averyfineline

In the car the other day, I caught this song during an interview with the singing Swedish sisters who are First Aid Kit. No, it’s not gospel, but the harmonies are about as close and fine as anything a southern gospel fan could want.

I could honestly do without all the visual palavering of the video’s flimsy eco-pantheism, but who doesn’t like a song about singers and singing (and I had totally forgotten until I heard this song that Emmylou Harris sang with Gram Graham Parsons, so bonus score for sharpening my music trivia knowledge).

That was one of the titles I considered for my book, actually, but I think we’ve probably had enough of that topic for the time being, nes cafe?

So instead let’s talk about the Dolly Parton/Queen Latifah film by that title soon to be released. Via DBM, here’s a clip of Karen Peck in the film.

I’ll reserve fuller judgment for a fuller viewing, but going by this clip alone, the “Joyful Noise” may end up being a “good” example of big-screen focus-grouped “gospel” that’s beyond experiential resuscitation even by a singer of Peck’s considerable ability.

At any rate, I saw a trailer for the movie in the theater last week and the acting looks to be dreadful and leaden (an inference that Peck’s over-amped stamping about the stage in this clip does nothing to rebut). And of course I’m sure I’ll go see it.

Since I posted information about my forthcoming southern gospel book, there’s been some chatter about the cover, and specifically some curiosity about the image. One reader wondered about the propriety of using the image of these four celebrities to grace the cover of this book, which seems to take for granted a far greater symmetry of belief, behavior, and worldview among the people on stage and in the audience than I would assume (and too, there’s the long-settled legal status of reproduced images of public figures).

Another reader expressed a more general interest in the origins of the book’s cover:

The cover intrigues me; in that these are all current singers, and there are none of the “olt-timers.” Doug, could you gives us your thoughts on how you chose the cover?

Sure! I assume the reader’s calling out the relatively recent vintage of the image compared to “olt-timers” implies that he expected a more “classic” photo from one of the legendary quartets. And that’s a fair point. Why not seek out a renown group from the golden age of the 40s, 50s, and 60s?

There are basically two answers: action shot and permissions.

The best cover photos for most books are non-posed shots, which in this case means groups singing live on stage. There may or may not be a lot of high quality action shots of midcentury southern gospel acts in live performance out there, but they are hard to come by in my experience. And even if you can find them, you have to get permission to use them, and this can prove even more difficult for any numbers of reasons. Descendants of bygone stars or other custodians of historic, proprietary content such as midcentury southern gospel photographs guard celebrity legacies carefully. Some are skeptical of academic work. Just as often, some are, again in my experience, simply impossible to reach (literally, as in, they don’t respond to phone calls, emails, faxes, registered mail, and the carrier pigeons never come back … and my hunch is these are a lot of the same folks who don’t pay - and sometimes don’t even collect on - their royalties).

In a perferct(er) world, I would have used this image, or, perhaps, this one. But the obstacles to securing the rights in this particular case were just too difficult to surmount for an image that would have been used with such prominence.

In these contexts, it’s much more pragmatic and manageable to seek out what amounts to a free agent — someone who holds the sole rights to a good image (both in terms of composition and content, as well as resolution and reproducibility … that is, 300 dpi at 5×7 or or higher, ideally) and deal directly with him or her, without all the interference of industry politics and professional self-interest. At this historical moment, under these circumstances, that typically means more recent images of current groups or events shot with digital cameras by regular fans who have a knack for new media. Thus the post from several months back when I asked the hive mind of Avery readers to see what you could come up with. Which led to the generous Jeremy Bell and the image you see used above.

Jeremy has dozens of images up at his site, and I liked a few of the Hoppers, but no image more urgently captured as many related aspects of southern gospel as a distinct set of musical practices and experiences as this one: a quartet, singing (if my memory of the event serves) the staggered ending of a song, flamboyantly emotional, a clear connection among the group (note Fowler’s Youncesque gesture, lightly holding onto his neighbor’s arm, with a seemingly unself-conscious ease), a well-lit stage, and (rarer than rare), an actual face in the crowd, so subtlety lit in the reflection of the stage lights.

In short, one learns to be a pragmatist in these matters. A friend of mine was writing a textbook recently and thought, how clever it would be to place lyrics of content-specific songs from American pop and rock-n-roll above the title of each chapter in her book. Until her publisher came back and said, if you want to use all these lyrics, it will cost you just shy of a million dollars to secure the rights. Let us know when your check’s in the mail. Suddenly, my friend didn’t think those lyrics were nearly so clever, or at least not nearly as necessary.

And so it goes. Let not the perfect be the enemy of the possible etc.

