averyfineline

Item No. 1: a Greenes Tenth Anniversary Live album without all the talking.

Item No. 2: a Hoppers Live in Greenville album without all the talking.

A friend of mine who sings with a prominent southern gospel group was talking to me the other day in email about finding good/great songs. In the course of the back and forth, he wrote:

One thing we’re focusing on is to find and hit (really good) songs. It’s a consistent theme. The problem is….good from who’s perspective. It’s like no one can seem to agree on what is a good song. Obviously, what we’re doing is not working in that regard. We have only had one number one song in [many] years. So…I will work on that.

It’s a fair point: Good songs are tough. You can’t throw a free “Jesus Got R Done” t-shirt through the Freedom Hall Expo Center without hitting an artist bugging a writer for great songs, man, we’re looking for your best stuff … I mean, the next “Champion of Love” or “The Lighthouse.” Well, yeah. Who isn’t.

I’m sure some important music has emerged from this kind of solicitation. But as much as anything else, artists need a gut check on this kinda thing. If an artist is struggling to find and record great songs, the problem isn’t going to get solved by relying on songwriters to give you their best stuff. Most songwriters have a catalog of songs ready to pitch to artists at any given time. They’re  holding back what they think is their best stuff for artists who have proven an ability to take ownership of the music they record.

For the downmarket groups, this means your energy would be better spent working on imprinting your own style on songs rather than harassing songwriters who aren’t going to give their best stuff to a b-list group anyway. But for the established groups of the sort my correspondent is a part of, the salient point here is that you not only need access to songwriters’ best stuff - is this a good song in general? - but also an instinct for song selection: is this song good for us, can my guys and I sell it, can we make it good, bring it to life, give people a reason to care about it and us? (Insert old chestnut here about George Younce adding that “step … in .. to … the water” bass lick to Talley’s original song and thereby illustrating the difference between finding good songs and making great music).

Or, if you don’t have that sense or don’t trust it, find someone who does.

Or (and this is increasingly the more common path for most groups), create the impression or the appearance in the fans’ eyes that you have someone whose instincts on “good” music you and they can trust. This is what Rodney Griffin has given Gerald Wolfe, especially now that Griffin’s well’s started running dry. The conspicuous drop-off in the quality of his output since, say, the Quartets project (their last really fine album with some good Griffin pieces on it) doesn’t matter that much. Why? Because it became settled law years ago that Rodney Griffin writes Great Songs and Gerald Wolfe and Greater Vision support Great Songs from a Great Writer.

The Perrys are trying something similar, I gather, with Joseph Habedank. His writing has promise but so far has been marked by creative indiscipline and conceptual underdevelopment, but the Perrys are going all over God’s green gospel earth telling folks that this boy can write as well as he sings … just listen here to our new song. And off they go. Expect to see Habedank’s name on the favorite songwriters ballot any year now.

Ernie Haase has taken a slightly different route, surrounding himself with superb writers in Joel Lindsey and Wayne Haun, and – as far as I can tell from reading liner notes and song credits – appending his name on the co-write line in several instances. How much he does or doesn’t contribute to the creation of the song is immaterial (and I have no reason to think he doesn’t contribute something, however out of proportion it may be to what Lindsey and Haun are bringing to the writer’s table). He’s got bankable writers helping him create bankable songs that he can stage around the idea and image of his own ongoing quest for the divine musical light, both as a singer and a writer, as gospel artist and faithful scribe to movings of the spirit in southern gospel.

All these examples make me think that No. 1 songs aren’t really the best metric for good music. The SN chart measures plenty of things (primarily how much you pay your radio promoter) but not really great songs. There’s no accounting for taste and all that, but I’d say less than a quarter of the songs that go No. 1 are really “good” songs, if good is taken to mean performatively engaging, creatively influential, and historically lasting both in their appeal and performance.

