THE BOOTHS

The lineup went this way: Booths, Talleys, Greater Vision, and obviously the point here was that GV was the headliner. But when Michael Booth joked that “we’re so glad the Talleys and Greater Vision could be here to close our program tonight,” it ended up – after all three sets were done – being a kind of deadpan prophecy. Musically, this was a Booth Brothers & Friends concert. From the start, the Booths nailed the first note of “His Grace is Sufficient,” the sound expertly mixed and fully balanced. After three nights of hearing one knobbed intro and botched pick up after another at NQC, first-class beginnings are sadly not something one can take for granted in gospel music. But this was not just a comment on how inexpertly most sound techs run shows these days. The point is that the Booths come out vocally confident, but not stridently or too loudly, as so many groups do in the first few bars while they try to find their notes.

The ensemble sound that the Booths have nearly perfected masterfully molds each phrase to the musical thought – the attack and release so finely calibrated and blended. It’s as if the lyrics dissolve into a finely knit fabric of feeling textured as much by the dynamics of their voices as by the harmonics. That is, how they sing is at least as important as what they’re singing. There’s energy here – a great deal of it, in fact – but it’s contained and held taut, restrained so that lines others would oversing manage to be for the Booths buoyantly subtle. The less impressionistic way of saying this might be that they encored “His Grace” acapella and got a bigger rise out of the place than most groups do with turnarounds twice as loud and half again as fast. I think that’s because such an understated approach gives the music a chance to breathe, to resonate with audiences accustomed to being shouted at and browbeaten into submission by evermore overpowering encores.

The insight the Booths seem to have made – and not just in their opening but throughout their set in general – is not new. The Martins were the most recent trio to popularize it and the Gaither Vocal Band deploys it as needed: namely, emphasizing musical textures and harmonic colorations over volume and dramatic expansiveness. But whereas the Martins had little else to fall back on other than their ability to wring seven different shades of supplication out of a harmonic suspension, the Booths have figured out how to make their sets cohere around this acoustical sound (and here’s the really brilliant part) even and especially when their music is at its trackiest. “Look for Me,” “Tears are a Language God Understands,” “Won’t that Be a Hallelujah Meeting,” and “Castles in the Sand” – especially “Castles in the Sand” – besides featuring Jim Brady a lot, these songs from the middle passage of the Booths’ set were held together by vocal arrangements that foregrounded the kind of harmonic and dynamic intricacy we expect most commonly from acoustical music: vivid and sentient, warmblooded and – in a word – felt. And yet only one song in their set (besides the first encore) was truly acoustical.

To hear what I mean, listen to the final “all” of “He Saw it All.” It’s there even on the recorded version, a little harmonic inflection that makes it sound as though three voices are moving in four different directions (though I suppose that could just be the track). Or “Crucified with Christ,” with which the Booths closed last night. Though Brady sings the song persuasively, Michael Booth seals the whole deal with one note in the final tag, a little augmented flourish that somehow manages to erase the sense of performance and artifice of the show and for a brief moment create what feels like an unmediated experience of the paradox at the heart of the song: living through dying in the transformative action of regenerative grace. I don’t necessarily think everyone (or anyone else) there would have put it that way, but then they were all too busy jumping up and beating their hands together, so I suppose in one way or another we were all more or less saying something similar.

THE TALLEYS

The Booths are a tough act for anyone to follow, and the Talleys did what they could. Which is to say, the same basic set they’ve been doing for the last two years with a few modifications to account for their latest project: Lauren Talley & Her BackUp Singers Sing Some Songs. Seriously, Lauren Talley is a transfixing stage presence, and if she’d do in six or eight months whatever it took Kim Hopper the last decade to do to open up and widen her head tones and get them out of her sinuses (and here’s a good place to say that Kim Hopper’s voice on The Ride is resplendent), Lauren Talley could pretty much write her own ticket, I think. Songs like “That Name” from her solo project, “The Broken Ones” and “Orphans of God” (which were part of the sets final segment last night) really pack the kind of wallop that can launch a career.

But back on earth, the most effective single moment of the Talleys’ set was perhaps the simplest: Roger Talley’s pared down piano solo at the beginning of their forty minutes, which led into a super slick video montage identifying the group on the church’s jumbo-tron monitor overhead (FBC Orlando is more digitized and hot-wired than the space shuttle, I think). This digital introduction made Roger Talley’s labored introduction of each member a little redundant, but it shouldn’t go without saying that the Talleys do an excellent job of integrating live music (that is, Roger at the piano) into their sets and their tracks. We’ve been talking a lot lately about bands this and live music that, but realistically the kind of limited mixed modes the Talleys work in – using a few bars of piano at the beginning or piano-and-voices interlude – is a model that more groups could strive for to enliven otherwise digitally moribund music without breaking the bank.

Roger Talley talks too much, and that wouldn’t be a problem if Debra Talley didn’t talk too … and if Lauren Talley didn’t talk too much. But there’s just entirely too much talking, not least of all the big fat dead spot after the second song during which Roger and Debbie make predictable – though occasionally funny – jokes about twentysome years of marriage etc. This wouldn’t be so bad if much of the stuff they’re staging from their newest album didn’t have a kind of easy-listening feel to it. As it is, the smooth-jazz style of this music – see, for instance, the loungy “No One Ever Cared For Me” – had the cumulative effect of a sedative on the first half of their program.

The song selection for the last half of their set was strong, but it was effectively gutted by this unintentionally hilarious video segment projected overhead during “The Healing.” The clip looked like a recording of some small-time church-theater group dramatizing scenes from the song – the story of the woman touching the hem of Christ’s garment, a contemporary scene of a healing miracle in a hospital room.

Oh. My.

It was the kind of thing that makes you embarrassed for A)The people doing the “acting”; B)The Talleys for thinking it was a good idea; and C)Yourself. Honestly. The wardrobe department seemed to be mostly old bath robes and mangy facial-hair prosthetics. “Jesus” was wearing what looked to be some kind of white canvas hoody with a vented coverlet. Needless to say, all this was both distracting and trivializing. The crowd’s reaction was underwhelming at best, so I don’t think I was alone here. Ditch the video.

Once again, I was disappointed that this crowd, like the NQC audience, didn’t seem to get “Orphans of God,” which is just a gobsmackingly good song and works well thematically with “The Broken Ones” to create an emphasis on the ordinary realities of religious living. But “Testify” woke everybody back up for ….

GREATER VISION

It was weird that the minister of music had GV come on while the love offering was being collected. And even weirder that Gerald Wolfe didn’t ease the awkwardness with some kind of humor. Is this normal, bringing a group on while the plate is being passed?

But no matter. Greater Vision would make a textbook study of product branding. It doesn’t matter that Jason Waldrup struggles to place pretty much every note of substance that comes his way throughout the night (his voice is beginning to consistently have the sound of someone who’s just vocally exhausted all the time). It doesn’t matter than when they sing “He’d a still been God,” that last word comes out variously as “Gad,” “Gawd,” and “Goad” from each guy. It doesn’t matter that like clockwork Gerald Wolfe pulls out the old red song book about halfway through and announces that they’re going to sing some old shape notes … because hardly any groups sing this style of music anymore … just the way nobody sang this style of music anymore when George and Glen and the Cats do-re-meed their way through “Oh Happy Day” 25 years ago (not coincidentally, Wolfe was playing keyboards for them then).

