Besides, the appeal of this upcoming GVB reunion video isn’t about whether or not the singers can still cut it. The appeal is seeing them together again. I enjoyed Danny Funderburk on the Cathedral Reunion Tour a decade ago, even though he could no longer cut it. The excitement was still there, and yes, they SHOULD sing the same songs they popularized in their heyday. Why would we want them to sing some song we’d forgotten?

I wanted to hear Danny sing “Somebody Touched Me” as well as he was able while Glenn and George cheered him on at the Cathedrals reunion back then, and I want to hear Mark and Michael singing “Satisfied” now…warts and all.

This isn’t exactly a new point – that reunions are less about music and more about the satisfying memories evoked by watching and listening to certain recombinations of singers perform music from the past. And as several of you have noted, even at or near their worst (and think this clip probably qualifies as such), the Vocal Band – even past its prime – still surpasses a lot of the gospel music being made today.

But put together like this, these two points made me think about two related points. The first one is somewhat obvious: part of what makes it so painful to watch that clip is not how it compares to gospel music in general, but rather its merit compared to the Vocal Band’s own longstanding and justified reputation for innovative, difficult, impeccably sung arrangements that consistently found that sweet spot between the familiar and the fresh. Put this another way: for most gospel groups, having your live reunion performance dubbed  “not bad” is probably a complement, but the GVB is not most groups, so not bad is … well, not good, no matter how much nostalgia you slather over it.

The second point has to do with the concept of a reunion for a group whose main function over the past 15 years or so has been to maintain a stable core of musical excellence for what is probably the biggest and longest running reunion in Christian entertainment.

Sure, there was always a sentimental component to what the Vocal Band has done as part of the Homecoming phenomenon, and the opposite it true: there has been a lot of great music created by so many friends “coming home” to the Gaither tour. But the appeal of Homecoming has always primarily been sentimental and nostalgic. I think a lot of us want to believe that it succeeded because it emphasized musical excellence, however schmaltzy it may have been at times. And it is probably true that Homecoming wouldn’t have succeeded to the extent that it has beyond the gospel music world if the quality of the music on the tour hadn’t been reliably high. Still, I don’t think anyone could persuasively argue that musical excellence is a precondition for success among gospel audiences.

One way the Homecoming tour kept from sliding into abject sentimentality and maudlin nostalgia was to anchor the shows and videos with vocally astonishing performances by increasingly astonishing iterations of the Vocal Band. My own sense is that the Lowry-English-Franklin (or maybe the Lowry-English-Murray) Vocal Band was the most musically talented version of the group, and the Phelps-Penrod-Lowry/Hall version(s) the most accomplished group of entertainers.

But everybody has their own favorite. What stands out in this process of recalling one’s favorite lineups from the group’s history is that there hasn’t really been a bad iteration in the bunch (and this is true going back from the beginning, long before Homecoming came along). No instance where a new member faced a conspicuously steep learning curve. No case of someone failing outright in the job, even if in a few cases the choice was less inspired than most others. Instead the distinguishing feature of the Vocal Band has been that personnel changes seemed to be managed not on the basis of their nostalgic or sentimental value, as is naturally the case for the at-large roster of Homecoming friends, but on the basis of talent and ability.

Thus, to see this particular group, which kept the Homecoming reunions from falling into reunionizing excess, undertake their own reunion is a pretty clear signal that an era is maybe not over, but is headed toward some sort of end. And no matter how inevitable this may be, and no matter how well the GVB reunion will sell (oh how it will sell), it can still be hard to watch, sad to see, and sometimes difficult to listen to.

OK, I do realize that attempting to address the vitriolic Gaither-hating on this site is an exercise in futility, but you know… sometimes the wife of a “histrionic, emotionalistic, over-singing, Gaither-light waving, badly dressed, prematurely atrophied career” singer just needs to get a couple of things off her (smoking hot) chest.

(more…)

PS: If you haven’t already: go vote.