People don’t remember a song because it went No. 1; they remember it because it makes an abiding impression in some original yet recognizable or familiar way (here we might note that the definition of a good song also overlaps with the definition of style: easy to recognize, difficult to define, and impossible to imitate). What that “way” means for any given artist … well, there’s your $64K question, and usually the answer has less to do with the formal features of the song itself and more with the atmospherics, optics, and style unique to the artist or group.

Have you got your $70 ticket to the SN Fan Awards at its new Dollywood location yet?  Yeah, me neither (h/t, KD). But act fast. Karen Peck Gooch and Charlie Waller are predicting a sell out. Actually, 70 bucks ain’t a bad deal for parking, lunch, the awards show and Dollywood admission, assuming that flies your kite. You’d probably pay close to that for admission to NQC on the awards-show night, KFEC parking, dinner and overpriced snacks at Freedom Hall. Of course the Dollywood theme park attractions vs the post-show evening concerts at NQC is kinda apples and oranges as value-added comparisons go. But no matter, … there’s gotta be some sticker shock in bundling more or less the same costs into a single ticket. So I guess we shall see.

If I were a more enterprising blogger, I might suggest an interesting experiment in blogsourcing: like, say, having everyone email their favorite SN-Fan-Award nominated artist(s) and ask them if they’re going to the show or not and then report back on the results in comments. The answer probably depends on whether record labels or the SN/SGMA are comping or partially underwriting/discounting nominated artists’ tickets, I guess.

Incidentally, anybody know about how many seats are available in the Dollywood space where the awards show will be held?

If you’re looking for some non-sg blogging from a sg type, Kenneth Kirskey has a new blog about … well, whatever seems to strike his fancy. Kenneth and I sparred a bit back in the day when Avery first opened for bidness and Kirksey was still blogging periodically at the SN site. If you recall those exchanges, you already know that Kirskey and I don’t agree on a lot, but in the ensuing years, he and I have had occasion to correspond on this or that. And I’ve come to find him one of the most enjoyable and engaging and amiable and enlightening people to disagree with from the sg world.

The Pew Research Center digs into popular attitudes about blogging. Among the findings: blogging is more or less passe among the under-34 crowd, assuming they even know what a blog is.

For all the excitement about blogs and the media coverage of them, blogs have not yet become recognized by a majority of internet users. Only 38% of all internet users know what a blog is. The rest are not sure what the term “blog” means.

Full report is here (pdf).

This week in the Gospel Music and American Fiction course, we just finished a section on black gospel (thanks to everyone who helped try to solve the mystery of the James Baldwin lyrics), and without question, the highlight of this unit for me was being able to immerse myself in all things Willa Mae Ford Smith, the mother of the song-and-sermonnette style of holiness black gospel singing.

“Mother Willa Mae” worked with Thomas Dorsey in the early days of her career and was either instrumental in or stylistically influential on (or both) the careers of many mid-century black gospel stars: The Barrett Sisters, Zella Price Jackson (she also makes a vocal cameo here), and of course Mahalia Jackson, who like Smith possessed a rich, booming, powerful and profound voice and who, also like Smith, relied heavily note-bending and phrase slurring. Though Mahalia Jackson turned funeral gigs into a record deal with Decca and went on to international fame, Smith remained firmly affiliated with the more paraprofessional and evangelistically focused National Association of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, Dorsey’s brainchild, analogous to the singing convention movement in white gospel.

As a result, Smith recorded very little (there is at least one live performance that was released on Savoy Records, but I’ve yet to be able to locate a copy) and remains far less well known outside the world of black gospel music than her commercially successful contemporaries like Jackson and Rosetta Tharpe. Which is too bad, because she’s a force of nature, able to generate an astonishing presence and musical immediacy. Fortunately, her life and some fine recordings of her singing late in life are preserved on the fantastic 1982 documentary, Say Amen Somebody, recorded in St. Louis, where Smith lived, and organized around a tribute concert for her at the Antioch Baptist Church in near north city.