Well actually, on this last point (the matter of Wolfe’s personable stage manner and the way he manages to emanate a certain star quality and folksy charm) it DOES matter. Because this is important. These days Greater Vision musically seems primarily to be a pretext for Gerald Wolfe’s masterful emcee work. It’s not exactly inimitable, because as that redbook anecdote suggests, Wolfe has carefully learned and applied the lessons he received at the Younce School of Showmanship back in the day. But with the exception of a Vep Ellis hymn off GV’s hymns album (which served as a vivid reminder of what GV’s music could be like if it were more often invigorated by work from outside the Rodney Griffin Songbook), GV’s set musically never rose above competent. And yet they were the draw. No question about that.

I have some theories about why Wolfe is so captivating as an emcee, and soon I hope to inflict them upon you. But for now, it’s enough to say that people started getting up and leaving when Rodney Griffin took over to do the spiritual heavy lifting with “Faces.” I think that’s because the real high point of GV’s set was actually a hi-freakin-larious story-joke (in high George and Glen style) about Gerald and Rodney, a banana, a train ride in eastern Europe. To watch and listen to (and to watch everyone else watch and listen to) Gerald Wolfe tell a story like this is to witness a type of greatness in the vernacular arts that comes around a handful of times in a single genre every generation. It would not, I imagine, ever get old, just the way George Younce made every one of those old jokes he told about Glen Payne feel like the first time they’d ever been launched. And this is a good thing for Greater Vision, because “My Name Is Lazarus” and the material it exemplifies just doesn’t seem to be cutting it any more, at least not with the folks in Orlando.

***

“Them Gaithers” has long been a term by which to designate not just Bill Gaither and his wife, Gloria, but whatever troupe of performers takes the stage alongside Bill and Gloria on any given night. In the 15 years since Gaither first started recording events of the sort that grew into the Homecoming Tour, death, self-perpetuating success, and reality have all exerted their shaping force on gospel music’s longest-running show – so much so that “them Gaithers” today is a much different group, putting on a much more agile and stylistically diverse show, than those from the early days of the tour.

With so many of the old friends dearly departed and so many of the younger ones off enjoying careers launched in large part by Gaither’s influence, Gaither’s Homecoming Family has become a more tightly knit clan, more casual and relaxed together, less uneasy alongside one another, and more comfortable performing as a group.

Partly this owes to the subsidence of the personality-driven Homecoming event. Whereas in the Homecoming heydays people came to see Howard and Vestal and Jake and George and Janet and Ivan, today’s events largely put individual personalities in service of a Variety Show for Christians. Certainly, Homecoming fans still feel strongly about their favorite Homecoming friends. But with the exception of maybe Guy Penrod, there’s no single star on the tour – besides Bill and Gloria Gaither themselves – who individually generates the kind of excitement and attention that the Homecoming Friends still collectively command.

Thursday night in southwest Florida, “them Gaithers” numbered about 20 of the usual suspects: among them, Lynda Randle, Gordon Mote, The Easters, Signature Sound, Ivan Parker, Ben Speer, Joy Gardner, Russ Taff, and Jessy Dixon, plus the Gaither Vocal Band. That four hours of music from this group precipitated in some very nice moments is a tribute not just to the durability of the Homecoming concept and its execution, but also the intelligence and talent of the artists involved. That much of the four hours was but serviceably sung and politely received by a crowd that nevertheless outlasted me (I left during the third chorus of “Because He Lives”) bespeaks the intense affection that reliably good — if not always or even often great – music can generate over a decade or so.

There are personal “moments” – ones that are special for the individual but perhaps go unnoticed by everyone else – and then what I call “live” moments – those instances when an audience awakens to the realization that something has happened on stage. Personal moment number one came a few minutes into the show with Jeff and Sheri Easter, and when I say “Jeff and Sheri Easter” and I really mean the neglected, underutilized, and dazzlingly voiced Charlotte Penhollow Ritchie. She’s got by all appearances a great gig: sings a few songs each night, backs up someone else on a few others, gets to travel with her family, and appear in front of thousands at a time. Not bad considering what the Nelons, with whom she got her start, are (not) doing today.

But still, it’s hard to listen to such a great voice go so unused, especially when it breaks through the ordinary every now and then, as it did during “Over and Over.” The emotional center of the song revolves around a single word near the end of the chorus – “victory” – sung on the fourth of the chord, which gives way to the hook and the song’s end: “over and over again.” Penhollow Ritchie’s harmonies in these passages are piercing (in a good way), placed deftly and in right proportion to the group’s vocal balance – the kind of thing that when you hear it you just laugh out loud and point (again, in a good way). Perhaps this would become old hat if she sang more, but still … that’s a risk I’d be willing to take. At one point, MNP leaned over to me and hissed: “Do ya think they’re ever gonna let her SING anything?” This was not a question. And the answer was “no.”

The first real “live” moment of the evening came courtesy of Lynda Randle. She opened her two-song setlet with an mid-tempo arrangement of the old black gospel number “Walk with Me, Lord.” Her voice is, of course, extraordinarily deep, so that by the final chorus of the song she was singing, in the key of F, an E above middle C in a captivatingly rich, full, throaty tone (later in the night, during the old-timey quartet hour, she would sing the bass line). But things came alive during the song’s break … she points to Gordon Mote on the piano and Mote serves up one of those big, wide-opened solos in that barroom barrel style playing he favors – arms splayed out to each end of the piano working their way toward the center via rollicking 8ths and 16ths. Mote is not a good player “for a blind guy.” He’s a stupefyingly magnificent piano artist whose blindness only magnifies the intensity of his talent.

Randle is such a gracious, self-effacing stylist that the obvious pleasure she took in surrendering 8 bars of her song to Mote somehow swept through the room momentarily, carrying her through to the end of her song on a wave a good will. (Personal moment No. 2 came during Mote’s solo song, “Through Her Eyes,” on which he both sings and plays. Oddly enough this didn’t seem to resonate with the rest of the audience, though perhaps that’s because of its lack of any clearly religious content.)

Randle, incidentally, also gets props for the best outfit of the night, this sleek black pant suit with a slit up her calf and some red heels that I think might have been last worn by Roxy Hart. Cha-cha. (Worst outfit award goes to Jeff Easter, who clearly did NOT read the GQ article on the perils of the untucked shirt.)

Speaking of style, one has – of course – to speak of Ernie Haase and Signature Sound. I hadn’t seen them perform in about a year, and the degree to which nonverbal stylistics – the look, the choreography, the retro-hip quartet revivalism – has come to dominate their act is remarkable. Originally, EHSSQ would sing standing (by comparison to their current style) more or less flatfooted, and then break out with some little choreographed bit or two (remember that “Stand By Me” made such a mark because the dancing stood out so much from everything else). These days, nary a moment passes without some kind of fancy foot work, hip swiveling, shoulder rolling, skull gyrating and assorted other contortings of the body worthy of live action figurines.

The PR euphemism for all this is “energetic,” but the word that keeps coming to mind watching EHSSQ is “contrived.”