But I don’t think I’m settling. It’s a gorgeous image that deserves an iconographic status separate from my book. But boy howdy am I happy to have access to it.

Regular readers will know that the past year or so has seen a diminishing number of posts around here. Y’all have done an excellent job of running the asylum in my pseudo-absence, so I won’t apologize (not least of all because many of you probably don’t really miss the sound of my e-voice). But the diminishment has been painful for me personally for a number of reasons.

First, even when I’m not actively posting, the blog is never far away from me and my thoughts. I put my eyes on every comment that’s posted (and especially those few that aren’t), at all hours of the day and night. And then there is the small book’s worth of scrap paper laying about my home and work offices, scrawled on with ideas for potential-laden threads, as well as a growing list of voice notes on my phone in which I’ve dictated (usually in the car) snatches of thoughts that will, I swear, become a post one of these days (there’s the one about an old Greater Vision album that I think of as capturing two Gerald Wolfes on one record, and another about why backwoods virtuosi can’t seem to leave the world of southern gospel, and another that involves a wonderful old photo of the Klaudt Indian family from way, way, WAY back … and so on … you get the idea).

Second, and more ironically, what must look from your perspective like a withdrawal on my part of interest in, or a disengagement of attention with, the subject matter at hand has actually measured for me in inverse proportion my immersion in the music as I’ve worked on an academic book about southern gospel. Unlike “regular” books, scholarly works take a long time to gestate (conceptualizing, researching, writing, rewriting, reviewing, revising, re-revising, indexing, and so on) before their final appearance, and so I’ve tried to play down the enormous undertaking it is, and has been and continues to be, lest it all become one big anticlimax, or the bloggerly equivalent of hearing over and over again about one’s dog and its fondness for consuming one’s homework.

But no matter: here we are. The book is nearly done. It’s all over, as we’d say back home, but the shoutin’ (a final proofing, to be exact, of the galleys that sit on my desk here as I write, and, you know … actually producing the thing itself, which is accomplished by far more talented people than I).

And so begins the self-promotion.

The University of Illinois Press’s spring 2012 catalog is out, and my forthcoming book is part of it. Since the readers of this site have played an indispensable role in my understanding of southern gospel in general and the writing of this book in particular, I wanted you to be among the first to see the cover and catalog copy. Many thanks to Jeremy Bell and the generosity with which he volunteered access to his trove of southern gospel images. This image in particular says southern gospel with exquisite clarity … says it splendidly and immediately.

The catalog description of the book is here (the full spring catalog is here).

I’m not sure when “regular” posting will resume, but at least now you know a bit more about what stands behind my increased silence (and how/where to buy the book, which of course I hope you’ll do in droves, pre-order or post-release). I guess you could say that the silence around here has been and is, in its own way, the sound of my soul singing just offstage.

Ok so this isn’t exactly southern gospel, but it is an adorable and authentic live bit of musical revelry for the new year.

See you in 2012.

And a happy new year, dear readers. As we celebrate our 8th holiday season together, it’s probably not a bad time to reflect on the generosity and loyalty that so many of you have shown, not to me so much (’cause that’s not necessary or expected) but to the idea and practice of a more or less freewheeling community of conversation about a common cultural interest. As the demands on my time and patterns of posting have waxed and waned over the years, it’s been gratifying to see the community sustain itself beyond and in between my words. So, thank you, and Merry Christmas. See you in 2012.

PS: For those of you who haven’t gotten enough talk about (mediocre) Christmas music, here’s a reflection on the cockroach-like indestructibility of the Christmas carol. And for those of you who’d rather skip the pendanticism and go straight to a youtube mashup video of dogs and cats singing Christmas music, here ya go:

This clip showed up in my Facebook thread over night (h/t, SS) and was a lovely way to start the morning. This formation of the Speers is Mom, Dad, Brock, and Ginger Smith carrying the lead. Ben Speer is at the piano.

We live thoroughly in the post-melisma period of popular music, in which the overwhelming majority of singers and audiences alike assume good singing always must involve highly ornamented vocal styles that have, at their worst, about the same the relationship to the melody as a gnat to the ear: buzzing all around it and occasionally making contact but mostly just being annoying, as singers over-extend what I long ago dubbed their inner angry girl. Not all singers who self-indulgently rely overmuch on these sorts of highly filigreed lines are incapable of the kind of exquisitely well-placed and unornamented tones that Smith lays down here, but it’s rare enough to be captivating in retrospect.

And one more thing: I don’t see a date associated with the youtube clip. Anybody wanna take a stab at suggesting an approximate year on this recording?