At this point, she’s in her 80s and her voice is less controlled than in her younger years, but she’s lost none of her ability to convey the irrepressible spiritual urgency of gospel music when it’s really good. Here she is singing, “I’m Bound for Canaanland,” a fantastic example of black gospel’s special brand of artful artlessness:

Smith sang this song all of her career, but it achieves a special poignancy here in the context of her age and the wistful nostalgia with which she approaches reflection on her life in the documentary. That first chorus - “I’ll be so glad … to meet … the prophets … and the others … gone on [the way she ornaments this phrase alone is worth the price of admission] .. before!” - the way she manages to convey the song’s emergence from the depths of her being - “between the bone and marrow,” as she says - and her sense of where the center of the melody is even when she has trouble placing the vocal ornaments so essential to her style, and the manner in which she bodily eases herself down off the stage, into the crowd, as if a big lovely angel arriving in heaven … it’s a breathtaking achievement … of talent trumping the effects of time, of someone’s very own inner light brought to life in song, of an artist holding the inexpressible barely but beautifully in expressive equipoise.

And for a bonus: here she is keeping alive her lifelong rivalry with Sallie Martin, another of Dorsey’s discoveries.

One thing that bugs me is when websites are not updated regularly. If you are not going to maintain it, dump it. Oh yeah, something else, when a certain blogger friend we all know and love to hate disappears for days on end and doesn’t update his blog, and you know who you are, Doug. ;P

Touche.

It’s a strange experience, blogging. I’ve been at it - albeit on an idiosyncratic schedule - for over five years and at some point, the fact of needing/wanting to blog even when I’m not able to became an abiding part of my daily life and mind and experiential DNA. I’ve always got a running list of things to blog, always hearing things - musical or otherwise - and wishing I could blog and drive at the same time, or teach and blog, or write a book and blog, or sleep and blog simultaneously. And of course moderating comments keeps averyfineline ever before me. It doesn’t do readers much good that I’m thinking about the blog almost constantly even when I’m not actually blogging, but I mention it at least as a way to say these hiatuses aren’t just benign neglect. Rather, they’re like Clark Kent unable to find a phone booth, or Popeye without spinach, or Peg McKamey with shoes that fit too tightly.

Kevin Ward makes a modest proposal to combat unwanted music clips on artist’s websites that blare out at you uninvited and unstoppable.

So at this point in my Gospel Music and American Lit course, we’re reading James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head, about a black gospel singer coming of age in the Civil Rights era, and I’m struggling to find a recording – indeed any evidence at all – of a song whose lyrics Baldwin refers to in the text. Here are the song lyrics, as given in the novel:

Faith I am maintaining
I go on, uncomplaining,
But, before this time, another year.
My life may all forsake me,
And death may overtake me,
If I’m with Thee,
I’ve no need to fear.

Make my pathway brighter,
Make my burden lighter,
Help me to do good whenever I can.
Let Thy presence thrill me,
Thy Holy Spirit fill me
And hold me in the hollow
Of Thy hand.

Part of me thinks I’ve heard the song before, but then again that could just because it relies on a fairly common set of stock images from gospel songs (or maybe I just really really like that first couplet so much I WISH I had encountered it before). I don’t know that it’s exclusively a black gospel tune but certainly the fact of its being in a novel about a black gospel singer would suggest it mostly likely comes from this tradition. Of course, this all assumes Baldwin didn’t just make the song up for the purposes of his novel. It’s possible, naturally, but I don’t think this is likely, since I’ve been able to identify and find recordings for pretty much every other song he references in the text.

At any rate, and assuming the song is real, I’ve searched high and low on the internet, or at least as high and as low as I can go, with no luck. I also find no references to the song in the secondary scholarship on the book and Baldwin that I’ve looked at so far. Obviously I’m a little far afield from my expertise with white gospel here. So I’m turning to your collective knowledge. Any chance any of you know of the song and/or where I can find a recording?

