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It’s taken me … well, let’s just say an embarrassingly long time to realize I could download television programs from iTunes onto my iPod and watch them while I’m on the elliptical, and I’ve just started Big Love, which a friend tells me often includes gospel music. But of course one always need to switch up one’s routine so I’m looking for good, ideally new(ish) sg recommendations to accompany on the exercise machine.

Now, I hasten to add that I’m not one of those gym monkeys who need a 150-mm tune to work out to (”I Rest My Case at the Cross” got me through the last few minutes the other day). And it need not even be new (though newer would probably be more interesting). In general, I’m just looking for stuff that keeps your attention and moves you along toward the mark of the high calling … or, barring that, the finish line. In particular, I’d love to stumble onto something that gives the equivalent experience of what, say, First Love’s debut and only album provided when I popped it into the mix for the treadmill years ago. I wanted to run somewhere … and did!

PS: of course I’m a musical omnivore so I’ll take non-sg recs too.

I suspect that most sg types could really not care less than they already do about the Doves (the SN hasn’t even bothered to post a link to the story on its site). If you’re one of those people, this is probably not the post for you. Otherwise, here we go:

If you want a round up the cross section of opinion about the Doves’ move to Atlanta, check out the comments section on the Tennesseean’s story (h/t, SS). There’s race-baiting, some Sister Bertha Better than Youing, some praise and excitement, some inside baseball critiques of the GMA and its utility and function, and one gloaty post about NQC’s success compared to the Doves’ perpetual self-embattlement and constant attempts to reinvent itself, to not much avail. You can almost see that last commenter giving the raspberry while typing. But the most insightful take might well be the theory that the GMA’s alliance with the Gospel Music Channel is as much behind this as any attempt to shore up the black (”traditional” in the GMA’s parlance) gospel audience. At least this seems among the more plausible things I’ve heard.

I don’t know CCM that well and have only a cursory knowledge of the GMA, so I’ll stick to what I know and say that the comparison to NQC seems to me both right and wrong. Right, in that, while it has its problems and faces some structural challenges to its sustainability, NQC obviously knows how to maintain a strong bond with its base in a way and to an extent that the GMA obviously has not, and probably can’t.

Which gets us to the wrong part. NQC is a niche event. Probably any one of the major genres included under the GMA heading could draw a similar crowd by itself (and of course a few of the major CCM artists can draw as big a crowd as any single night at NQC alone), but put them all together under one umbrella organization and you’ve got an impossibly diverse range of sounds and (sub)cultures intermixing in a way that inevitably tries, as one commenter notes, to be everything to everyone … and so leaves nobody terribly satisfied.

Not every genre within GMA has southern gospel’s fractious history with the organization (David Bruce Murray provides a useful summary if you’re just joining us; I have a lot more to say about this sordid past but I’ll save for it the book). But with the exception of the reigning pop Christian kings and queens who always get plenty of face time on the Doves, I’m sure fans and artists from most subcategories represented in the televised portion of the show have beefs with how “their” music is treated.

I don’t have a beef with how southern gospel is treated. If it sold more, it’d get better treatment. It’s that simple (plus, so much of the sg industry acting like southern gospel is owed something by the GMA because James and J.D. were founders of the organization half a century ago doesn’t really help, I’m sure).

No, my beef with the show is that it’s the Christian music equivalent of what would happen if you tried to combine the MTV Awards, the Country Music Association Awards, the Tonys, the Delilah Show (she actually has been a presenter at the Doves!), and a Sunday morning service at Joel Osteen’s church all into one two-hour broadcast of awards and performances and hosty chatter. In other words, the Doves are weirdly but reliably dissatisfying, and I say that as someone who always goes ready to be blown away or at least entertained by whatever … and yet I always leave feeling glad I got my overpriced tickets comped. That is, if you were someone not really sure what Christian music is about or wondering if you might like all or some of it, the Dove Awards would probably be a great introduction. But since the Doves’ audience is actually people who already have established tastes and allegiances within Christian entertainment, it’s almost destined to fail for the same reason that southern gospel artists consider a Singing News Fan Award more important than a Dove Award.