Lovin Life, the GVB’s latest album, might as well have been phoned in. More energy and thought appeared to have been put into the lighting, makeup, and hairstyles of the cover photo for the album than anything else. Indeed, the album art rather nicely captured the album itself: highly coiffed but largely vapid.

Rick Hendrix sent round an email this afternoon saying Penrod is fine and just wants to take a few weeks to rest, and maybe that’s true. But it’s hard to believe he doesn’t have one eye on the door, and hasn’t for some time. He was intimately involved in creating the music and image of the GVB at the height of its Homecoming fame, so he knows which way the wind is blowing for the group in these sunset years.

Meanwhile, it’s gratifying to see that my crystal ball is not entirely crusted over and that Jason Crabb will indeed be making some appearances on the Homecoming tour. Daniel Mount wonders what Crabb will sound like in a male-quartet, and I myself raised questions back when Crabb signed with Spring Hill about what kind of fit he’d be with the Homecoming set. But lately it occurs to me that, thanks to Russ Taff’s stint with the GVB, we’ve already seen what happens when you try to make a histrionic emotionalistic diva  divo do ensemble work. The more I think about it, the more I imagine that, like Taff, Crabb will generate some minor excitement among the faithful at first, and then just as quickly make people miss the other guy. And evidently Gaither might suspect this too, since Lowry and Phelps are sharing Penrod’s workload with Crabb.

Gimmicks and nostalgia … GVB’s starting to look more and more like just another gospel group.

“For believers, coming to Wal-Mart is like coming home.”

Gloria Gaither may also read a poem over the store’s loudspeakers about cheap affordable grace.

I haven’t read the book and honestly don’t plan to any time soon, so I don’t have anything meaningful to say about the novel itself. But I did find this image from the NYT story interesting. It’s a picture from a reading that the author did in suburban Indianapolis recently and isn’t that Gloria Gaither standing off to the right? The caption doesn’t say, but it sure looks like her.

It’s really not that big of a deal, but I’m always curious about these sorts of “as others see us” takes on insular cultures from the outside. Assuming that’s Gaither in the photo, here is arguably one of the most influential writers and artists in Christian entertainment involved in the rise of a bestselling/controversial Christian novel, and she doesn’t even rate a mention (and/or the reporter had no clue who Gloria Gaither is and so didn’t know that it might have been worth mentioning). I’m not surprised, mind you. Just bemused at being reminded in an unexpected place just how “sub” the sg subculture really is.

What I’d like to see, aside from all the Gaither/Homecoming product released today, would be an extensive compilation, like a boxed set, of all the earlier recordings, with outtakes, alternate versions, etc. and extensive liner notes. Bill would have to write them since MacKenzie and Bob Benson are gone but additional comments by Bill Grine (photographer), Bob McConnell (graphic designer), some of the engineers or players could be insightful. I doubt there would be a market for it, but as a collector who was influenced by BG’s music and a fan of that era of recording and publishing gospel music in general, it would help fill in some of the gaps and provide a comprehensive overview of the earliest years of one of the most significant groups in the genre.

I heartily second all this (read his whole comment; it’s worth it).

Judging by some of your comments, I’m more surprised than most of you that Gaither is no more actively involved in curating the history of his own career than he is. Perhaps a Gaither partisan would argue that this disinterest in certain parts of his own personal history reflects Gaither’s selfless concern with just being a blessing and letting the rest of the chips fall where they may. But I think that’s pretty clearly naïve, and wrong.

Both of his autobiographies are in some ways extensive attempts to carefully manage the relationship between history and his professional image (and like I said, it’s not like he’s averse to copiously annotated lists, as evidenced by the fairly exhaustive recitations of awards that cap off each book). The few times I’ve talked to him, he has spoken at length about Christian music history. Again, this may be Bill Gaither playing the part of Bill Gaither, but even so, that would only seem to deepen the puzzle. Wouldn’t a commitment to music history include carefully preserving your own if the early part of that work helped bring about a sea change in Christian music and entertainment?