One benefit/risk of blogging about southern gospel is that you find out how the sausage is made pretty quickly. My interns turned deeply cynical some time ago (which is why I keep them in the basement of Avery HQ), and sometimes a dispatch from the inner rings of the industry will make its way to the subterranean mailroom and I’ll hear a collective chuckle and a “that’s about what I’d expect” coming from the intake team. Sometimes the news from our industrially embedded correspondents contradicts those jaundiced interns (rarely, but it happens). And then there are those messages that achieve a kind of architectural, monumental place in the annals of southern gospel. That’s the context for this email, which came our way a few days ago. It was received by an artist under contract with a major sg label, from a prominent sg radio promoter:

Hi its [xxxx]. I know you spoke to [xxxx] in my office at one time. I kept your song on my IPOD….. I  am going crazy over your song!!!!!!! UNBELIEVABLE!!!! I played it for President Obama, and he cried!!! He said it was his heart song….He said it painted his path so clearly of what God wished for his presidency. I just wanted to share this with you. If your in the DC area sometime, Id love to have you come by the White House. Not sure when we can plan this…But, it would be AMAZING….

WOW!! Great moment…the Lord fell…..

If I had smarter interns, they’d probably have come up with an audacity joke or something. But I don’t, so you’re gonna hafta talk amongst yourselves on this one.

Via Daniel Mount (via Dean Adkins’ YouTube video archive), a clip of the Cathedrals singing “He Left it All” with the rarely remembered Kurt Young:

Some random thoughts:

1. That’s a really fine song.

2. One of my favorite parts of this clip is Mark Trammell’s harmonic inflections on the choruses. A lot of people - including Trammell himself, judging by this comment - seem to take George Younce’s remark that Trammell was the best quartet man Younce knew to be an endorsement of Trammell as a marquee front man. But watching this clip makes me re-wonder if Younce’s comment might have actually been a way of acknowledging Trammell’s superior, understated ability to lay down some of the best harmony in the bidness from the back of the stage. You can’t have a great quartet, after all, without good harmony, and few people have demonstrated an ability to get out of the way and do their quartet jobs as well, with as little overweening showiness, as Trammell in the ensemble.

3. Kurt Young is mostly remembered as the guy who blew his performance with the Cats at the Doves and got fired. But this clip helps contextualize his brief stint a little better. He’s not without vocal ability, of course, and he has the right look for the Cats. But he also struggles to place his tones and, more deeply, he doesn’t have much a rapport with the audience - hard to put my finger on what it is that gives me this feeling … but … well, ok … look at the way he holds the mic at the very tip end of the wand, up and away from his chin, and the way his whole upper body remains bent back and away from the audience almost the entire time … used sparingly, this posture can convey a sense of rapture and awe before divine Providence shining down from above, but striking this pose as consistently as Young does here makes it seem after awhile to be emblematic of a certain coldness or distance that he gave off on stage.

4. It’s certainly not unique to this clip, but notice the way Glen Payne stands behind Young during his second verse and talks him up all the way through to the chorus … shouting little encouragements or annotating some note or line of particular emphasis with a short shout or happy hoot or hand gesture or whatever. Happens all the time,  I know, and most people probably just chalk it up to supporting a colleague at work. But of course there’s more to it than that. For one thing, when a more famous or well-known or beloved singer like Payne - whom audiences respect and implicitly trust to know what good music is - gets behind a singer like Young in this way, it shapes the audience’s response to the performance, particularly when the performance isn’t going as well as it might. Back in the day when I was hacking my way through songs at the keyboard for a regional quartet, our front man would often take to carrying on a la Payne in this clip precisely when solos were going downhill or starting to fall flat. Is there a shorthand name for this that anyone knows of?

A gospel-music songwriter passed along this link recently about Rascal Flatts’ treatment of its songwriters. Money quote:

 Band members Gary LeVox, Joe Don Rooney and Jay DeMarcus wanted to recognize the 80 or so songwriters who have contributed work to the group’s six studio albums. So the guys booked the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum and threw a big party with food, plaques and singing.