Moving to Atlanta will not change any of this. But it may make some sponsors and a core fan constituency of the GMA happy, and that’s not nothing  if you care about that little gold pigeony statuette.

Update: Jim Cumbee, former big wig at Salem Communications (Singing News’ parent company)  and a former NQC board member (among other things), writes with some salient insights on this issue:

Your instinct is right, in part.  The GMA does not have an “alliance” with the Gospel Music Channel, the Gospel Music Channel is — right now, anyway — the LIFELINE of the GMA.  The CCM industry has been absorbed in getting the Dove Awards on TV, otherwise the record companies wouldn’t force the artists to appear, and with no star power there can be no ridiculously high ticket price, and with no high ticket prices, the show loses even more money. It’s a vicious cycle from which the GMA could never extricate itself. Bottom line, getting the show on TV has always been the prerequisite to even having a show.  So when GMC says jump the GMA has to say “how high?”   The costs to tape in Nashville are ridiculously high and GMC is moving its programming away from music, so GMC has less financial incentive to stretch to make it work.  I imagine the message was something like this “if you want us to broadcast the Doves on GMC, you have to come to Atlanta where our cost to tape the show are much less.”  I am a huge fan of Ed Leonard; he’s the smartest guy in the SG business and he’s built a very fine company over at Daywind.  But, I can’t figure why he didn’t just say we are accommodating our TV partner.  In that context, going to Atlanta makes perfect sense.

Thanks to this commenter for flagging the Dove Awards’ move to Atlanta, at least for next year. Maybe permanently?

Meanwhile, the Tennesseean’s story describes a fairly grim corporate situation at the GMA: a staff of 18 reduced to three, relying heavily on volunteers, and a significant cutback to GMA week activities. None of this is exactly new news, mind you, but interesting all the same for those of who don’t pay super close attention to such things on a regular basis.

So what’s going on with southern gospel’s favorite boy band dancing quartet these days? Well, last week it seems they headlined the Stamps-Baxter School of Music, to mostly rave reviews. Here’s an email I received a few days after the event:

I think what blew everyone away is that SigSound hauled in their whole lights/sound/backdrop, etc., for the show. They were dressed to the nines, etc., just as if it were a real concert. Ben Speer [who owns and runs the school] was visibly impressed with their show, and made jokes about adding a dance class to next year’s school, but he didn’t do it in a condescending way, but in a very flattering way, actually.  No real surprises to their show, other just really giving it 110%.

Another correspondent confirmed this view:

At first I didn’t know why the group brought the “full enchilada.” Most acts come in casually and that’s understandable because it’s a summer school, but afterward I understood why they did it. The kids loved it. And they appeared to be buying a bunch of a product after the show.

Smart stuff indeed. I mean, it’s an audience of a coupla hundred kids who for the most part all want to be or become EHSSQ. If your audience has visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads, it doesn’t hurt to show up in a big fat candy truck.

And anyway, it probably wasn’t that big of a deal for the group to pull the full enchilada since they were headed to the Gaither mothership for the Cathedrals tribute taping. The only complaint-like thing I’ve heard about the performance was their decision to sing “Old Convention Song.” And it was an odd choice. Despite the title, it’s not actually an old convention song, of course. Rather it’s about a bunch of other songs that are really old convention tunes. I mean, sure, they were probably rehearsing material for the Cats tribute album, since the Cats popularized the song way back when, but still … if you’re at a singing school that teaches convention singing, why not sing… you know, an actual convention song?

A few days later, the group recorded the Cats tribute. Daniel Mount has a descriptive summary of the event. So does Nate. Aside from a clunky segment with Bill Gaither near the middle of the show and an overheated auditorium that required a lot of breaks for makeup reapplication, it sounds like it went smoothly, at least from the email I’ve received (I’ve asked a friend to repost her email in comments for all to see).

In other words, Signature Sound has been a bunch of busy beavers. A recent commenter on another thread wonders why EHSSQ has largely stopped putting out new material since Dream On, but I suspect the group is playing a longer game than the one that measures a quartet’s success by whether it has a new project every year full of mostly mediocre tunes with a few cuts respectable enough to go to radio. They’ve spent the last few years establishing themselves at an increasing distance from the Homecoming crowd without actually breaking ties with Gaitherland. And now comes the Cats tribute recording, which will, I imagine, probably more or less cement the group’s claim to the George and Glen legacy, at least as a brand (that is, selling product and putting butts in seats  by using the group’s connection to the Cats).