Take Ryan Seaton, the group’s lead singer (though in fairness, singling him out is only a way of identifying in his individual behavior tendencies that run amok in all the group except pianist Roy Webb, who manages to retain a great deal of his own personal dignity just by having to stay seated to do his job). In Seaton one sees the worst kind of over-rehearsed stage mannerisms that EHSSQ embodies, quite literally: every step, each movement and motion practiced to a slickness that only comes from copious repetition in front of a mirror – and, one imagines, a few winks and nonchalant nods of self-satisfaction … yeah I’m cool. Seaton doesn’t walk anywhere on stage. When he’s not gliding, sliding, grooving or doing a kind of bastardized moon walk, he struts as though on a cat walk modeling the new spring line of Calvin Klein tank tops – somewhat saucily leading with his hips and ostentatiously following through with his shoulders. Though this is meant, presumably, to convey grace and suavity simultaneously, it comes off more like a manly sashay.

For an Andrew Lloyd Weber show, this would be fine. For the unironic Homecoming stage, it’s hard to know what to think of all this. The main problem is that EHSSQ takes their own campy outlandishness so seriously. I don’t mean they shouldn’t work hard or sing well (they do). And they are having fun, obviously, in a way that makes no apologies for being entertaining. I applaud all this. What’s missing is any permission to laugh. Their performance of “Then Came the Morning” (at least I think that was the song) included this elaborately choreographed vignette in which two guys crossed by one another while the other two watched, and then at a precisely timed point, the watchers crossed one another while the original crossers stopped to watch … you get the idea. The unnecessary intricacy of it all was touchingly comical, but only unintentionally so. The earnestness with which they stepped and turned and pivoted and crossed clearly conveyed that this was meant to add to the spiritual heftiness of the song, whichever one it was.

That I can’t recall which song exactly rather gets to the crux of the matter, though: are they intentionally gilding the lily here or do they just not trust themselves to survive and thrive as musicians rather than ambassadors of groovy gospel?

It’s not that they are unable to stand still and sing. Their respectful, acoustical rendition of the old Gaither tune “Lovest Thou Me” was full of deeply satisfying singing, especially from Seaton, who has grown into a lead singer capable of organizing a song around his voice without bullying the ensemble (though note to EHSSQ: the fuss you made about recording “Then Came the Morning” pretty much established your fealty to Old Bill; you can start singing songs someone else’s songs now, too). Seaton’s emergence as a bankable lead singer not only enhances EHSSQ’s sound, but distributes the vocal labor more evenly. Among other things, this takes the pressure off Haase, who despite being the star is (like Bill Gaither) vocally the weakest link in his own group. The trouble is that there isn’t anywhere near enough of this Seaton, this EHSSQ – the careful and subtle musical stylists bending a song to their will without breaking its spirit. Instead we get a lot of amateur Broadway dancing and marching-band formation movements.

To the extent that EHSSQ is exploding longheld notions about what a gospel male quartet must look and act like, their preoccupation with the aesthetic is understandable, even admirable in a way (though it must drive McCray Dove nuts to see EHSSQ shamelessly ripping off all of Dove’s old moves in a song like “Get Away Jordan,” down to the throwing of the suit jacket and the crowd taunting, pretending to walk off stage within out an encore, asking leadingly, you don’t wanna hear any more of that do ya?). Over dinner, MNP told me of a friend of hers – educated, independent, professional, Christian, living in the Southwest – who has no interest in southern gospel but has become a fan of EHSSQ mainly because they aren’t anything at all like what sg outsiders think a quartet is.

If this iconoclasm works – and for the moment and in the Homecoming context it very clearly does; crowds love the idea of fat-free cotton candy – it does so on the basis of its contrast to everything and everyone else around it. It’s no coincidence that EHSSQ followed Lynda Randle. The real test of EHSSQ’s durability as a brand name will be how well this product ages – which is a question not only of how capable they will be of fulfilling the cartoonish and physically demanding expectations they’ve created among their fans, but also whether the novelty of their style will retain its appeal as these guys cease to be “boys” and begin detaching themselves – as they inevitably must at some point – from the Gaither magic.

To watch the Gaither Vocal Band is to see what EHSSQ could become and what exactly they cannot be if they want a spot on the Homecoming Tour: gimmickless headliners. The GVB’s set mostly covers tunes from the Give it Away record, which I’ve reviewed here, and about which I have only one small thought to add after hearing them live.

Gaither and the Vocal Band have perfected what I’ve come to think of as the post-quartet ending. The GVB’s endings tap into that preverbal desire all gospel music fans have to experience the resolution of harmonic dissonance to consonance, but gone are the vertiginous staggerings and sloppy swoopings of voices into their final tones, a la the Kingsmen or the Doves or Gold City. In place of this, is a cleaner, brighter, more self-confident (as opposed to just plain brash) inhabiting of a simpler arrangement. The distance on the scale between dissonance and consonance is much smaller and the ensemble moves together, in time, toward its harmonic resolution – the effect being not so much of a return to order and unity but an expanding and unfolding of other, larger possibilities. One of my secret vices is that I’m a sucker for big made-for-TV endings, and the kind that GVB puts on may be stacked to the stratosphere, but I’m not much of a mind to care in the experience of hearing it, because it leaves an impression, becomes a moment – and, as MNP is wont say, the moments are what make everything else worth it all.

For the fan of gospel music and a student of its success (and failure), a lot else goes on at a Gaither show between all these moments. While Ben Speer gives us our nightly dose of nostalgia or Jessy Dixon turkey walks his way through “Highway to Heaven” in a celestial white suit and candy-cane stripe tie, or them Gaithers sing their way through some embarassingly mushy headed lyrics that Bill and Gloria wrote to the tune of Finlandia (I’ll seek commitments that enrich the cosmos … ok … I made that up, but only a little), you’ll notice (as a way to pass the time) that Russ Taff’s main function seems to be holding up and waving around one of the new Gaither lights – these throwaway flashlights that Gaither says from the stage are meant to personalize the vast space of big arenas … the idea being, presumably, that hundreds of little bleating lights in the darkness give people a way of applauding in silence. I’m not sure about that, though they probably are a huge money maker. At any rate, I do know that I was putting together sentences that involved “Gaither Lights,” “Russ Taff,” and “sun don’t shine” after about the 30^th time Taff put that holy-spirit look on his face and started ponderously waving his Gaither Light (as for Taff’s own performance, it really is the sign of a prematurely atrophied career when Ben Speer easily outdoes you).

More significantly, though, there’s just so many little details that get done right in these shows. The comedy is so deft, well timed, and perfectly placed. Gaither and his team use technology to sharpen their comedy skits and lighten their own load as comedians – using cut-aways on the strategically placed projection screens and flat panel monitors to develop some kind of visual joke, usually one that contrasts something Bill Gaither is doing on stage with something Rory the Sound Guy or Williams is doing on the video feed.

And at Thursday’s concert I noticed for the first time that the simulcast being fed to the monitors and screens around the arena are not just practical ways of letting people with bad seats see more of the event. They also give the show that “feel” of a Gaither Homecoming video even while you’re experiencing it live.

None of this is happenstance. Gaither has a staff of dozens these days managing all these little details and making it all seem natural and easy. But they’re only ensuring the show meets standards established by Gaither himself.