“We just wanted to say thank you,” LeVox said. “We don’t just have professional relationships with these cats, we have personal relationships with them, too. We are always touring and they are always writing, and they are always traveling and we are always traveling, and after 10 years of being able to do what we love to do it’s a big, huge milestone. We just wanted to get them all in here to say thanks for a wonderful 10 years.”

But the trio did more than that: They asked the writers to each bring along two songs to pitch for the band’s next studio CD.

Until Taylor “Maybe She’s Not the Best Technical Singer” Swift at the Grammys, I would have said that Rascal Flatts is probably the most pitch-challenged act in country music today, but they get major props for treating their songwriters so well.

Perhaps needless to say, this contrasts mightily with sg. My gospel songwriting correspondent,  who writes for top-tier groups, had this to say:

If, like we all are fond of saying, it all begins with song - then wouldn’t it behoove artists to treat songwriters like Rascal Flatts does?  I can’t tell you how often artists contact me - desperate for “hit songs” - and then, after I send them a stack of my latest/greatest, I hear nothing…(crickets)…not a “thank you” - not a “I got them and will give them a listen” - nothing.  Total silence.

I do understand that it can be awkward to respond, specifically, to a writer about his songs - especially if you don’t love them all.  But I’ve had scores of artists who’ve gone on to record my songs - even singled them - and I wasn’t extended the courtesy of a single note of thanks or even a copy of the product itself.  I’ve joked that I’ve actually spent more money purchasing CD’s of my songs than I’ve made from royalties off those songs - assuming that I was even paid royalties!

I don’t know if artist in SG are ignorant, rude, over-extended, or a combination of all three.  But I do know that what Rascal Flatts has done should serve as an indictment to all artists who take for granted the hands that feed them.

Thanks to reader RK for first alerting me this a.m. to Justin Ellis’s departure as the all-purpose keyboard player for several of the various Crabb family spin-offs out there. This comment suggests he going to work for John Hagee, which makes sense since one of the Crabb twins and his wife signed on with Hagee not too long ago. It’s too bad to see such a talented guy scatter his force this way. I mean, I get that the audience is larger and the money is no doubt better and steadier with Hagee, but … yeah … well, it’s Hagee, who seems to be on a prolonged campaign to be a kind of one-stop-shopping for Christian craziness.

Anyway, I’ve been so deeply and abidingly impressed with Ellis’s subtly and gracefulness at the keyboard that I think I kinda made that silly fanboy mistake of not remembering that artists don’t always make professional decisions that I like as much as their music.  In any event, good luck, Justin.

Scott Fowler’s most recent SN column offers some push-back against Pat Robertson’s latest bit of bilious ignorance, urging financial support for the Haiti relief effort. Good for him.

Fowler gets a lot wrong politically – mostly recently Ollie North (!) and Mike Huckabee – and one could wish that prominent evangelicals in southern gospel were half as courageous in denouncing the fringers amongst them as they are positioning themselves as victims of pervasive anti-Christian bias from the stage. But it’s good to see someone of some recognition push back against the likes of Robertson.

If I had my druthers, I’d say just give money directly to the Red Cross or other relief organizations that have a more encompassing mission and presence than Fowler’s recommendation of Compassion International, which - in addition to being slathered over with Sally Struthers-style hucksterism - focuses (rather narrowly in this particular crisis) only on children. And too, I guess it’s grading on a pretty steep curve to give credit as if it’s some accomplishment when an evangelical celebrity simply comes out in favor of, you know … helping people in need and stuff. But such is the state of allegedly Christian discourse in America today (see here for some cogent reflection on the penchant amongst prominent evangelical preachers toward outrageous nonsense). Let’s take sanity - and small-c compassion - where we find it.

Our story so far: A while back in an open-thread free-for-all, the issue of the SG Hall of Fame in Dollywood came up, specifically the number of HOF inductees whose commemorative bronze plaques had not secured a sponsor. Currently, sponsorship rates per plaque seem to be going for $2000 and of 114 inductees, 15 or so are still without an underwriter, comprising a so-called deadbeat list.