Thus, new music is really beside the point. They can do that, but so can (and does) everyone else. For EHSSQ it’s not really what their brand is about, as far as I can tell. And if this approach sounds familiar, … well, it is. In fact, it’s basically the Homecoming model writ small in a single group: Old favorites and a smattering of new stuff held together by a signature style. The glue is not the “new” but a certain way of producing and arranging and, of course, a very meticulously cultivated brand of singing and showmanship.

Sure, the breathy singing makes me wince, and the some of the more peacocky pretensions of the group’s onstage persona can be off putting, and Ernie’s emcee work gives me the willies a lot of the time and no they can’t really dance … but blah blah blah. It’s hard to argue with their commitment to what they see as their vision of quality or excellence or whatever you want to call it. And they’ve got the popularity and the success to show for it. This is impressive, particularly at a time when what are typically considered top-tier acts in the bidness count singing to a few hundred people at any given venue a good night. In other words, a lot of groups like to ride on the big-fish/small-bowl reputation of themselves as top-tier sg acts, but very few groups are actually achieving top-tier status in terms that wouldn’t be laughed at out outside sg. Or as one reader put it to me in an email:

Maybe I’m just drinking the Signature Sound kool-aid these days, but you know what? They give a damn. They really do, and you can see it in their shows: they’re in shape and take care about their appearance and style. And from a performance angle, you don’t get that kind of precision on stage without rehearsing hours a day. And when you do that, then you can go out on stage and have fun for two hours! Because they know what they’re doing and they’re not stepping all over each other’s lines and pissed off at each other for screwing things up or missing opportunities. And then, when the concert is over and they stand around in their sweaty suits signing autographs and talking to fans for as long as it takes.

Maybe that’s why they can go to Lancaster, PA (no southern gospel stronghold!) and sell thousands of tickets (I’d guess upwards of 2500-3000ish when I saw them) and move a ton a product, if their table traffic is any rough guide.

A few weeks ago, I caught Gold City and frankly, it disgusted me. Seriously. I’ve been in the business for decades and I love it. Love it death, but unfortunately I think that’s what’s happening to so much of the music: a slow, agonizing death by the lazy performance of countless sloppy songs. Watching Gold City, I saw these arrogant men in their S&K suits get up there looking bored out of their minds belching out the same songs they’ve been wheeling out of cold storage for 20 years and they wonder why they can’t sell records anymore. Well, out of the 200 people who came to see you the night I was there (no doubt many of them out of respect for how you used to sing and perform), probably 150 of them will be dead in five years so you better come up with some new schtick fast because the clock is ticking on your tiny little kingdom, mister.

I have no idea if Kim Hopper has had plastic surgery (a topic of hot debate in comments recently) and to be perfectly honest, I don’t really care. I won’t exactly say it’s nobody’s business, since Hopper’s a celebrity in gospel music and like most southern gospel personalities, the Hoppers do ask their fans to invest heavily and personally in the image of the person on stage, and that includes the kinds of aesthetics bound up in plastic surgery. But like I said, I just really don’t care. And anyway, it sounds like Kim Hopper has a lot more serious health issues right now and my good thoughts go out to her.

But if the Hoppers don’t want to have to, as one commenter put it, “come and out correct” erroneous facebook comments that claim Connie Hopper has had plastic surgery, then they might want to rethink some of their media kits. Here’s what  I mean. Below, an image of Connie Hopper and family from one of the images the group has been using for a while now in its publicity.

Now here’s what we might best be called a more candid shot of Connie Hopper from around the same time*:

Mind you, Connie Hopper looks great here and she’s always a class act on stage. But I’ve asked two different people without interest or knowledge of sg in general or Connie Hopper in particular to look at that first picture and tell me how old they think the woman on the right is and one said late 30s, the other said early 40s. And they’re right. I mean, sure, good lighting and makeup can take a few years off but the woman occupying Connie Hopper’s position in that first photo looks like she’s just walked out of consecutive episodes of Nip/Tuck, Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style, and Queer Eye for the Southern Gospel Grandmother. And a reasonable fan who saw that first image after having seen Connie Hopper in person could, without knowing any better, fairly wonder about plastic surgery.