At one point early on in the show, some HVAC fans were roaring way up high on one side of the arena and the roaring was filling in the quiet space between phrases of a song, disrupting the balance between song and silence that is so crucial to the overall “feel” of music. The roaring is distractingly apparent three or four times in a row during one song … Gaither looks up at the ceiling and frowns … looks around for his road manager, and summons her to him. He whispers to her while pointing in the direction of the HVAC noise. A few minutes later, the roaring ceased, and Gaither smiled, as his Homecoming universe tipped back into balance.

Update: as many of you have noted, my choice of the HC to complain about spontaneous standing was a little fraught with history, but I’m willing to stick to the point, inconvenient history notwithstanding, if only because it strikes me as opportunistic for the pro-standers to cite some apocryphal sounding story about a sleeping monarch (see comments) to perpetuate a dubious (not to mention often rude) practice. And/but even if the monarch was roused from slumber by the chorus, as the story goes, doesn’t that say more about the inadvisability of sleeping during concerts and only proves my point that the standing was more of a self-invented distraction than homage to the song or God? Sit. Down.

First up, Talley Trio
The first hour of the concert could have been renamed The Lauren Talley show, just as the Talley Trio could more aptly be named Lauren Talley & Parents. Which is to say, Lauren Talley was the Diva of Dix. With her presence and voice, her class and good looks, but most of all her poise as an artist, the young Talley would probably stun most audiences into a kind of Awe and Reverence if she wasn’t so capable of taking people through a range of emotional and spiritual responses to the music she performs. “I’m Happy with You Lord” gave way to “Searching,” which would have felt a little tired, I suspect, in your average venue, but this audience ate it up and loved every moment of Lauren Talley’s virtuoso command of the little stage. An a cappella number got the crowd on its feet and led onto “Shout to the Lord,” and though I haven’t seen LordSong perform this song from their latest project, The Talleys may very well have out-Lorded Lordsong. Listening to Lauren Talley’s verses here, I was reminded of Toni Braxton, Whitney Houston (the early, pre-meltdown years) and, most of all, the echoes of CeCe Winans in Talley’s voice. I’d be shocked if Winans’s example wasn’t somewhere in Talley’s formal or informal training. Like Winans, Talley has a way of settling down on notes from a step or so above and staying a half beat or so behind the time (though Billie Holiday was really one of the first mainstream vocalists to popularize this latter technique), as a way of giving lines texture and emphasis without straying from the melody.

Yet none of this really seemed to matter when she sang a song from her latest project, “That Name,” a lyrically and melodically beautiful vehicle that made my drive to the boonies worth it and then some. Though I nearly came unglued during the song, the audience seemed for the first and only time, mildly baffled by it, politely clapping at the end until one perceptive and brave woman in the front stood up, at which point the rest of the room caught on and began to realize what they had just heard. Part of the pleasure here is Talley’s way with a lyric, her developed interpretative sensibility, the way she makes a song feel and not just sound. It’s an ineffable thing to experience, elusive of description but unmistakable. And, too, Talley has grown beyond much of the IAG silliness that not too long ago was so central to her stage presence. As her voice has matured and her mind has begun to catch up to her vocal ability, her confidence has deepened. Consequently, there is much less need these days for her to launch off on one of those IAG arabesques, chasing some rabbit around the melody until everyone is dizzy and exhausted and asking “what song is this again?” Talley still struggles in lower registers, as she did last night with the verses of “His Life for Mine” - too many notes are undefined and pitchy, and not well enough supported to allow her to push them to the back of her throat (a la Winans, again) as a way of covering and softening them, building contours and arcs into phrases and tone. But during songs like “That Name” and “The Healer,” Talley anchors her voice around big, broad, expansive whole notes - a full-on approach to solo work that is as impressive as it is rare (and rare because so difficult … artless displays of raw vocal power wouldn’t be so popular if technique and discipline were as easy to come by as IAG theatrics). Ending an hour-long set with an uncovered straight tone for four or six measures, as Talley did, is the closest singers can come to doing battle with their bare hands, relying on nothing more or less than their intuition and native sense of artistic self-possession.

Oh yeah, Roger and Debbie Talley were there, too. Seriously, I’m not intentionally short shrifting them. It’s just that it’s difficult for anyone on stage alongside Lauren Talley to make the kind of lasting impression she does and did. Debra Talley talked entirely too much, both during the Talleys’ set and at the end, when all three acts joined one another on stage, and she went flat against her track and the ensemble several times. But during moments when it was her job to carry the show, as during “No One Ever Cared for Me,” Talley reminded us of her early days as a gospel ingenue, with the velveteen magic in her slightly sultry voice that has endeared her to gospel music ever since she and Roger and Kirk first started singing together. And Roger, well … he is the Bill Gaither of tenor singers, I think. His voice is forgettable, a kind of placeholder, but that hardly matters, considering the acuity of his mind as an arranger and a choreographer. Case in point: It’s just a little thing, but it’s such a pleasure to listen to the piano lines that Roger played during Debbie’s “testimonies” (yes, there was more than one, alas …. And I “quote” them because when done right they don’t feel like “testimonies,” but while these were sincere, they still felt canned and padded). He threaded a quiet soundtrack behind her words that emotionally colored and emphasized her story at exactly the right spots (a minor chord here, a suspension there). In these moments, when Lauren is off to one side of the stage, while her parents close the deal, round out the package, it’s possible to see what the genetic code of greatness looks like.

Next up, Anthony Burger
Even though I had never seen AB in concert before, it’s not true to say I didn’t know a little of what to expect. Still, I was unprepared for this. Really. Burger took the stage just about 9 p.m. and played virtually nonstop for almost a full hour: it was like the place was hopped up on speed every second of the way. There was shouting, and hollering, and hand waving and yelling and clapping … and not just clapping, but that big, wide, open-armed smacking-together of the hands that people do when they are just so overwhelmed they can only express their feelings by hitting themselves in this primordial expression of enthusiasm. You think I’m being over the top. You weren’t there. But I’m ahead of myself. If you’re familiar with Liberace or Dino, then you’re familiar with the basic template Burger uses: in this case, familiar tunes (”Rhapsody in Blue” or “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”) interleaved with old gospel favorites (”I’m Winging My Way,” “I’m Getting Ready,” “Great is They Faithfulness” and so on). It’s up to each pianist to take ownership of the template. Burger’s approach is a kind of open-throttle, hard-driving intensity, pretty clearly steeped in the Jim Hammel School of Gospel Performance and the Rode-Hard-and-Put-Away-Wet style that the Kingsmen made famous while Burger was playing for them way back when. Thus, Burger does a lot of hopping up and down, rocking forward on the piano bench, blur-fast karate chopping of the keys and pretty much whatever else he can think of to accentuate whatever he’s playing (this is, I think, Andrew Ishee’s true calling). He also sweats. A lot.