Some people find this state of affairs disrespectful and appalling, others think the HOF is effectively money changing in the temple of southern gospel memory, and others think the inductees and/or their heirs or estates need to pony up in recognition of the honor bestowed upon them.

All caught up, now? Good, because now things get interesting (or not … I’m working with the material I got here folks).

Comes then Melvin Klaudt, of the Klaudt Indian Family, who doesn’t really seem to have wanted his mother honored by the HOF in the first place, resented a $2000 invoice for her HOF plaque  showing up in the mail, and wants her plaque to come down. Now.

My mother, Lillian Little Soldier Klaudt was inducted in 2004. She had a picture on a plaque for a couple of years. Unknowing to us, this was changed to a bust that cost $2,000. Our foundation, Klaudt Indian Memorial Foundation, was billed $2,000. for the bust after the fact. There is an ethical question besides a financial obligation attached to this. We, according to our 501 c 3 public charity IRS ruling couldn’t take the funds out of the foundation to pay it in the first place.

[snip]

Finally, my mother has other more important spiritual things to lay at the feet of Jesus than a SGM hall of fame plaque.

Full disclosure of the $2,000. must be disclosed to the public who are excited to nominate somone deserving of this award. I seems like everything else, lets just buy us an award. SGM is eat up with awards. Every year there is a new one.

I beg the Hall to remove my mother from this honor and remove her name from the deadbeat list. She evidently does not deserve it.

Full comment here.

Tonight, Harold Timmons, of the Chuck Wagon Gang, wrote in, begging to differ with Klaudt:

While I do respect Mr. Melvin’s Klaudt’s opnion, I do challenge his position on asking that his Mother be removed from the SGM HOF wall for any reason. The Chuck Wagon Gang worked with the Klaudt Indian Family many times during the ‘60’s and even into the ‘70s at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. The Klaudt Indian Family and The Chuck Wagon Gang were regular members of the highly syndicated TV series, “Bob Poole’s Gospel Favorites”. To me, the Klaudt Indian Family are unique unto themselves, as of Indian Heritage as well as involved in “Southern Gospel Music”. It was a board of directors who recognized Mrs. Klaudt and her contribution. It was the voters who agreed with the nominating committee, who in essence bestowed the honor of inducting Mom Klaudt into the SGM HOF. How on earth can anyone, even a family member, ask that Mrs. Klaudt removed for any reason?

Southern Gospel Music in some aspect works on a play “B” almost daily, and most certainly there could be a plan “B” in situations on the SGMA HOF list. This could be a family split of the dues due, or fans or friends, or even some businessmen.

Full comment here.

I really don’t have a dog in this fight. I’d much rather see the HOF focus more on bolstering its curatorial dimension in order to become a hub for the preservation and study of the music. But then again, that costs money and if selling HOF plaques is a way to raise money that supports a worthy, underlying cause, so be it.

In any event, though, one does have to wonder how hard the HOF is really trying to fund these plaques if, as Timmons says in his comment, da Gang was unaware “that no contributions had been received since [Anna Carter Gordon Davis’s] nomination” and only learned of the situation “by recently visiting this site.”

(For the record, and before Charlie Waller puts a check in the mail, I have decided to forgo my HOF Plaque Funding Broker’s commission.)

An sg-lovin’ former publisher of CCM Magazine doesn’t come off looking too good in this excerpt from Matthew Paul Turner’s book, Hear No Evil, which has the publisher demanding that a reporter extract an apology from Amy Grant for her divorce from Gary Chapman, and then fabricating the apology when Grant herself  wouldn’t give one (h/t, NG). Money quote:

Amy’s face still graced the cover of CCM that month, but the story printed only loosely resembled the one I wrote. Gerald forced my editorial director to rewrite the story. The new story featured Amy miraculously apologizing. Her quotes were fabricated and molded into something that didn’t represent her story or my story, but rather a story that reflected the moral absolutes Gerald believed CCM hadn’t upheld until he was in charge.