One final, updated thought: the Hoppers of course are free to do whatever they want in their publicity, and frankly, aside from making them look  a little vain and silly (I agree with this comment, that they all look touched up to varying degrees), this kind of thing is pretty harmless. But more substantively, it might do well for all of us to ask ourselves why it matters so much if Kim Hopper had plastic  surgery, yet we don’t go every man, woman and child to the internet to debate all the bad toupees and Just for Men mustaches out there from Jake Hess and Hovie Lister (and Claude Hopper, perhaps?) on down. No doubt gender bias and body image norms are a big part of it, but we need not conduct a gender studies seminar to note the disparity in the way discussions of male and female celebrity are conducted. From a purely personal perspective in the peanut gallery, I find the ridiculous hair pieces and the hair colors not found in nature that so many men are so badly indulging in (Ron Popeil hair paint, anyone?) to be far more visually off-putting than whatever plastic surgery Kim Hopper or any other woman may or may not have had (here, of course, I’m talking mainly about the sorts of plastic surgery that aren’t obvious to the average observer/fan; those cosmetic augmentations designed to elicit widespread notice are another story entirely).

*In case you want to check my work, here’s the source for the first photo (the Hoppers themselves are still using a version of this photo on their own site) and the second photo. I don’t have exact dates for either image, but they’re within a year or two of one another, at the most, I’d guess.

Some items that don’t warrant posts of their own but might still be worth mentioning as we head into the weekend:

• Crossroads Music is offering a free download of Lauren Talley’s new release, “In Christ Alone.” It’s a little Paula-Stefanovichy for my taste but hey … it’s free, until Monday.

• Oh the Hairmanity: Via DBM (by way of Daniel MountDean Adkins), watch Tim Riley’s Combover Mullet from ca. early 80s get the scraps that Rusty Goodman throws to him on “Let Your Fingers do the Walkin.’” Is it just me or was Rusty tryin’ way too hard to be southern gospel’s Conway Twitty?

• Daniel has reviewed a DVD release of clips from the old Sing Out America show, now available (in an earlier version of this post I mistakenly conflated the clip above with this DVD). Looks like a decent collection with decent image quality, for footage from the 80s.

• EHSSQ performed at the Stamps-Baxter School of Music Wednesday night. Anybody there have a report and/or audio/video clip?

• Following our Freedom Singers immigration discussion, I noticed that a CCM singer is having his own immigration woes.

Consider this an open thread. I’ll be back early next week.

This rubric to lyrics about getting places has been pinging around the twitterverse and blogosphere this a.m.:

Wonder what a sg version of this sort of thing would look like? Off the top of my head:

The gate: old, old highway (the one called straight)
The place where I am waiting now: Damascus Road
That land of perfect peace and endless day: Glory Road
That blissful shore (via the Union Depot): Life’s railway
Back home: wing it

Feel free to add your own.

From “gospelvideohub” via email this a.m., a golden gift: a link to what longtime readers know to be one of my favorite cuts …. well, pretty much ever: the Greenes’ “More Precious than Gold,” from Tenth Anniversary Live (the live video and live audio-only versions are remarkably similar, right down to Tony’s overlong prayer in the middle). Enjoy:

Since I posted about the Freedom Singers a few days ago, I’ve gotten a few emails and at least one comment in the vein of this reader’s sentiments:

I saw the Freedom Singers at the Gaither Family Fest in May. And anyone with a heart will sympathize with them. Their story is very compelling. And when they sing Because He Lives in Romanian, the whole place stands in praise of religious freedom.

But here’s what nobody is saying: these boys illegally entered Canada on a barge. They were using a sort of “black market” deal … basically like the coyotes that smuggle folks across the US/Mexico border. Yet the Fox News crowds that stand and applaud the Freedom Singers for their courage would be all for sending a Mexican who did the same thing packing. So, the Romanian refugees get a break because they love Gaither? Oh, and they’re white. But the latino maids and leaf blowers MUST GO!

AND, they can’t sing worth a crap!

