averyfineline

Maybe I’m late to the party on this one, but while I was cleaning the house the other day, Ray Charles came round on the iPod singing “You Don’t Know Me.” And I’ll be Connie Frikkin Hopper if the first half of the verse of “You Don’t Know Me” isn’t nearly identical to the first […]

Longtime reader AG writes to Ask Avery:

I wanted to let you know how much I’ve enjoyed reading your blog.  As you know I’ve been reading it since you started it several years ago.  I’ve laughed at some of the posts, gone out and bought cds as a result of some of the posts […]

So early, in fact, she doesn’t really sound like Janet Paschal yet:

It’s not so very good, is it? The sound is all up in her nasal passages and the front of her face and mouth, flattened out into unpleasant straight tones and dipthonged to death. She’s singing entirely too hard. She’s often just plain out […]

Via sg collector nonpareil DA: before The Homecoming board game, there was the SGM Game, ca. 1977.

Fun, as Dad Speer might have said, for the whole fam damily.
I think some of you thought I was joking about being kinda smitten by the Gaither boardgame (and frankly sorry I missed bidding on it), but I’m genuinely […]

What separates them from the herd? Via Andrew Sullivan, Merlin Mann and Jason Kottke weigh in.

In case you’ve got Sego drama fatigue …
All we need now is for some disaffected fanboy to start doing some dishing on the world of LuLu Roman, and the nominations for the “best supporting actor from the Golden Girls of Southern Gospel tour” will be complete.

This has got to be the best ebay sg auction item to come along at least since the singing in tongues album.

The internet is for porn on Avenue Q, but in sg, it’s also evidently useful for d-list score settling.

AVFL’s fourth anniversary came and went a week or so ago. To mark the occasion, we reach into the Ask Avery bag and turn it over to RA, who writes:

What has surprised you most since you started blogging?

Probably the single biggest surprise: that I haven’t run out of things to say. […]

Writing about ChoZen, I was reminded of this note from a friend mine that arrived several weeks ago:

What is with the overabundance of groups that, for one reason or another (I guess they think it’s cool), use either a number in the group’s name or a “clever” way of spelling a specific word.
[…]

Then there were two: Crossway is now a duet? Alrighty then. At the rate they’re shedding personnel, this group (that showed great promise not so long ago as a quartet) is one departure away from a solo career.
For whatever reasons, duets have never really worked in sg (or in many other genres for that matter). […]

I’ll be an absentee landlord for the next several days, what with the fall term starting soon and a hurricane coming. It’d be super if the homosexual panic that erupted from a post about paying royalties didn’t spread to this thread.
There’s plenty of other stuff to talk about: “Get Away Jordan” went gold. Anthony Burger […]

From reader dan:
[P]ublishing royalties, no matter how small should be paid if the product is sold. Nickels and dimes pay bills the same as paper money!

From longtime friend of avery, RK:
I am curious about the status of the recording rights of this [Rambo] “homegoing” celebration. Were the artists aware that their performances would be commercially marketed/sold? If so, did they sign away the recording rights or are they being paid a royalty? And were they paid an appearance fee to […]

Responding to a post where I linked to some video series that are pretty clearly attempts to export the Homecoming framework to other areas of pop culture, reader dan writes:

you mention the other versions of homecomings as knock offs, as if the Gaither Homecoming is an entirely original idea; isn’t the Gaither […]

Did I miss all those promised concert reports on the big “Farewell Jason, we’ll miss you but thank God the new guy’s last name is easier for avery to spell” concert a week or so ago? Feel free to jog my memory or post your thoughts if you were there or know of published accounts […]

In the past few months, I’ve noticed that every time the topic turns to Mike and Kelly Bowling’s big new song, “Your Cries Have Awoken the Master,” people get prickly. When I was in Nashville in April, I was with a group of sg types and they went at it for a good while about […]

They’re not only in sg, of course: “He’s a good ole boy, bad ole boyfriend,” drawls the sounds-like-every-other-mainstream country male vocalist on the radio at the cafe where I’m working this a.m.

Consider the difference between this:

And this:

I’m actually not sure I prefer the big symphonic too-muchness of the latter version (though that wood-wind descant in the first verse is pretty neat and the brass section is a classy touch), but I don’t think anyone can listen to that earlier clip and think that the Hoppers would […]

After reading my post on the death of Christian music, Glenn demurs:
I think that you try to make much more out of Southern Gospel music than it really is. You only attend the concerts you feel are relevant, the NQC or Mark Lowry, etc. However, there are many, many people who attend the […]