There is a great deal of wisdom in this strategy: for starters, it let’s people identify with Burger as that boy Hammel plucked from obscurity and worked like a dog until he was famous. That’s our Anthony, still working just as hard as Hammel forced him too, etc. Or something like that. And too, the interpretive dance that accompanies the music gives audiences cues about when and where to respond, though this audience hardly needed any cueing up. Before the first number (”Gershwin meets “Shout To the Lord,” which is beginning to be, I think, the new “He Touched Me”), people were on their feet, either in order to get more clearance for their open-armed smack-clapping or in order to get their footing for the big finale of each song, at which point the place exploded. Some people, like the three women in front of me, stood up the entire hour. They were dying to be able to see the keyboard, which we couldn’t from our vantage point (I think Burger could easily charge more for seats with a view of his hands … seriously). And they just couldn’t go over - “can you, Sandy?” - how he does it … at times their fascination was so irrepressible they started turning to perfect strangers near them, poking them in the arm and saying things like “hahahaha he can play just a little, can’t he?” and “they’re gonna hafta get a new piano after tonight” and “I think with a few lessons he might do ok.”

At first, this all rather baffled me. These people were almost all intimately familiar with Gaither and his videos, surely had seen Burger there, and even if they hadn’t, knew him from his Kingsmen days when his prodigious talent was regularly on display. So what is it about all this in particular that is so huge? First off, he doesn’t act or play like this on the Gaither videos, but I don’t think that’s the biggest reason. Broken down to its component parts, I think it’s something like: novel yet familiar, exciting yet predictable (the old hymn will always circle back around in each medley; the minor always gives way to a major); rowdy but safe. Burger’s set can be moving, and they’re emotionally dynamic, but his is not an overtly spiritual or religious act. It’s entertaining, unabashedly so, without reservation or apology. And I am grateful for that. There’s no testifying (people didn’t come to hear that from him … and besides, Debbie Talley testified enough for everyone last night). No attempts to justify how much he throws himself into the show. He just does it; the audiences loves it. And there you go.

Burger of course recognizes this, and he also knows that his audiences enjoy feeling like they’re on the inside track to the best kept nonsecret in Christian entertainment: that old hymns and convention songs can exist alongside Tommy Dorsey, melding into a kind of a smooth jazz sg. “I enjoy,” Burger slyly tells the crowd, “rearranging old hymns so that nobody can recognize them.” Which of course is patently false. The songs are entirely recognizable - if they weren’t, nobody would bother listening. But it’s a wonderful game he plays with audiences (”see if you recognize any of these old tunes,” and as soon as they recognize the tune, the room bursts into vigorous applause). With Burger’s help, these audiences are able to reimagine their favorite gospel music as being just as good as their favorite “secular” songs … plus, (added bonus!) it’s ok to listen to Glen Miller in church! In this regard, Burger is a one-man gospel Lawrence Welk show, merging middle-brow smooth jazz with low-brow pyrotechnics (people love the smoke machine Burger uses at various point throughout the show) - all set to the tune of the shape-note songbook.

Finally, the Booth Brothers
Here’s a challenge for you: close a three-act evening two hours into the night. Ladies and Gentlemen, The BOOTH BROTHERS! Tielessly hip, the BBs take the stage to … nothing. Technical issues. The first of the obvious sound trouble of the night, mind you, but given the hour, the fact that Burger has just exhausted everyone (himself included, I imagine), the absence of any intermission, and - most of all - Michael Booth’s humor, this particular break in things was welcome. Michael Booth looks around in faux confusion whilst sound guys scurry about diagnosing the problem: “Anthony Burger broke everything up here.” Big laughs. It’s funny. And Booth is a very quick-witted, fast-on-his-feet funny kinda guy. Michael Booth introduces the group, then turns to the device from which they play their band tracks: “And this is our band leader, Sony Mitchimishi.” This is very funny. And it’s the kind of humor that is a big part of the BBs appeal. The other part is their sound, which is built around Ronnie Booth’s trademarkably distinct voice, a sorta countrified baritone but not just or only that. Things kick off, once the sound problems are fixed, with “Thank Him for the Miracle,” “Feeling Mighty Fine” and “His Grace is Sufficient.” It’s a nice triptych that showcases the Booths’ lilting, sweet, charming ensemble, not to mention their stylistic range.

The group so clearly enjoys the intricacies and the risk-taking involved in complex harmonics, and they’ve got an impressive grasp of when it’s working and not. Jim Brady turned in an uninspiring second verse to “His Grace,” so Michael Booth pulled it out by calling an a cappella reprise of the chorus. The place sorta shrugged when it ended the first time, but after the turnaround, they were on their feet. There’s also a dexterity and range to the Booths’ stylistic interests that let them take advantage of moments other groups would have to pass up or approach tentatively. Thus the Booths invited Burger on stage to accompany them on “Look For Me,” Michael Booth’s first vehicle of the night. While his voice can be a touch thin and tinsely when he gets excited (which happens easily and often), Booth’s tones as exemplified by the early parts of these verses are gorgeous and evocative - a high, clear voice, full at once of both vulnerability and great restrained force. After “I’ve Been Changed,” we got the Booth Brothers Chuckle Hut routine that stretched on for a while between several songs, culminating after a few songs in an unfortunate towel-head joke that the Brothers should have left in Israel when they were over there for Bill Gaither’s Jerusalem project (just because people laugh doesn’t mean it’s funny). There’s more talking in the set than seemed necessary - it felt at times as if in trying to follow the moment where it took them, the Brothers often let the reins go too slack. But the set closed with “He Saw it All,” the first cut from their new project; “The Night Before Easter;” and “Still Feeling Fine.” A nice mix, even if Michael Booth’s voice lost much of its restraint (and so, for me, appeal) as things careened toward some of the shout-off moments when the Talleys and Burger joined the BBs on stage to close the night. Still, the Booths bring the kind of intensity to their sets, and along with it enough moments of genuinely good music, that it puts a person like me in a forgiving mood. I can’t recall the last time I heard a trio, of which there seem to be more these days than quartets, that had such a clear and sophisticated sense of what they wanted to sound like and where they wanted to go.

Even though I would have preferred they hadn’t strayed quite so far into the Garry-Shepard territory of red-faced shrill notes and improvised vocal stunts, it’s probably not fair to lay this entirely at the Booths’ feet. After all, these are three artists shaped to varying degrees by the Homecoming phenomenon, just as this audience’s tastes and expectations have been trained by Gaither and Friends. So when the Talleys-Burger-Booths finale quickly became a pocket-sized Homecoming shows - old standards notable primarily for the various recombinations of the assembled groups (Burger, Booth, Booth; or Booth, Talley, Burger or whatever) rather than the music itself - the only surprise was that it didn’t happen sooner. The first all-sing tune was “I Feel Like Travelin’ Home,” and the Homecoming choir track they were using was so loud the live vocalists didn’t really need to sing at all. At least that’s what it sounded like. It makes perfect sense: Gaither creating a whole line of band/choir tracks from the Homecoming Friends shows that groups like the Talleys and Booths can take out to their individual concerts and use to keep the Homecoming fires burning brightly. This descent of a three-act evening into a Gaither mini-me is, I note with some self-satisfaction, Gaitherization at work. For my part, though, I think it’s worth remembering that each of these acts, and not least of the Booths, kept almost everyone’s attention (only a few people I saw got up and left early) for three long hours on hard metal chairs in a gym trimmed with fake ivy that kept falling down in little pieces at various loud points throughout the night … if you can pull that kinda feat off, then I guess you’ve probably earned your right to trade on your Gaither connections for a little while.