We’ll return to the quality of singing in a bit. For now, let’s stick with the immigration angle.

I get what the reader is saying, and doubtlessly there is some element of hypocrisy and/or a certain blindness to the double standard that may be in play here in some instances. But my guess is if you pressed many – maybe most? – of the conservative Christians who stand and clap for undocumented immigrants when it’s two guys from Romania on stage with Bill Gaither but who also insist on the deportation of all “illegal aliens” from Mexico and South America, they’d say that there’s a difference: namely, that the Freedom Singers were defacto asylum-seekers, in flight from religious persecution (and after reading Janet’s comment, I’m assuming here that they’ve sense received proper documentation from the Canadian government, which would explain their ability to travel and work in the United States*). (I don’t have any hard data to back this up, but my gut feeling is, whether intentionally or not, “illegal alien” is pretty much synonymous with latino/hispanic immigrants in most discussions of immigrations these days.)

It’s never been clear to me the exact nature of what one of the Freedom Singers refers to in their promo video as “some persecution” they were experiencing in Romania (a lot of the details of the backstory remain fuzzy, I gather, from the stage, though it is evidently explained in their book).

But whatever the exact details here, the Freedom Singers’ situation still seems an awfully lot like most immigration stories: people willing to undergo expensive, illegal, life-threatening hardship in search of a better life in North America.

Now, I’m sure there are plenty of folks who would value people immigrating for religious (or at least Protestant Christian) reasons of any sort over those mainly trying to improve the material conditions of their existence. And given all the human, legal, and social complexity of the immigration issue, I also think I get why a story like this one is so popular: it doesn’t look or feel like the typical south-of-the-border immigration stories we’ve become so desensitized to, and so it lets audiences tell themselves and others that they’re not against immigration (see I support these nice young men up there singing that Bill Gaither song), just the bad kinds. And then, too, there’s the singing-in-times-of-great-trial dimension to the story that provides an easy-to-grasp evangelical element to boot (Paul and Silas singing in prison etc).

The fact that many people who applaud the Freedom Singers’ story also support a zero-tolerance immigration policy in the U.S. doesn’t necessarily mean that all Christians are ethnocentric xenophobes who only want to keep out brown people, any more than all immigrants are system-gaming scofflaws here to mooch, scam, and exploit. The most we can say based on the evidence in both cases is that this is sometimes true.

What the Freedom Singers ought to remind us is that undocumented immigration has as many faces and stories as there are immigrants, and these stories complicate any one-dimensional view of immigration (what, for instance, is a term like “illegal aliens” but a rhetorical attempt to leach the human element out of the conversation?), even if we don’t hear about those stories from the Homecoming stage set to the tune of “Because He Lives.”

So much for the immigration question. Now: Does it matter if the Freedom Singers can’t really sing? David Bruce Murray says, not really. “If this trio can find a way to effectively communicate their story, people will want to hear them sing as well.”

Ah yes, … “if.” And there’s the rub. They’ve only just gotten started, but at this point, it’s still almost entirely a novelty act rather than a fully formed brand of any sort. And to some extent, a certain unpolished quality to the performance may actually help. Here, there’s not only the poor singing skills, but the amateur showmanship. On the video up at their site, watch the way the guy on the right stabs at his eyes with a fist in a far too conspicuous, stagey manner to be entirely believable right near the end of the song. He’s choked up enough to stop and dab his eyes … but manages to get right back in to the mix in time for the big finish. It’s transparent but the transparency is so earnest that it’s mildly endearing … a young Tony Greene does almost the exact same thing in that “When I Knelt” clip.

DBM compares the Freedom Singers to David Ring, who has made a sustainable gig out of his disability. Of course the Freedom Singers share some parallels insofar as their story of hardship is the organizing element of their appeal. But unlike Ring’s story, which is not anchored to a one-time event but evolves as his life unfolds before him and us, the Freedom Singers have a story of being locked in a container for Christ. Now that’s a powerful narrative, no doubt. But they’re here now … they’re free, and it’s not exactly clear where the energy for their story comes from after people hear and experience the group’s retelling of their original ordeal.

*See longtime (Canadian) reader NG’s helpful rundown of both some context and some relevant aspects of Canada’s immigration laws.