Well he would say that. But he’s also probably right too (despite his self-regarding messianic poseur pose). Anyway, the gospel music selection ain’t bad, comparatively.

It is a fortunate thing that this, my now-customary annual post bemoaning the vast (and vastly lame) repertoire of standard Christmas music, is a written warning - given that the Christmas music that started polluting the airwaves at least a week before Thanksgiving may well have oblated the auditory systems of many dear readers and so rendered them overmuch reliant on sight to make their baleful way through this holiday season. Never fear. Avery writes again (or at least copies and pastes stuff he’s writen before!).

If this development of commercial radio switching to all-Christmas formats only weeks after Halloween is not entirely new, it is all the same horrifically new to me, and you may chalk it up to denial that I have taken this long to scoop my yearly spoonful of sand back into the ocean of unlistenably craptastic auditory pollution called Christmas music.

In any case, forthwith my customary admonishment to, as I originally put it, gird yourself for bad Christmas music:

It’s only November 29 and I’m already sick to death of “Jingle Bell Rock” and Burle Ives and “White Christmas” and the Ray Conniff Singers (”let’s all sing in unison everybody!”). Hasn’t anyone realized that there are only so many ways to rearrange “Silent Night” and “We Three Kings” before the songs collapse under their own threadbare weight? The state of Christmas music - Christian and secular - is atrocious. There’s a lot contributing to the dismal repetition of the same handful of exhausted melodies, which passes for Christmas music. First and foremost, the limited shelf life of Christmas projects disincentivizes artists and labels from investing heavily in good, original holiday music. Second, the hyper-commercialization of Christmas relies in large part on the sentimentality and faux nostalgia of traditional Christmas favorites softening the rapacious spending frenzy that’s at the root of most Christmas celebrations (”hey, we’re singing “Deck the Halls” while we elbow our way through Super Walmart, so this must mean Christmas isn’t an obscene orgy of getting and spending”). And since you’ve got only at most a couple of months of serious selling time and airplay for Christmas merchandise (in music), the best way to cash in on the Christmas cash-cow is to play to the saps who can’t get enough of “Rudolph” and “Little Drummer Boy” and Alvin & The Chipmunks. This kind of pandering leaves no air and shelf space for original, unproven tunes (and in turn, of course, recycling the same tripe season after season only reinforces the tendency to repeat “old favorites” next year, which is why, I assume, my local soft rock radio station has been taken over by schlocky Christmas crap … and speaking of radio, kudos to Chuck Peters for resisting the Christmas blinders most programmers put on when the tinsel and mistletoe come out). There are fine Christmas projects out there (B.B. King’s, Michael Buble’s [Avery in 2011: not the most recent one, alas], Linda Eder’s and, ridicule me though you may, Mariah Carey’s), but the profit-imperative behind the Bing-Crosby cliché Christmas (a complete fantasy, mind you) keeps these projects at the back of the rack. And there is original Christmas music being written out there, but it doesn’t get much airplay and little promotion because either it can’t compete with “Holly Jolly Christmas” or it’s a religious tune that’s too explicitly sectarian for pop Christmas radio.The situation in sg is not much better. Though original Christmas music fairs slightly better in Christian markets than others, that’s mainly because churches drive the creation of new Christmas musicals and other church music. Look at your average sg Christmas project and you’ll see the same forces at work here that thwart good Christmas music in secular markets: dashed off recordings geared toward holiday sales more than musical excellence. The few original tunes that may be included on these are often hastily assembled, kitchy affairs that are difficult to take seriously (for instance, EHSSQ’s “A Quartet Christmas”).

It kinda surprises me that this trend has persisted so long, since pretty clearly good holiday music - both Christian and secular - is in high demand when it manages to break through the Christmas-music barricade. Linda Eder’s recording of “Bells of St. Paul” became an instant classic when it came out a few years back, as is Kenny Loggin’s fine “Celebrate Me Home” (and Mariah Carey’s recording of “Miss You Most” is outstanding, though it doesn’t get as much play as Eder and Loggins). And it took only a matter of years for the wonderful “Mary Did You Know” to become sickeningly overdone - evidence, I think, that there is a demand for good, original Christmas music even if labels and vendors prefer to peddle holiday pap for easy profits. Aside from labels and artists investing in solidly built and performed Christmas music (which I don’t expect to see happen any time soon), perhaps part the problem is that the relatively small number of good, original Christmas tunes are too dispersed across and buried in a host of otherwise forgettable individual projects

The full thing is here.  Feel free to spread a little cheer with recommendations of actually good Christmas music in the comments.

The interns will be holding things down for the rest of the weekend. Have a good holiday.