Location: Bonne Terre, Mo.
Setting: North County High School auditorium
Occasion: Leadbelt Pentecostal Church event
Average age guesstimate: 42 (!)
Opening acts: Two local church groups: Patterson Family (a mixed trio that had the baldfaced temerity to do a song, “Echo of Tears,” that was exactly the same melody as Gerald Crabb’s “Trail of Tears” … it’s hard to imagine the group wouldn’t have known about the similarities … where did these lyrics and this title come from? Gerald Crabb? Really?); and Fresh Anointing (the church’s praise and worship band, by all appearances and sounds)
Attendance: ca 500ish (the place was snuggly full)
Cost: $17

After forty-five (yes that’s 45) minutes of local acts at an ear-splitting volume (note to sound man: bad music doesn’t get better if you make it louder), the Crabbs came on and delivered one hour and fifteen minutes - almost to the second - of mostly fast-paced, downright, holy rolling music. The first tune of the evening is “Promised Land,” and though the emcee (the church pastor, I gather) jumped the gun on his intro and forced the Crabbs to kick things off sooner than they would have liked, the family takes it in stride - indeed, this is one of the intense pleasures of watching Professionals at work: nothing rattles them, no time-killing humor to awkwadly defuse the group’s inability to get off the blocks without proper footing. They seem incapable of being nonplussed at anything. They perform, in a word, with authority. “Promised Land” is virtually all band in the house mix and the vocals struggle to rise to the top, but it really doesn’t matter, because soon enough we’re well into “I Know My Keeper,” which features Aaron Crabb (the non-harmonica-playing twin), whose voice has noticeably improved since those first days of heady fame for the Crabbs, when both of the twins were mostly all histrionics and weak IAG singing). It’s a little difficult, still, to hear his and the rest of the vocals over the band, which just throbs mercilessly all evening. Indeed, the vocals never really get mixed into the sound as adequately as I, sitting in the back row, would like. But I decide to count this no loss, since by every evidence so far, adequate vocals from this sound guy would probably mean a louder set, and the volume is near even my generous threshold for tolerability as it is.

Anyway, before I know, it’s on to “Greater is He” and the set really begins … the throbbing instrumentals are perfect for this 100-yard-dash of a song, and the place is on its feet, thoroughly enthralled. “Travelin’ On” gives way to “The Cross,” and my only response is a big, unstoppable smile. There are moments in gospel music when a live performance distills things to their essence, burns away the superfluous and filters the ancillary, secondary stuff out - leaving nothing but a kind of intense sensation that defies effective description in words and exists at a more ethereal level of feelings sharpened by spiritual intensity. The sg jargon for this is glory bumps, but I prefer to imagine that this is what redemption would feel like if it were just poured all over a person. “The Cross” is the occasion of just such a moment tonight. Jason Crabb carefully tends to this important few minutes, effortlessly interleaving a bit of “The Old Rugged Cross” into the reprise of “The Cross.” The emotional pitch of this interlude sets up “He Came Lookin’ For Me,” and the song’s up-tempo gate creates an absolutely irresistible enthusiasm that spreads through the whole place, giving expression to what I imagine is the room-wide urge to run somewhere. It’s easy to forget, in these kinds of rollicking segments of the set - what with all the hands waving and the crowd shouting and the sound just slamming you in the face relentlessly - that this spiritually carnivalesque atmosphere requires skillful cultivation, mostly the work of Jason Crabb tonight. He stands at the far right of the stage, often practically in the shadows (not the place you’d expect the leader, in every sense of the term, to be), so that when he steps into the foot lights - as he does on “The Cross” and “He Came Lookin’” - it has the effect of a conductor stepping up to command an orchestra, or (more accurately) a young patriarch emerging like Joshua from the shadow of Abraham to lead a tribe (Abraham, that’d be Gerald Crabb if you’re keeping score at home, may not be here in person tonight, but he is everywhere in the set by virtue of his songwriting and his progeny, and the tribal image is reinforced by the stage itself, which just seems tribally full of Crabb Family members, Crabb Family musicians, Crabb Family stuff … one in fact imagines the Crabbs wandering across the wilderness in that caravan of garish buses reporting back to headquarters on the prospects of the land as it appears from the sg stage). Jason Crabb’s command, as a singer and no less as a showman, is complete. He crafts a unified musical experience that picks you up and carries you along in its irrepressible sweep.

Which is why I don’t really mind so much the duds like “Sacrifice of Praise,” a song way too reminiscent of the tonal staleness and lyrical redundancy that marked Fresh Anointing in the far-too-generous opening portions of the show. This is the kind of tune that unfortunately reminds us what it was like early on with the Crabbs … too much screaming and carrying on, not enough substance and too little organization. Perhaps the sound guy felt this too, felt he needed to do something, because though I didn’t think it was possible, the set gets louder on this tune, if not better. Thankfully, a harmonica solo is next. I say thankfully not because I like the harmonica. In fact, if I had three or even two wishes, one of them would be to banish the harmonica from the face of the earth and the whole of eternity. But Adam Crabb’s time to shine does lessen the chances of inner ear damage I was fearing during the few final seconds of “Sacrifice.” The solo is a cheesy rendition of … wait for it … “Amazing Grace,” backed up by keyboardist Justin Ellis on a stringy synthesizer - “string cheese,” I chuckle to myself, and the little girl next to me whips her head around and gives me the most withering look of condemnation I have seen in a while. No more chuckling from me. Anyway, the Crabbs shift gears at this point. Everyone, guitarists included, take a seat on stools for a truncated “Please Forgive Me,” and it gives me time to puzzle again over the vocals in the house mix. I just don’t hear five voices, even when all five kids appear to be singing. Hmmmm. I also note to myself that this is the part where the Crabbs really have to begin to work. This thoroughly Pentecostal crowd has been with the family even before they took the stage … the Crabbs coulda sung serial numbers off the cars in the parking lot - and there were a lot of them, because a high school basketball game was underway at the adjacent gymnasium - and this audience would have had a spell in the spirit all the same. But now that things are slowed down, there’s less emotionalism and flamboyance, less chance of those contagious waves of worship that have been rolling through the auditorium thus far. But nobody misses a beat, on or off stage. And pretty soon we’re back up and going again. “Soldier on his Knees” segues to “Through the Fire,” at which we the emotional center of the evening arrives.

