averyfineline

Even though being bogged down at work has kept me  away from the blogosphere, I get the impression not a great deal is going on out there in the world of sg right now. Bad economy? Too distracted by the election? Fortunately we’ve moved on from politics around here, but we have had to go […]

From Wade:
“planned spontaneity.” onemadeupmind is RIGHT!!!
The VERY FIRST TIME I had JADED thoughts about Gospel Music was as a YOUNG Man of about 10.
My Uncle dated a daughter of a well known GM Player. I lived in Chattanooga, but we would go to Mull’s Singing Conventions in all the markets her was in. Knoxville & […]

Our favorite (and maybe only?) Irish reader, Irishlad, mentioned a clip of the Crabb Family singing the old Hinsons classic “I Could Still Go Free” and so I went and tracked it down. Take a look (the embed feature has been disabled, but it’s worth clicking through to). 
I remember this moment vividly from NQC […]

Eliminate “Maybe” from the first line and I’d say this gets it just about right.
Maybe it’s the money.  While secular artists/record companies/archivists really have the stash to properly preserve and appreciate the historical archives of their genre, maybe this industry does not.  And maybe no one really cares.
I have been on the front lines of […]

Via reader MM, a vintage Hinsons clip. At MM’s recommendation, I’d urge you to skip to around the 6:00 mark when the song slows down and Kenny Hinson improvises his way through a long verse. I have no idea what Ronnie Hinson means when he says, “Jump on it, Jesus” in response to Kenny’s vocal […]

I’ve been intending to write a post for a few days now about how disappointingly typical it is of southern gospel that no one seems terribly surprised to imagine entire swaths of a major label’s archive being destroyed, lost, or - at the very least - mismanaged and neglected. But then one of our favorite […]

Is it really true that, as commenter EM suggests, many of the old Benson masters were destroyed when it was acquired by Provident? Destroyed? Can anybody confirm this?

Kyle is on the case.

I don’t know exactly when it was, but at some point along the way I think this site’s critics lapped themselves, so that now the job of the dissenters is not so much to say something new but to level a version of the same basic critiques in more and more innovative ways. And boy […]

So last night, I watched Frontline’s biography of Richard Nixon (fascinating stuff, natch) and about half-way through, we get to the part where Nixon is bogged down in Vietnam. You may well remember this bit of history: In an effort to rally his core supporters, he goes to a Billy Graham Crusade and gives what […]

I refer to the John Rutter piece of that name. The chorus I sing with is performing it at our holiday concert.
Here’s a clip of the St. Olaf Chapel Choir performing the piece.
The harmonies are so exquisitely voiced and the modulations built so tightly into the vocals that I’d be curious to hear […]

From the left: Ralph Stanley endorses Barack Obama. I’m not kidding. One more way bluegrass is not like southern gospel (h/t, M). And, uhm, can we trade Rick Hendrix for Ralph, please? Can someone make that happen? 
From the right: Gerald Wolfe’s recent e-letter urging people to remember that Barack Obama supports abortion seems to […]

And I promise this isn’t about Sarah Palin. Gosh darn it.
Daniel Mount has a surveyMonkey thing going that attempts to figure out if music was better in the good ole days. Good luck with that, I say. But it’s fun seeing how many songs from less than recent memory that you remember. Check it out.  […]

Of the Gaither Vocal Band, I mean. I confess, that was one thought that crossed my mind when I saw Guy Penrod is taking a “sabbatical” from the GVB. I don’t know anything to make me think there’s more to this than meets the eye. Rather, it just seems like a particularly visible evidence of […]

Jonathan Sawrie does some historical accounting to compare the earnings and expenses of professional gospel acts in the 50s and their counterparts today (h/t, again, NG). And because I find it singularly unilluminating to hear about the time when gas was [insert pennies-on-the-dollar-sum], as if only prices have gone up and everything else is the […]

Alt title: A bunch of stuff that longtime avfl reader NG sent me and I thought was worth passing along, plus this first thing that reader DA sent to me and then later I saw on Musicscribe too:
That didn’t last long: as many probably saw already, the Smoky Mountain Showcase where the Fake Florida […]

Responding to my (now seemingly long ago) NQC comments about the Mark Lowry/LordSong set, nonSGfan wrote:

I think the Mark Lowry delusion was so off base….reading WAY too deep into a shallow man. Mark Lowry doesn’t believe the bible is the final authority, he makes jokes that make eevvveerrybbbooooddy laugh about how other people believe. […]

At long last some, some final thoughts I’ve been kicking around since NQC. First, some odds and ends.
Dottie Rambo: To answer many email queries and comments I’ve received on this, there was no formal memorial or remembrance of Dottie Rambo on the weekend evening mainstage, assuming anyone remembers what happened almost a month ago […]

When we last left our regularly scheduled blogging, the discussion was partly centered on suboptimal sound at live concert venues. Which made this note from avfl reader Jrod especially timely. Jrod was in NYC during NQC listening to the Queen of Soul Herself and he sent back this report:

Aretha is beyond everything that you […]