averyfineline

This week in the Gospel Music and American Fiction course, we just finished a section on black gospel (thanks to everyone who helped try to solve the mystery of the James Baldwin lyrics), and without question, the highlight of this unit for me was being able to immerse myself in all things Willa Mae Ford […]

One thing that bugs me is when websites are not updated regularly. If you are not going to maintain it, dump it. Oh yeah, something else, when a certain blogger friend we all know and love to hate disappears for days on end and doesn’t update his blog, and you know who you are, Doug. […]

Kevin Ward makes a modest proposal to combat unwanted music clips on artist’s websites that blare out at you uninvited and unstoppable.

So at this point in my Gospel Music and American Lit course, we’re reading James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head, about a black gospel singer coming of age in the Civil Rights era, and I’m struggling to find a recording – indeed any evidence at all – of a song whose lyrics Baldwin refers to […]

One benefit/risk of blogging about southern gospel is that you find out how the sausage is made pretty quickly. My interns turned deeply cynical some time ago (which is why I keep them in the basement of Avery HQ), and sometimes a dispatch from the inner rings of the industry will make its way to […]

Via Daniel Mount (via Dean Adkins’ YouTube video archive), a clip of the Cathedrals singing “He Left it All” with the rarely remembered Kurt Young:

Some random thoughts:
1. That’s a really fine song.
2. One of my favorite parts of this clip is Mark Trammell’s harmonic inflections on the choruses. A lot of people - including Trammell […]

A gospel-music songwriter passed along this link recently about Rascal Flatts’ treatment of its songwriters. Money quote:
 Band members Gary LeVox, Joe Don Rooney and Jay DeMarcus wanted to recognize the 80 or so songwriters who have contributed work to the group’s six studio albums. So the guys booked the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum […]

Thanks to reader RK for first alerting me this a.m. to Justin Ellis’s departure as the all-purpose keyboard player for several of the various Crabb family spin-offs out there. This comment suggests he going to work for John Hagee, which makes sense since one of the Crabb twins and his wife signed on with Hagee […]

Scott Fowler’s most recent SN column offers some push-back against Pat Robertson’s latest bit of bilious ignorance, urging financial support for the Haiti relief effort. Good for him.
Fowler gets a lot wrong politically – mostly recently Ollie North (!) and Mike Huckabee – and one could wish that prominent evangelicals in southern gospel were half […]

Our story so far: A while back in an open-thread free-for-all, the issue of the SG Hall of Fame in Dollywood came up, specifically the number of HOF inductees whose commemorative bronze plaques had not secured a sponsor. Currently, sponsorship rates per plaque seem to be going for $2000 and of 114 inductees, 15 or […]

An sg-lovin’ former publisher of CCM Magazine doesn’t come off looking too good in this excerpt from Matthew Paul Turner’s book, Hear No Evil, which has the publisher demanding that a reporter extract an apology from Amy Grant for her divorce from Gary Chapman, and then fabricating the apology when Grant herself  wouldn’t give one […]