Mark Trammell Trio’s set at NQC last year, I had something close to an epiphany in this regard.

MTT was following not too far behind The Dixie Echoes, who had just put on an astonishingly impressive set, entirely unsupported by tracks, stacks, or other canned components. It was the kind of experience you know immediately will be one of The Moments (as opposed to ginned up SSMs) that stands out from among the rest. Then MTT comes on, poorly mixed tracks ablaze. And the artificiality of the accompaniment seemed achingly obvious, all the more so for the stark way in which it contrasted with the urgent presence of the Dixie Echoes.

In isolation, MTT’s set would have seemed pretty normal by sg standards. But with the memory and sensation of what genuinely live music sounds like in that particular auditory space still fresh, the artificiality of MTT’s sound stood in stark, stale contrast the Echoes immediacy and vitality.

And here’s what I realized: tracks aren’t a problem because they import sounds into the live setting that aren’t being created in the live space itself (Gaither’s a good example of how to use tracks in ways that seem perfectly natural). They’re a problem when they draw attention to themselves and their artificiality. Sometimes, this happens when the track sounds artificial, as with MTT (or the Dixie Melody Boys, who are the worst at this; I swear Ed O’Neil uses the same secondhand cassette tape for all his instrumental tracks).

Other times, and more commonly though, the track sounds all too real in the wrong space, so real that the mind can’t cognitively reconcile the sound of a 50-piece orchestra and a celestial choir coming from the front of a rural church whose stage is barely big enough for three or four singers and their equipment to stand without bumping into each other.

The ear hears something out of proportion to the information provided by the other senses … the size and scope of the room (very small room, way too large sound); the location itself (one is not prepared to expect the Prague Symphony Orchestra at Mt. Pisgah); and the context of the moment (if you just put five dollars in a chicken bucket, it is not immediately clear or logical that the next thing you should expect to hear will be cinematic strings and brass fanfare in crystal clear digital sound).

So with the rise of accessible technological enhancements to live music, there’s this tacky arms race to create ever more fantabulous (which means, increasingly artificial) experiences.

Sometimes it can work – the right space (Freedom Hall, for instance, is big enough to trick the mind into not noticing there isn’t an orchestra actually in the room, if the track is of sufficient quality not to draw attention to itself); the right moment (a group of show(wo)men who know how to convincingly act like they - and you - are in bigger, better experiential space … think the Cathedrals or the Goodmans); and finally the right – which doesn’t necessarily mean the best –  music (The Perrys, as everyone has been noticing lately, have the market cornered in this regard right now; more on that in a few days when I get around to reviewing their new cd).

But more often than not these stars don’t line up, and we’re left with preposterously outsized performances that beggar the most willing suspension of disbelief. Even Sister Bertha Better Than  You can’t really convince herself in her heart of hearts (or ear of ears) that those sangers were really doing all, or even the better part, of what she heard. And once you start down that road in a culture that insists on ministerial authenticity as non-negotiable part of the SSM, then the jig is well nigh up.

PS: I apologize to my friends B and A, who had to hear me test drive this idea inarticulately already at a fabulous hole-in-the-wall Thai joint in Nashville a few weeks ago.

Great news, music fans. According to this comment, Daywind has released a slew of classic albums:

BLACKWOOD BROS/GIVE THE WORLD A SMILE SUNDAY MEETIN TIME

MASTERS V / CLASSICS OF YESTERYEAR & O WHAT A SAVIOR CD

OAK RIDGE QUARTET / RIVER OF LIFE & SING FOR YOU

SPEER FAMILY / FAMILY FAVORITES & KEEP A HAPPY HEART

STATESMEN / COMMON MAN & STATESMEN ENCORES

JD SUMNER STAMPS/COLORFUL STAMPS QT/SIGNS OF A GOOD LIFE

Burke has some links to the albums themselves.  The only downside I can see to this is that by releasing so much  good classic music, labels like Daywind (hello, Canaan?) will remind their customers how craptastic much of the new music is that these labels are releasing.

“Sing it again Bill … ‘I’m redeemed … by a love divine …Glow-ry Glow-ry, Christ is myyyyyyy-iiiiihne’” 

I’m back, so let’s get started on the miscellaneous stuff we’ve missed in my absence.

• Via Adam Edwards, there’s another clip out of the Perrys singing another song from their new album live.

• Via Musicscribe, there will, evidently, be a sg quilt at NQC.

• For those of you who enjoy southern gospel funerals, Burke has a link to video of Eva Mae LeFevre’s memorial.
  

• James D. Walbert, grandson of James D. Vaughan, and an accomplished pianist and teacher in his own right, died earlier this month (h/t, SS).

• This just in: there is a lot of libido in sg.

• I thought I saw a link to story on a blog somewhere about Billboard making some change to its charting system that related to sg, but I can’t seem to find it now. If anyone has a clue what I’m talking about, chime in below.

What else should we be talking about?

From reader Paul:

I remember Susan Speer at Massey Hall in Toronto in the early ’70’s…I was a young university student and she sat in the back of the hall following intermission and fanned her face with a large stack of dollar bills received from album sales.

I love it.

My first reaction to the news that the LeFevre Quartet has “retired” the group’s family name - and rechristened themselves Priority - was WTF? As Adam Edwards said:

 Honestly, I don’t really understand this move whatsoever. … The group is based on Mike LeFevre’s name, status, history, etc., so is the expense of changing your name and having to create your identity again really honoring the name?  I can understand wanting to honor the LeFevre name, but wouldn’t the name be more honored if it were to continue in gospel music instead of retiring it?”

Exactly. To bring this sort of thing into focus, wouldn’t this be rather comparable to the Gaither children “retiring” the Gaither name when B&G die? Royght.

Perhaps the thinking here was that LeFevre is a brand that appeals to a generation of people with names like Urias and Eva Mae, and not the kind of music and fans this current group wants to reach (though it seems unlikely that LePriority will ever appeal to an audience that isn’t disproportionately southern gospel and so predisposed to venerate a great name in southern gospel music like LeFevre). Or maybe there’s some internecine network of financial or familial alliances behind the group that wants to move in whatever direction it is that an abstract, unbrandable concept name like Priority takes you, and so cooked up this “honor the name by ditching it” business (at least that’s one way to read the line in the press release about this move coming “in response to a request by some LeFevre family members to discontinue the name when Eva Mae was no longer able to travel“).  Who knows. To be sure, this is a “bold move,” as the group’s press release puts it, but then again, so was New Coke.

Update: a couple of readers have already emailed to say more or less the same thing: that this move doesn’t appear to have been within Mike LeFevre’s control, that he was essentially forced to stop using his own name. I take the point, and though I don’t know the particulars, I have no difficulty believing this (the general vibe coming off the group from the get-go was that LeFevre was not primarily the person calling the shots). But from a branding perspective, it’s still a bad move.

Later update: Several emails from people I trust pretty much confirm that Mike LeFevre himself had no choice or say in the matter … “due to some pettiness that existed elsewhere,” as one of my more diplomatic correspondents put it.  So there you go.

Mickey Gamble, a Crossroads executive, has added his voice to the blogosphere. Since the southern gospel blog revolution back in the middle part of the decade, no single industry figure in sg has, to my mind, shown more meaningful curiosity about new media and music than Mickey. For artists and other insiders wondering what digital culture means (or could be) for music professionals, his blog will likely prove a must-read. The rest of us just get to consider it a free education in tribalism and other new media marketing concepts migrated to sg.