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As you might have noticed, Billy Graham’s most famous song leader soloist is among this year’s recipients of the Grammy’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Good on him. And them. If NARAS had waited much longer - Shea is nearly 102 - it might have had to have been a posthumous award.
Anyway, I don’t really have a […]

Via reader MVC, I draw your attention - should you be interested - to An Illustrated History of Gospel Music (Amazon page here). From the looks of things, I’d wager this is one of those books that assumes, as so many folks do, that gospel is more or less synonymous with the black gospel style. […]

And so, a little Christmas music (sort of), via the Homecoming Friends: “Jesus, the Light of the World.” I had frankly forgotten about this tune until I heard it last week as part of the Gaither Christmas show. I think it first appeared on a Homecoming recording in the Joy to the World video (at […]

It’s taken well until Blog Year Seven, but it finally happened: some malware managed to worm its way into averyfineline, necessitating a take-down of the site for several hours. Particularly, if you happened to visit between roughly 4 and 5 p.m. EDT yesterday, you may have experienced some weirdness, ranging from a guardian alert about […]

This, from Jason Crabb and His Fabulous Omnicompetent Combo at NQC, who turned in another of my favorite moments at NQC (h/t, RK). Take a look (no embed available that I could see).
Video, of course, doesn’t do all this justice, can’t capture the palpable immediacy of the set’s aliveness. We’re accustomed to hearing this kind […]

From the department of random holiday week silliness comes Isle of Tune. It is a strange, mildly transfixing time-suck. And hard to explain … or maybe just make sense of. Anyway, here’s one attempt:
Isle of Tune is a musical sequencer with a twist…you build little roads with houses, trees, streetlights, etc. that cars can then […]

Via Andrew Sullivan, Wired magazine argues that “the age of music piracy is officially over”:
Mark down the date: The age of stealing music via the Internet is officially over. It’s time for everybody to go legit. The reason: We won. And all you audiophiles and copyfighters, you know who fixed our problems? […]

As regular readers know, I taught a seminar on gospel music and American literature last semester as part of my real-world job, and this semester I reprised the course at the graduate level. So when the Gaither tour came to town Friday, I organized a field trip with some of the students. Or, I should […]

One of my favorite moments at NQC 10 (h/t, KC):

Now if someone can just find a clip of Jason Crabb at NQC on Thursday night …

Apropos our ongoing conversation about the mediocrity of “Christian” art and music, a call to abolish “Christian” music:
[H]aving a Christian music section is as silly as having an “heliocentric dog loving Buddhist” section.  So why does it exist?  Why is there only one section of a music store that is defined not by the genre […]