averyfineline

Dutch Elvis Southern Gospel. Via Martin Roth, of course.

I know we’ve discussed this numerous times tangentially to larger conversations about concerts and live performance, but RC’s remarks about the imbalanced house mix at the LordSong concert she attended reminds me that I’ve been wanting to address this question full on. Over and over again, concert reviews or reactions (not least of all, but […]

Since the real world will be intruding for a few days on the blogging side of life, I’m posting a longish reaction from a friend who recently heard the new LordSong. Thus RC:

I was very fortunate to catch what appeared to be a last-minute advertisement by a local church for a LordSong concert this Sunday […]

Reader Charles Brady chimes in with a note about politics and the law that’s worth promoting to the main page.
Many of the artist in southern gospel have their ministries set up as 501(c)(3). I think if the politics continue as they have in the past it will only be a matter of “when” and not […]

So the Florida Boys are going to go out in grand style at NQC this year. Thus an FB’s press release:

[T]he multi-award winning quartet has agreed to perform at all of their previously scheduled performance slots during the National Quartet Convention scheduled to be held in September. The group will be joined during those […]

I’ve been lurking on the Association for Recorded Sound discussion list lately. It’s mostly studio technicians, archivists, music librarians, and other assorted audiophiles (professional and avocational). And the last few days internet radio has come up. This is so primarily because July 15 is fast approaching. Barring any Congressional action, that will effectively be the […]

They don’t mix (shhh don’t tell Martin Cook and Jonathan Wilburn). More at sogospellovers. That clunky phrase “potential listeners” is unfortunate (if they’re gonna be alienated – or not – by politics, they have to be real listeners first), but the poll perhaps confirms what many of us have known for a long time.

Responding to my query about the late Speers in the post below, reader CVH offers some insightful thoughts on the great group, well worth promoting to the main page:
Actually I’d venture the thought that the Speers always had a sense of (what would become known as) the “inspo” sound even back in the 70’s. Between […]

As the gospel music market continues to be ever more saturated with all the self-produced albums, custom-recordings, and generally unlistenable music being churned out daily, I’ve been taking refuge in several nostalgia compilations of “classics” and “greats” that purport to pluck the pearls from among the swine of the past. Right now, I’m listening to […]

Speaking of compilations. JPHQ has to be a little chagrined to see Gaither & Co. releasing The Best of Janet Paschal (as seen with Gaither & Friends) exactly when JP’s big hymns project is coming out.
Update: Or not. Reader Shadow writes: “Worry not about Janet. She gets a very healthy royalty from Gaither on her […]

He’s back on the road with the Old Paths Quartet, “and we don’t know why.” That last bit of barbed wire is from Chuck Peters over at southerngospelreporter.com, who appears to relish sticking it to Jeremy Peace just a scosh too much. But there is something admittedly strange about the way this has all played […]

I’m thrilled to see that the Crabb Revival – Adam, Terah, Justin Ellis, and Zach Smith – will be staging with a full band (thus Smith and Eillis). But doesn’t this act run the risk of pretty quickly degenerating into the “Is Jason Crabb Gonna Get Here Soon?” tour?

Color me a little creeped out too.

Yes, yes … Denny as Kenny. But do we really need another adenoidal cowboy poseur? Rather than America’s next whatever (or counterintuitive theorizing about the Kingdom Heirs giving up the gold mine at Dollywood for the pennypinching of the road), I’m more interested in whether or not anyone has heard anything about why Steve French […]

So given the Spring Hill implosion, the chances of the Oak Ridge Boys looking for (or needing) a new label seem pretty high. It would be unfortunate for the Oaks to wind up with a full blown country label: in the first place, it’s clear that despite the official distance that southern gospel puts between […]

So today is the day for calling it quits, I guess. Mitch Kenitzer and Dave McVay have resigned from Three Bridges, effectively ending the group as it has come to be known. I gather that Elliot McCoy has a desire to continue with a group of some as yet unspecified sort that will work under […]

I was just about to sit down and write a short post noting that evidently the Florida Boys had bumped lead Josh Garner up to tenor and Les Beasley was singing lead in wake of Harold Reed’s recent departure (if you’ve heard a certain bootleg audio clip of Beasley from a NQC performance a while […]

The master has signed an “exclusive agreement” with River Bend, the studio run by the former Goodman Johnny Minick and his son, Aaron. Now, “exclusive agreement” is a loaded and often deeply misleading term as it gets used in a lot of music-industry press releases (esp small-time southern gospel, where “X has signed an exclusive […]

1) An anecdotal report from a recent EHSSQ concert. These kinds of isolated pieces of testimony are interpretatively meaningless, of course. I offer it mostly as a way of paying my respects to the old adage that judges a performance by how well it plays in Peoria.
Update: In the interest of fairness, it’s probably worth […]

I’ve gotten a couple of emails about this and now I see a commenter brought it up, but Spring Hill has evidently fired all or most of its staff in a fit of corporate (yes, I’m going to pun now) spring cleaning. Reader quartet-man says one of the Oaks is writing about it at their […]