The whole thing is here.

Update, also via NG: two links, one to a page that appears to link to the CCM article in question, another that appears to be the raw transcript from the interview on which the article was evidently based. Now what would really be interesting to see is Turner’s first draft … the one he said Gerald threw on the floor.

What better way to start the week off right than with a free-for-all open thread? I’ll throw the first few punches.

• Via Daniel Mount, Jason Crabb just won a Grammy for his solo album. I reviewed it here if you want to refresh your memory or catch up on things.

• The Mike LeFevre quartet  is no longer Priority and is now back to being the LeFevre quartet.

• KPNR has hired a replacement for Devin McGlamery and Mark Trammell quartet hired the Dixie Echoes’ bass singer away to round out the new MTQ.

• The Singing News Fan Awards are moving to Dollywood. I think the consensus opinion that has emerged is about right: it’s a dumb move from both ends. On the NQC side, we get more predictable high hat: in this case, it probably involved something like giving the SN a take-it-or-leave-it offer to turn the awards show into a ticketed showcase in the afternoon. For the SN’s part, they clearly seem to have felt they had no option but walk away, and Charlie Waller’s involvement in the new arrangement will probably mean he can deliver a few hundred GOGR folks to ensure the place isn’t empty on awards night. But in terms of industry profile and influence, Dollywood and the Hall of Fame are pretty much an axis of irrelevance (see here for Exhibit A).

• Welcome southerngospelworld to the sg blogosphere.

• I’m pretty fond of the Bowling Family’s new single off their Shine album, “I Still Glory in the Cross,” particularly the ascending chord progression in the chorus (make sure you catch the final chorus’ revoicing of the parts!) and the lines that make like they’re going to rhyme lost with cross but don’t … that kind of lyrical mutability helps keep music as reliant as gospel is on familiar tropes and images from going too stale (there is a so-called listening party for the album over at GospelMusicUpdate). Plus the title gave me a reason to go back and listen to Larnelle Harris’s rendition of “I Will Glory In the Cross,” which still knocks the top of your head off.

What else?

Brian Eno on the allure of gospel singing:

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything’s going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records – and I have – and try to distil what they all have in common it’s a sense that somehow we can triumph. There could be many thousands of things. But the message… well , there are two messages… one is a kind of optimism for the future rather than a pessimism. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it’s never ‘oh my god, its all going down the tubes’, like the blues often is. Gospel music is always about the possibility of transcendence, of things getting better. It’s also about the loss of ego, that you will win through or get over things by losing yourself, becoming part of something better. Both those messages are completely universal and are nothing to do with religion or a particular religion. They’re to do with basic human attitudes and you can have that attitude and therefore sing gospel even if you are not religious.

The whole thing is worth a read, if for nothing else than the chance to stumble on the phrase “mutant gospel.”

Over at musicscribe, David Bruce Murray is conducting a (to me) fascinating little poll that asks readers to rate the “relative appeal” of artists on the NQC mainstage in 2010. He’s got preliminary results up but is still taking responses. Go drop him a line.

Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been working a lot today with results from the survey I conducted (and many of you participated in) last year, but DBM’s results so far are very interesting, not so much b/c there any real shockers (Booth Brothers are No. 1, natch … and the Inspirations rate pretty low down, but then their fan base is probably less likely to be online too) but because it provides an empirical way to adjudicate all the competing claims out there about what fans want and don’t want etc.  No, Virginia, people really don’t enjoy the Pfeifers (relatively speaking, of course).

Setting aside for the moment the old “gospel always means black” fallacy at work here, this article reminds me of all the stories I’ve heard from sg insider types about the troves and troves of recordings abandoned and forgotten and dry rotting all over Nashville and other points south (h/t, GT). It also demonstrates that the digital age empowers players who would have been marginalized in the pre-digital era but who now are able to, as in this case, hold down a full time IT job while compiling a museum-quality collection of southern vernacular music.