averyfineline

What he said. (Congrats, btw, to Martin Roth on what looks like a book (re)publication?)

Via Martin Roth, an “absorbing” (his apt word) look both at Mary-Tom Speer Reid’s life and career and at gender and the SGMA Hall of Fame inductees on the occasion of Speer Reid’s induction. This is a much tougher issue to plunge into than you might think at first (there’s the competing values systems of […]

Just a quick note to explain that I’m going to start trying more consciously to write less cleverish or quippy titles and be more topical, mostly as a way to try to boost the circulation of my ideas and your feedback around the rest of the world wide web via Google. This article in this […]

The Lesters are in Illinois this weekend and one of avfl’s roving interns sent me this text message earlier tonight:
I am listening to the Lesters sing right now in Paris, Ill. — they have NEVER sounded better!!! IMHO. Ginger’s daughter is pretty freaking awesome!!!!

David Bruce Murray pulls out all the stops and stars and gives Valor’s new cd FIVE stars. Wow. Even for a reviewer who tends, in my opinion, to be a bit starry eyed in his reviews, this makes me want to go out and get this cd. A year or so ago I caught a […]

This comment from the discussion thread is worth promoting to the main page as a balance to the diesel-sniffing angle from a few posts ago:
The flip side of what you’re saying, Avery, is that there are many artists who are paranoid. They make themselves unapproachable in many cases because of their perceived vulnerability to […]

Daniel Mount thinks the results of a Singing News poll about downloading sg — 15% say they have downloaded sg online; 85% say they haven’t — are skewed by faulty wording. “My instant reaction upon seeing the poll was that it was referring to illegal downloads.” But isn’t the simpler answer that the results refer […]

This is the group name I think I’ll use whenever me one or two other guys (or gals) in the group I just started get ticked off about something – the way the take at the table is divided or who controls the sliders on stage or how many monitors I carried and you didn’t, […]

It’s been a slow week or two at avfl hq (which means a really busy real world). You know what that means. Yup. Emails about diesel sniffers. Take it away, Thorn.

May I broach the subject of obsessive fans? Having been around the industry for many years, both as a vocalist and as a promoter, […]

This could really be something: From Chuck Peters’ ShowPrep:
Ginger Pitchers [Brian Lester’s sister] and her daughter Jenny Revelle are returning to the Lesters. They will be replacing Liz McMillan and Trecia Cisneros. Pitchers and Revelle will be joining Brian and Jonathan Lester in their family ministry, at least until the end […]

A copy of O Happy Day, the story of the Happy Goodmans, signed by Rusty, Sam, Vestal, and Howard goes on the block at ebay (hat tip, TM).

Is it verifiable, documentable and documented truth that southern gospel was Elvis’s favorite music and/or that he REALLY wanted to grow up and be a gospe quartet man but couldn’t sing harmony (well enough)? Or this is all old lore that just collects and perpetuates itself among sg types? I really would prefer/do need chapter […]

I’ve moved recently, and so naturally this upends long-ago untouched piles of accumulated stuff that I forgot I even had. Like an old Cathedrals poster announcing their appearance in suburban St. Louis back in the mid-1990s. I think I’ve mentioned this poster before, but no matter. It hung in the lobby of the […]

After I posted my L5 review, which included a few lines about how much I liked “The Blood Covers it All,” written by Belinda Smith and Marty Funderburke, Smith and I exchanged a few emails, including this one that Smith granted me permission to use, with her name, obviously.
As [one of the] songwriters in SG […]

Legacy 5
Live in Music City
Daywind 2006
ALI: 67%

If, as Cecilia Tichi claims in her book High Lonesome, the experience of country music starts in the car with the radio, the experience of southern gospel starts in the pew, the auditorium seat, the folding chair of the county fair. The live performance remains the basic unit […]

It’s official. The incoming avfl spam is out of control. I put a whole new division of interns on the problem but, getting what you pay for and all, that really didn’t seem to help much. The executive summary reads something like this: managing four different email accounts and moderating comments means that several different […]

This story from the New York Times (free registration required) about evangelicals openly, vocally fearing the loss of youth and what it means for the future of evangecalism might be of some tangential interest to readers of this site.
I honestly don’t know enough about on-the-ground realities of evangelical church life anymore to comment on this […]

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research lately on the emergence and diversification of southern gospel and of the many things I’ve stumbled across, this excerpt from Lee Roy Abernathy’s 1948 how-to book on the quartet bidness is worth reprinting here:
Should gospel quartets charge? They most certainly should, and they really ought to […]

I wonder if all Kirk Talley’s critics who complain he hasn’t adequately reformed and has failed to become sufficiently “Christian” again will book him back on their concerts now and reinstate his record deals and generally (re)certify him roadworthy now that he’s lending his support to these toxically delusional degayification programs from Focus on the […]

One of the best things the SN does that no one - including me, until now - gives them enough credit for is putting together the Just Call It Southern compilation discs for magazine subscribers. I purposely wait to renew my subscription at NQC every year just to get the cds. Yeah, the songs are […]