I was just writing about this song earlier in the week and so was thrilled today to happen upon what looks like a fairly recent upload to youtube of the Greenes performing it live in the 1980s (at least it sure appears to be the 80s, judging by Kim Greene’s hair, among other cosmetic differences). The notes from the uploader says this clip is from the 10th Anniversary Live recording, but I’m not so sure. At least Kim’s set up of the song differs from what I hear on the audio-only track I’ve been listening to for years, and the song itself is sung with slight but nevertheless perceptible differences. Plus I don’t hear the cello (or at least what sounds like a cello) accompaniment from the 10th Anniversary recording in this youtube clip (though I guess this and other differences could be the result of overdubs and studio “fixes”). (See here  and here for an explanation of the discrepancy … in short, this both is and isn’t the 10th Anniversary Live recording). No matter, a great find that captures a great moment of music in southern gospel.

Now if I could just find an upload of “More Precious Than Gold.”

PS: In case you’re wondering why I didn’t say more about the musical aspects of the recording, it’s because I’ve covered most of that ground  already.

PPS: For an earlier discussion  of the captive/captor issue in the first line of the song, see here.

A slow week, no? Or maybe it’s just my near total immersion in footnotes that’s blinding me to everything else in the world. Anyway, let’s see what we missed.

• The more or less complete NQC schedule is  out (h/t, Burke). I just scanned it very quickly so I’m sure I’ve missed plenty of interesting tea leaves to be read, but two things did stand out: no McKameys on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, and the Song of a Lifetime showcase is back.  I was at the first one of these showcases and was never as blown away as Phil Cross told us (over and over in countless emails) we should have been  but whatever. I’m not the target audience for this stuff. Still: how many songs of a lifetime - a lifetime, mind you - can there be for a writers out there in the sg world, really? At some point, this concept is going to lose its valence.

• Following up on my earlier post about David Phelps, Phil has some DIY clips of Phelps’s Ulster Hall concert.

• Scott Fowler is putting his weight behind a new group called the Freedom Singers, who seem to be leveraging their debut heavily on having fled Romania in search of religious freedom and undergone some pretty extreme ordeals in the process. I think I see why Fowler is backing them, but also I think these guys got some bad advice  from whoever told them the best way to tell their story was to hit the road as singers. As one reader put it in comments: “No disrespect to their story, but once you’ve heard it, and the singing doesn’t cut the muster, how many would actually go see them again?”

• David Bruce Murray rounds up some new Christmas music.

What else?

I’ve gotten a couple of emails about this clip and see that it’s showed up on at least one other blog: David Phelps doing “No More Night” partly in Romanian:

What’s so striking here is how effortless  all this is for him at this point. I don’t mean the Romanian stuff but the superhuman vocalizing. Go back and watch him on some of his earliest Gaither videos, and though he’s never seemed to struggle like most singers … ever … there’s a visible concentration to his manner, a certain selectivity about where and how he adds his ornaments and flourishes. It’’s not so much uncertainty as a degree of carefulness about how and when to hit the turbo button. Now … it seems like he’s just a one-man improvisational machine, riffing off his own ability.

There are draw backs to this approach for sure. A friend of mine emailed a few days ago to say Phelps singing this song gave him … well, the musical equivalent of something inappropriate to describe in polite company. But it actually seems to me like less could have been a lot more here at times … all the improvised filigrees and soaring acrobatics on nearly every note leading up to the big finish. My point here is not so much to complain (shocking, I know) as to note how unthinking all this overmuch ornamentation seems to be for Phelps. Reminds me a little of Loren Harris after he’d been singing “Wish I Coulda Been There” for so long that he started basically scatting his way through entire passages.

Back in another life, when I had been a church pianist for many more years than most children and young adults can stay focused on any one thing, I started to lose interest … in the songbooks from which I was getting material, in the bag of tricks and runs and fills I relied on, in myself, really. And so one day for the offertory I played a slow-downed, self-indulgently ornamental and fully sentimentalized version of … the Flintstones theme song.