Aaron Crabb has tried his hand at some extemporaneous sermonizing a bit earlier, and it goes off pretty well with this crowd (for my part, though, Aaron’s preaching is bit too much like Jim Hammil’s old set pieces that began with a variation on “when the storms of life rage round about you and you’re tossed on the sea of despair …”). But it’s Jason that really lights into a stemwinder of a sermon in the middle of “Through the Fire” … it has the high shine of regular practice to it, and it’s impossible not to sense how at ease and at home Crabb is among this particular type of audience. Looking around me at the hair buns and make-up-less faces, the long skirts, the almost-missionary zeal in the eyes of the younger guys (not the typical sullenness and punkish bravado of most young, rural males these days), I realize that this is a perfect storm of an sg moment: here’s the one segment of evangelical Christianity - Pentecostalism - that’s growing, excited and enthusiastic about the future of the Christian enterprise, in contrast to the stagnant attendance in most denominations and the political toxicity contaminating so much of the rest of evangelicalism today. And these Christians are here for the most exciting gospel act around right now. I have a tingly moment of my own in which I gloat a little to myself (no chuckling though … that little girl is still hawk-eyeing me, unsure if I may be trusted even yet), because I feel like this auditorium, this evening is confirmation of my hypothesis a few weeks back about the direction of sg’s newest generation of fans. I said they tend to be Pentecostal (as opposed to previous generations of stalwart sg fans who were largely Baptists), and here was a room full of hundreds of Pentecostals, many of them teens, twentysomethings and young couples with kids trying to raise the roof when they weren’t out buying Crabb product all night long (it didn’t hurt the Crabbs were selling any three cd/dvd combination you want for $30). So under these wildfire conditions, “Dontcha Wanna Go” just set the place ablaze straight through to the end of the evening, two songs later. By that time, my ears are aching, literally, but I don’t much care and neither does anyone around me as far as I can tell (and this includes people my grandparents’ age as well as my little girl chaperone). I sneak out before the press of bodies at the doors becomes to much. As I leave, I see the Crabb caravan idling contentedly off in one corner of the lot (facing the highway, not coincidentally) … waiting patiently to carry these gospel itinerants to the next stand, the next night, to the next musical bonfire. Dontcha wanna go .. go .. yes I wanna go .. go .. go …

Location: Belleville, IL
Setting: St. Matthew United Methodist Church, mid-sized, formalish
Occasion: Gospel concert series (this one is dubbed “Quartet Heaven,” by DBQ and Anchormen, apropos the all-sing at the end of the program)
Average age guesstimate: 66
Opening act: none, unless you count the local mortician (Mort, I take to thinking him, having forgotten his actual name), who was also the emcee, or vice versa.
Attendance: ca 250 (generously)
Cost: $15 at the door; $12 in advance

Mort promises a night of “old style” music (the “good ole hard stuff”) - “none of that fancy stuff,” which is an interesting thing to say, considering fancypants groups like Gold City and Legacy 5 are on the St. Matt’s series docket later this spring. But nevermind. Tonight is all about old … old people, old music, old jokes, old skits … coming from 10 guys whose average age is about 27. I have come with a fairly open mind (insofar as I am a blank slate) about the Anchormen. And their set leaves me impressed with their potential but disappointed that they’ve glommed onto this classic quartet meme. From what I can gather, they’ve done so less because of any real ideological preference for “the good ole hard stuff” and more because it’s a plausible way of accounting for the noticeable absence of original tunes or compelling arrangements in their repertoire (evidently, doing it the old way exempts you from having to hire an arranger like everyone else). Indeed, by the time the Anchormen have clipped through their first four tunes - “Take my Hand Precious Lord” (a cappella), “Living Water,” “I know I’ll be There” and “The Fourth Man” - two things are clear: 1)the Anchormen have a clean, tight sound (best exemplified by “Living Water”) whose energy people respond to; and 2)they’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time on staging the set - the comedy bits, the one-liners, the role playing, the hamfisted antics - than they have singing. How much of this is their fault is not clear. The Anchormen have had historical problems keeping a group on the road, and this kind of instability shows up in other ways even when the personnel is temporarily in place; namely, the lackluster arrangements and undistinguished song selection. In addition to the songs above, the set included one tune that sounded original - “He Was Already Out” - and then “Just a Little Talk,” “Oh What a Savior” (oh my), and “Boundless Love,” the last two taken whole cloth from the Cats’s renditions. “Classic” is one way to describe this kind of set. “Uninspired” and “unoriginal” also come to mind.

As well as “youth.” The prevailing sense the A’s left with me was of extreme youth. It’s not just or even primarily their age, though they are young: the group’s most senior performing member is 31 (tenor Michael Hayes); the front man is 28 (Jason Funderburk, Danny’s kid); the pianist is 19 (Bryan Elliot). It’s also a question of development and the (im)maturity of their craftsmanship. Take the bass singer (Will Lane). He is pretty clearly the weakest musical link in the group, though he need not be. His voice is not unpleasant, though he is at times spotty and hollow. The real problem is that he is often simply MIA during songs. Oh, he’s moving his lips and probably actually singing, but he’s inaudible a lot of the time because he does this Ernie-Haase thing with his mic … yanking it way out in front of him on most notes above an F and then showing up for his part only when it establishes a pending resolution or tonic foundation - and even then he relies heavily on subwoofer roar to convey the idea of accurate placement of low tones, when in fact there’s just a bunch of resonance passing for a bass note (see also Gaither, Bill). This is a “classic” sign of someone uncertain of his tone placement, using mic play to kill time until he can find his pitch and then fade into it. With experience and training, this kinda thing can be overcome, but in the meantime it hobbles the collective product. Or consider Brian Elliot. He’s got more sui generis talent than perhaps any performing musician under the age of 30 in sg today. It just rolls off him and onto the keyboard in waves of easy, confident, authoritative playing. In fact, I’m inclined to say he sets the emotional agenda for much of what the Anchormen do. In the free-for-all sing along at the end - the “Quartet Heaven” part of the program, wherein the groups do various mindnumbingly familiar songs - he singlehandedly led the Anchormen through a delightfully knock-the-top-of-your-off rendition of “Dig a Little Deeper.” It was the A’s high spot all night - an absolute radiant three or four minutes of majesty - for which Elliot was largely responsible (at least the energy seemed to come from him and move to the other guys secondarily). Elliot’s work on this tune reminded me of the way Anthony Burger could herd the Kingsmen into line by sheer dint of the one-man soundtrack he’d lay down. Elliot is capable of an undiluted musical force that spreads out from the stage and into the audience, and on “Dig a Little Deeper,” it caught hold of the group as a whole - they sang an old song in a way that made if feel new and full of that word I’m so fond of right now … freshness. The effect was to leave the Doves looking slightly mawkish and insubstantial by comparison, if only for a moment or two. But that’s Elliot’s only performative setting: ECSTATIC! And while this hard-driving style works perfectly at a few well-placed spots in a program, it has an overpowering effect after while (he just completely tromped all over McCray Dove’s solo lines in “The Lighthouse”). What at first seems purely impressive, endearingly flashy, and boisterously appealing about Elliot becomes - after an hour so - slightly antagonistic. Elliot needs to learn the virtue of well-placed restraint and simplicity. Which is why I found myself welcoming Andrew Smith, the DBQ’s pianist. Though his style is a touch too heavily arpeggiated in general, he has an admirable sense for subtlety, for quiet nuance and the understated grace that come with Smith’s being just a few years older and road-wiser.

