averyfineline

What better way to start the week off right than with a free-for-all open thread? I’ll throw the first few punches.

Via Daniel Mount, Jason Crabb just won a Grammy for his solo album. I reviewed it here if you want to refresh your memory or catch up on things.

The Mike LeFevre quartet  is no longer […]

Brian Eno on the allure of gospel singing:
I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything’s going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records – and I have – and try to distil […]

Over at musicscribe, David Bruce Murray is conducting a (to me) fascinating little poll that asks readers to rate the “relative appeal” of artists on the NQC mainstage in 2010. He’s got preliminary results up but is still taking responses. Go drop him a line.
Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been working a lot today with […]

Setting aside for the moment the old “gospel always means black” fallacy at work here, this article reminds me of all the stories I’ve heard from sg insider types about the troves and troves of recordings abandoned and forgotten and dry rotting all over Nashville and other points south (h/t, GT). It also demonstrates that […]

I received a mass email today from a southern gospel artist with the following subject line: When Your Mess Becomes Your Message. Feel free to write as many verses in comments as the lord lays on your heart.

In my gospel music course this week, we spent a good deal of time covering the question of whether one has to share the values and vision of a performer in order for the performance to create genuine experiences - religious, spiritual, emotional - for an audience or an individual. Longtime readers of this site […]

Via Adam Edwards a while back (via Dean Adkins’ treasure trove of YouTube clips) , an old clip of the Mullins Brothers, with a young Paul Lancaster and Buddy Mullins pre-Gaither make-over:

Forget angel bands. I’ll take this sound any day.

So in the past few days I’ve had to delete several off topic comments and redirect the commenters to the most recent open thread (prior to this post, that would have been the Weekend Roundup). Evidently it’s not enough to have an open thread; it’s got to be at the the top of the page! […]

David Bruce  Murray notices another instance of honesty being committed in announcements about personnel changes - this time, the Chucks asked their alto to resign so a family member could come back to the group - and adds an insightful reflection about how to walk the fine line between diplomatic honesty and indelicate bluntness. After […]

A lot of folks are scratching their heads over Guy Penrod’s recent signing with Gaither Music. But the move strikes me as just about right. The Gaither Mothership has always had a very paternalistic relationship with its artists … willing to cut them off when they (were deemed to have) misbehaved, and just as willing […]

Via David Bruce Murray, it looks like Chris Allman, of original Greater Vision fame (and more lately of this transfixing clip), has launched an ala carte co-writing and publishing business called, Write With Me.
DBM runs down the particulars of the service and raises some good questions about who owns what publishing rights in this sort […]

More evidence that our thinking about intellectual property online and digital content provision hasn’t quite caught up with the complications and paradoxes of e-commerce:

People who illegally download music from the internet also spend more money on music than anyone else, according to a new study. The survey, published today, […]

Stephen Shearon, a musicologist at Middle Tennessee State University and scholar of (among other things) southern gospel history, has collaborated with a MTSU colleague to produce a documentary on the southern gospel singing convention tradition, titled “I’ll Keep on Singing” (h/t, JS). I exchanged a few emails with Steve this afternoon and he confirmed that […]

I stumbled across this in some holiday reading (on my new iPod touch, using the Amazon/Kindle iPod/iPhone app, which is good and would be gooder if it had copy/paste functionality so I wouldn’t have to manually retype long passages like the one below). It’s from a Kazuo Ishiguro short story collection entitled Nocturnes. The first […]

So what’s been going on while I was away in the real world?

Calvin Hunt, who released his late work with sg producer Wayne Haun in recent years (and earned two Dove Award nominations for his 2008 album with Haun’s Vine Records), died the day after Christmas.  RIP.

In case you’ve got $789.89 laying about, there’s this […]

So I guess I ought to have an opinion about all the personnel changes that happened while I was away for the holidays. They were, evidently, very exciting (”!!!” according to the Singing News release about Gold City’s most recent upheaval). Fortunately, most of what can be said about these changes already has been thoroughly […]

In this season of quartet personnel changes (more on this in a moment) and all the euphemisms, evasions, and lacunae that pass for explanations of various departures and arrivals, I give you what is quite possibly the best reason any quartet man has ever given for leaving a group. Dear readers, Brad Smith, on departing […]

A reader objects to the premise of my course on Gospel Music and American Literature:
As the father of three kids in college, I am uber-sensitive to the cost/value of higher education, which therein begs the question in my mind: “why in the heck do kids go to college to take a course like […]

So I’m teaching a senior seminar this semester on Gospel Music and American Literature, which is … well, basically what it sounds like: we read literature that appropriates gospel  music in some way (texts include Bastard Out of Carolina, Just Above  My Head, Southern Baptist Sissies, and, of course, The Gospel Singer, as well as […]