A stupid stunt, I know, though actually, it wasn’t that bad, and I got several compliments afterward. I don’t mean to suggest that everyone ought to start pulling juvenile stunts to freshen up their repertoires. Rather it’s this: off-the-rack creative people in general get bored easily with their  own work. But astonishingly talented people like Phelps don’t just get bored. They reach a kind of zen in the art of entertainment where the crowd thrilling, ear pleasing inventory of moves and sounds and phrasings pour uninhibited from some deep-set wellhead of showmanship. And back on earth, all the rest of us can do is just stand and stare.

A reader weighs in on DBM’s attempt to measure artists of the decades:

I think it is hard to give anyone an entire decade. The Oaks seemed to dominate from around 1967-74. The Kingsmen seemed to dominate from around Chattanooga Live (late 70s) throughout the mid 80s and were still doing some good live stuff into the 90s. The 80s had Gold City and the Cathedrals putting out strong stuff.

It would be great if we had hard data like album sales along with #1 hits to help us make this determination.

An obvious but good point. It’s been a constant source of amazement to me how the fortune of a group or an artist can rise and fall so quickly. It may not be the most recent example but within the past decade, we’ve seen the Perrys more or less come to occupy the top spot among mixed groups once held by the Hoppers. And it seemed to happen within the space of a year two in 2003-05.

Of course to some extent there’s not a lot of mystery here: tastes are by their very nature fluid and fluctuant forces. But even if we know that tastes will change and artists will fall in and out of favor, it’s no less an exciting thing to experience when the ascendant group is riding high and the balance of audience delight is shifting from one focal point to another. In fact, it may well be the chance to  experience just such a moment that makes all the derivative, dull, and uninspired stuff tolerable.

So this little writing analyzer thingee has been making the rounds on the interwebs this week. It lets you plug in a sample of your writing. Then it spits back out the name of a writer that the analyzer-monkeys behind the screen say you write like. I plugged in the most recent post before this one about sailing on the Chesapeake, and it came back saying I write like H.P. Lovecraft. Erm, ok. So I plugged in a draft of the post you’re reading now: Margaret Atwood. Score! Finally, I plugged in a random passage from the book chapter I’m editing at the moment: James Joyce. My publisher ought to love that. Nothing says “buy me” like academic prose in the style of Joyce.

Fortunately these things are rather like horoscopes: fun and diverting, but craptastic as far as their predictive value. But don’t let that keep you from sharing your results.

So part of my holiday weekend involved sailing on the Chesepeake Bay, which was both the first time I’d been out on that particular body of water as well as my first time sailing. It was one of those large vessels that you rent with thirty or so of your closest friends whom you meet for the first time standing in line on the dock to board.

Anyway, it was a delightful experience, not least of all because it brought to life some of the antique imagery in so many old gospel tunes that remain dead metaphors for many of us, who don’t literally bring in the sheaves anymore, or leave the fold to find one little lost lamb or, in this case, get on board an old ship … is that the old ship of Zion I see … which I was singing (mostly to myself) on and off much of the time I was on the water.

The excursion I was on involved heading out an hour or so into the bay, coming around and heading back to the Annapolis marina. When the sails were fully unfurled and the boat gaining speed, I had no trouble understanding how songwriters from the days when sailing was a common part of everyday life would find in the experience a sense of majesty and power to be mobilized in lyrical imagery. Having only ever spent time on the water in fully motored crafts (save for canoes), I thought I had prepared myself for riding the waves in comparative silence. But of course intellection and experience are entirely different forms of knowledge, and it was thrilling the way the schooner cut through and shot across the water with quiet, astonishing power.

The weather was glorious (it was a few days before the crushing heat arrived), but when we came back into the marina, I thought of an old nineteenth-century song about piloting the ship of the soul safely home amidst the storms of life. I discovered it in researching the book, and had, conveniently enough, just picked out a few bars of it on the piano before I left for holiday. And so as we glided into port with the Maryland hills rising up before us, I hummed the first verse lightly to myself:

Land ahead! Its fruits are waving
O’er the hills of fadeless green;
And the living waters laving
Shores where heav’nly forms are seen.

Rocks and storms I’ll fear no more,
When on that eternal shore;
Drop the anchor! Furl the sail!
I am safe within the vail!