This brings us to the DBQ: most of the crowd was there for McCrae Dove and Co. And they didn’t disappoint, which is to say, they didn’t surprise either: the set comprised the mostly familiar litany of “classics” you’ve come to expect from sg’s reigning Nostalgists: “King & I,” “I’m Living with Jesus,” “Did you Ever,” “Moving to the Rhythm,” “Gonna Rise,” and “Just a Closer Walk.” This is the first half, a generally loungey 25 minutes or so - followed by a coupla piano solos. Then on to the second more histrionic half: “Lonesome Road,” “He Didn’t Throw the Clay Away” (the surprise of the evening, such as it is), and of course “Didn’t It Rain” and “Get Away.” Interspersed within this mix were various comedy bits, all slapstick and farce (best line of the night: “we all went to the same high school … David [Hester, bass singer] is a few years older than the rest of us, but we all got to graduate at the same time”). Indeed, between the two groups, this was perhaps the most schticky evening of music I’ve ever encountered. Beyond these two groups transforming a perfectly staid Methodist establishment into a poor man’s Chuckle Hut, a few things struck me about the DBQ’s set: One, David Hester possesses an easy, full range of bass tones … and he is there all the time. Two, McCray Dove’s intonation continues to widen, approaching part-the-Red-Sea proportions. At times, deciphering his pronunciation was like playing a word scramble: “fine stately mansions” sounds like “pine stained stanchions” … that kinda thing. This, set over against his slightly hectoring, half-jokey half-serious bullying of the audience (”DID YOU LIKE THAT? DID YOU REALLY LIKE IT?!”) and his persistently unconvincing self-deprecation (words to the effect of “I didn’t sing that worth nothing” or “if you ever wondered what it was like to have to sing sick, this is it” even though of course he sounded fine) … all this creates an asymmetry to the set, like watching one of those old radio performers alternatively inhabit diametrically opposite roles one right after the other without warning of the switch (Dove the blustery bumpkin, Dove the itinerant evangelist, Dove the Laurel to his own Hardy, Dove’s Mutt to others’ Jeff). Dove plays this one-man vaudeville stuff well, and his singing is solid, but it’s nothing you can ever settle comfortably into for very long, before he’s off another bit. This is fun if you like playing charades. Otherwise, it’s distracting. Three (and finally), tonight does nothing to shake the feeling that this whole “classic” business is essentially unimaginative. There is indeed a certain grim logic to the enthusiasm with which these classicists go about their work. But I have to wonder: Does the unsustainability of this project occur to them? Do they see the way they are desperately burning through the unrenewable resource of those aging fans (average age 66 tonight!) whose musical tastes were arrested in 1963 or thereabouts. You can call this classic if you’d like. Or tonight, you can call it “Quartet Heaven,” … as in “died and gone to,” I suppose. But for my part, I refer to hope this means the arrangers and songwriters and groups willing to perpetuate (rather than embalm) the music aren’t dead yet.

Location: Arnold, Mo.
Setting: First Baptist Church; large but informal
Occasion: Real Evangelism Conference
Average age guesstimate: 57
Opening act: local choir (despite some infelecities, choir gets more sustained applause than GV)
Attendance: ca 500-600
Cost: whatever you want to put in chicken buckets as they pass

Thirty easy minutes: That’s about the best way to describe Greater Vision’s set at the 21st Annual Real Evangelism Conference. GV has been working with Bailey Smith ministries, which runs the REC, for a lot of years now. And obviously these kinds of partnerships are bread and butter for a group like GV. Reliably friendly and receptive audiences. Light workload, brisk product sales in the lobby. But I don’t feel like it’s terribly fair to judge them as artists or performers by these gigs. This one tonight could have been phoned in save for “Common Garments.” At any rate, tonight was just kinda blah. They sang six songs in just over thirty minutes …very little crowd interaction, though what there was of it was typical genius showmanship from Wolfe. I gather there is a certain agreed-upon arrangement between the groups that variously perform with Bailey (GV, Karen Peck & New River, Alison Durham, The Crabbs, The Booth Brothers and Mercy’s Mark) and his troupe of traveling evangelists (among them Jerry Falwell, who’s speaking tomorrow night … oh my). That is, Gerald Wolfe agrees not to upstage the likes of Falwell or Paige Patterson, and in return GV gets to continue with this plum gig.

Mind you, it wouldn’t be difficult to upstage this bunch of paint-by-number preachers. Haven’t these guys heard any new jokes in the last thirty years? Have they no other way of endearing themselves to the local crowd than to pander and fawn over the local choir (whose performance tonight was earnest but uneven, or perhaps it was just the song selection) and the attendant orchestra (some major horn issues, alas)? In comparison, Wolfe was all easy charm and understated grace … he never moved more than an inch or two from the same spot, never did more with has arms or hands than motion slightly, never spoke above a conversation voice … but the room was his for as long as he wanted it. And GV didn’t even break a sweat. Opened with “I Was Blind” (ugh) and “There’s Still Room” from Faces, which were both very meticulously rendered but serviceable as live performances go (the lackluster choir was filtering in through the back of the sanctuary all during these songs so there was no need to try to gather up the room at that point). “My Name is Lazarus” perked things up and no one seemed to mind as much as me that “Samaritan’s Heart” is a piece of musical swiss cheese, full of dead spots and awkward fissures and gaps where nothing happens and I feel awkward for the performers who have a look of equal parts embarrassment and annoyance in their eyes during these long caesuras. “Common Garments” was the high spot. It seemed to awaken Rodney Griffin and Jason Waldrup, shake them out of the familiarity of the newest material from Faces. Then Wolfe wrapped things up with “It is Well.” Of course the place lit up like a hockey game on goal, but the remarkable thing is that Wolfe really wasn’t doing anything that out of the ordinary for his voice. He didn’t deviate from the Faces cut of the song much. It wasn’t like there was some “live” moment. He’s simply capable of rousing a room of 600 Baptists with his everyday stuff. Of course it doesn’t hurt that Waldrup stands over there gently pushing the sliders up throughout the tune, so that by the time it ends, the stracks can support the intensity of Wolfe’s voice and reinforce the Big Finish. People don’t seem to mind when it’s too loud and they like it.

What a refreshing concert!! I haven’t been so entertained in a very long time. It’s nice to go and see a southern gospel group that obviously practices on a regular basis and isn’t afraid to stake a claim to some individuality. Plus, they’re all in shape, they dress to kill, tan regularly and look like stars. I like that. It’s been a while since we’ve had any glamour in this industry and I think it’s about time someone brought it back. Not one of their jokes had I ever heard before (a definite southern gospel first) and their piano player’s dry wit is wonderful! Vocally, they are definitely exceptional - the weak link is Ernie, whose voice is one of those love-it-or-hate-it kinds, but his pitch is shaky at times. But, he makes up for it with his power and range … and the audiences love him. I kept waiting for the overpowering stacks that people talk about and honestly could never tell for sure if they were using them or not - AND there was no major drop-off when they were doing a capella or piano-only songs.

I haven’t heard them since NQC, and I don’t think 25 minutes at NQC probably does their brand of music much justice. It takes a while, I imagine, for SSQ’s high-octane approach to produce substance as well as heat. At NQC they look like all flash in the pan and not much else, though that 30-year-old Gaither tune they’re doing (the one I always mistake for “Redemption Draweth Nigh”) came off quite well in Louisville. Anyway, maybe running this letter will win me some points with a few of those SSQ fans out there who love to tell me all the ways I’m a fool. Now if I could just get the Integri-phants to come ’round my way … I guess if that’s my objective, I shouldn’t mention a certain high-profile soloist whose recent newsletter contained this little chuckler: “Make your plans now to be in Maryville Tenn on Feb 5th. I will be at the Maryville college, along with the Whisnants, and Triumph (formerly Integrity Quartet).” I guess he got the memo, but it was cut off. Anyway, many thanks to FK for the note.