averyfineline

As promised, here’s the article I recently published that we were discussing earlier (and if you’re a Thought & Action reader just joining us, welcome). I am not unaware of the irony of an article about the internet age having to be scanned from paper and converted into a .pdf in order to appear online. […]

I just noticed that a while back Daniel Mount asked:
Would it be a good idea or a bad idea for local Southern Gospel stations to have an amateurs hour?
Would it cause even less professional acts than some stations currently play to get aired? Or would it have a positive effect of isolating amateur acts in […]

I don’t want to alarm anyone accustomed to the generally deplorable state of southern gospel online, but the National Quartet Convention has redesigned its website. And it is now abnormally attractive, uncharacteristically intuitive (though beware of getting rabbit holed in the PRODUCT pages, which launch as a separate site with a completely new home base), […]

From the ever-reliable CVH:
[The Crabb] ‘reunion’ demonstrates two truths.
First, because audience’s tastes are so easily satiated and because they don’t discriminate between a reunion of significant magnitude and one of trivial importance, they’ll probably fill quite a few seats. And commercially speaking, more power to the Crabbs if they can.
But the second truth is that […]

Part one:  a reprise of something I wrote a few years ago about one of my favorite Christmas songs, “Heaven’s Child.” I listened to it again this morning and find it just as powerful as I remembered, so naturally I wanted to write about it. But I already have, and having reread what I wrote […]

How long after a group disbands do you have to wait before staging a reunion? A reader implicitly raises the question in this comment to my post about the Crabb Reunion scheduled for early next year, not even two years after the group “retired.”
One one hand, in a nostalgiafied genre like sg, it would be […]

The Crabb Family (minus Kelly Bowling) is reuniting for a “rare” concert together early next year. Thus the press release, as quoted in this a.m.’s ShowPrep:
Less than a dozen years ago, the Crabb Family took the Christian music industry by storm when they burst onto the scene. Then after a relatively short duration, […]

I refer of course to the title of the CD series put out by the The Singing News as an annual gift to subscribers who re-up. A song from one of the collections rolled round on my iPod recently (I knew immediately without looking where the song came from … why else would I own […]

From a recent NYT profile of Clint Eastwood:
Some directors are known as an actor’s best friend. Mr. Eastwood may be the writer’s. “He didn’t change a word,” Mr. Schenk said. “That never happens.”
Mr. Eastwood said he learned his lesson after making extensive revisions on the script for “Unforgiven,” then calling up the writer, David Peoples, […]

A reader takes aim at my academic treatments of southern gospel (though I could never be half this clever):
If you look to the left of the tramcar you will see the Blue Hair Diesel Sniffer in it’s natural habitat. Note it’s vast collection of cassette tapes. This is due to a congenital reluctance to accept […]

The latest edition of Thought & Action, the scholarly journal of the National Education Association, includes an essay of mine on blogging, academics, and professional identity. An excerpt:
I started my blog AVERYFINELINE: Criticism and Commentary on Southern Gospel Music and Culture (www.averyfineline.com) in August 2004. If I confess that this was almost exactly the same […]

It’s that time of the year when I issue my standard public service announcement about bad Christmas music, though as per usual, individual results may vary.