Patty Griffin has recorded an album of gospel songs and hymns (h/t, JL). The album, Downtown Church, gets its name from the Presbyterian church in Nashville where the recording took place. There’s a five-minute-ish clip of her talking about the project’s genesis and her own fraught relationship with religion and gospel music here. The full album is up at iTunes, and some of the clips sound pretty fantastic, including “House of Gold” and “Little Fire,” which features Emmylou Harris.

Via my pal M, a few xtranormal animated send-ups of the record industry in these latter days, including one specifically about Christian music.

Any takers on the CCM producer being sent up here? Ed Cash and Ian Eskelin came to mind, but then CCM isn’t really my bag. More likely, though, it’s just an amalgam of all the off-the-rack studio-session exchanges that go on a schmillion times a week.

Then there’s this descent into A&R madness:

SG just cries out to be given the full xtranormal treatment. Any takers?

I’ll be traveling for a long holiday weekend so you’re on your own, though ya’ll don’t take that well to supervision anyway so I ’spose this is all for the best. Here we go:

• David Bruce Murray has reprised his best of the decade polls, this time focusing on artists of the decade. Like all sequels, this one doesn’t sound as interesting or as enlightening as the first but everybody likes to take a poll, so here tis.

• Meanwhile, Kyle is back with another installment of his odd series, more recording oddities!

• Burke has a couple of interesting posts up about what he’s calling album amnesia. Worth checking out.

• A coupla people have emailed a link to this video from what the youtube notes are saying is the first Seamans Family concert (as in Frank). And now I’ve seen it show up on at least one blog and every time I see a reference to it people are carrying on about how great it is but I just don’t hear it. In fact in several  places - including the very beginning, big parts of the middle and lots of the end - it’s just a big hot mess.

• If you haven’t heard the Gatlin Brothers singing “In the Upper Room” on the Nashville Homecoming, … well, you really should. Though Gatlin has been there from the very first Homecoming Video Album, he gives the slight impression when he’s on a Homecoming tape that he’s just stopped by from his other more famous and important career in county to retouch-up his gospel roots, and this gets old after a while. Here he can’t resist “pretending” to correct Gaither’s songwriting skills on “The Upper Room” before singing it. It’s mildly funny but it’s also redolent of the popular kid who wants to play with the nerds but can’t resist making fun of them once they invite him over. But “The Upper Room,” sung like they sing it, can buy a guy a lotta forgiveness.

• While you’re at it, check out the Johnny Minick/Guy Penrod/Sheri Easter cover of “I Don’t Regret a Mile.” Minick’s is one of those voices I can’t stand by itself but that is marvelous in the right ensemble. And these three all have a complementary twang in their voices that blends, if not quite beautifully, then mighty powerfully.

All yours …

That was one commenter’s assessment of NPR’s piece on the bass singer Roger Menees’s world record for singing the lowest note. The print story is pretty much phoned-in boilerplate (you can listen to the on-air interview here), but the comments are definitely entertaining:

Woah. This subwoofer on the multimedia computer didn’t even pick the lowest frequency up. They cut out at the end, and then pick back up when he finishes burping and begins talking again. Wow.

The burping reaction seems to be common:

[T]his sounded much like a child drinking soda and sayingt he alphabet during a belching contest.

Even dogs get in on the act:

What a fascinating story - however, my 8 1/2 terrier mix Smokey went crazy, thinking there was somekind of large growling predator lurking somewhere in our kitchen. Thanks for messing with my dog’s mind

Please note, if you’re trying to perpetuate this deadend debate about homosexuality - the same one we’ve had around here schmillions of time -  your comments probably aren’t getting approved. That’s by design.

In threads where I’ve started a conversation about sexuality, I usually let the discussion go where it will so long as it remains largely civil. But this one was not even remotely close to the  issue of  homosexuality - I mean, since when did a comment about Sue Dodge = go to gay, go directly to gay? - and the “debate” was going nowhere. And yet here we are. What that says about who precisely is obsessed with da gays around here is a conversation for another time. For now, let’s move on and give some air to those who have something new and/or interesting to say.

I’ve emailed you personally to say as much if you’d tried to post in this line the last few days, except for those of you who use bogus email addresses. So at this point, please consider yourself personally notified. Thanks.