My own sense is that Gaither is intellectually and imaginatively restless, that his eye is constantly darting hither and yon, trying to look for and alight upon whatever is just on the horizon, whatever the next thing is for him and his musical career. Partly this is good bidness, but reading his books, I get the sense this restlessness may also be a symptom of a deep-set anxiety Gaither has about losing his edge – or, perhaps more important, about being perceived to have lost his edge, gone soft creatively, or sold out ethically or spiritually.

Both books go on at some length about a “attack” in the early 70s on his integrity and authenticity from a close friend. The assault devastates Gaither, as he tells it, and sends him into a year-long depression and creative dry spell that he doesn’t reemerge from until the arrival of his third child, whose birth inspired “Because He Lives.” When I first read the books, the amount of attention and energy Gaither expends on this episode seemed strange to me: what his friend says is indeed mean, but I originally had a hard time imagining that what really amounts to an outburst of rudeness from a jealous friend could have surprised Gaither that much.

But on rereading the books this time, I got the feeling that Gaither is deeply concerned that his motives be perceived as pure and that his success be understood as a testament to his purity of heart. I don’t mean that Gaither is insecure. Just the opposite, in fact. If anything, he often comes across in the books as put-out that he has to explain how or why he and his wife made the business decisions they did. It’s as if to him, the patent proof of their business wisdom and ministerial acumen invalidates all need for explanation, that his story matters not for its explanatory value but because it provides a glimpse into the origins of their current success and contextualizes his reflective insights on life and Christian art.

In this light, history would seem to matter to Gaither only insofar as it affects the present. This would explain why he spends so much time constructing and reconstructing autobiographical narratives about the past, while evincing little interest in creating a coherent discographical record of his early years. Those old albums matter because they succeeded, individually and collectively. Why care about anything else?

There’s a bit of the historical fallacy in this kind of thinking. Moreover, it results in a pretty astounding gap in our understanding of American Protestant Christian music and cultural history. But aside from all that, as a practical matter, I find it difficult to believe a collector’s edition release of The Gaither Trio: the Early Years (from the earliest custom stuff to, say, 1975 or so) wouldn’t sell quite well, and not just among old timers like CVH.

The Homecoming phenomenon has (d)evolved to a point now where Gaither has nothing to risk by reminding people of his contemporary and inspo roots. In fact, many of his Homecoming fans would probably relish the chance to invest in the nostalgic prehistory of their favorite gospel music impresario. Everybody wins, especially BG: rereleasing the old stuff puts money in the bank, and reinforces his image as a trans-stylistic master of Christian music.

Aside from the fact that the writing in the first is far superior to the second, the books are interesting, when read side-by-side, for what they suggest about the way Gaither has quite consciously set about reinventing himself since 1992, when the first Homecoming video was shot. In Sunset (which comparatively makes very little mention of his southern gospel roots or interests), he pretty clearly sees himself winding down his career, and he seems to be using the book to make the Gaither brand synonymous with “elder statesmen of Christian music,” sensu lato. In More than Music, Gaither finds himself in the strange position of having had his career rejuvenated by southern gospel - after an adult lifetime of success as more or less a contemporary or inspirational artist - and needing to create a backstory of his life to accommodate the changed circumstances of newfound southern gospel success.

I’m not suggesting either book is a misrepresentation of reality as he experienced it. We all do this - modify and adjust and tweak the running autobiography of ourselves that’s constantly being (re)composed in our minds as our vision of ourselves shifts to meet the reality of lived experience. It’s just that few of us do so as publicly as someone like Gaither.

But I digress. In rereading these books, I found myself having trouble following the discographical history of the Gaither Trio. And so I started trying to plot out the trio’s early years project by project … and found it nearly impossible.

All the discographies I’ve found for the BG Trio are vexingly vague about the group’s recordings before the second Alleluia album (Alleluia: Praise Continues, from 1973, which is often mistaken for the first). The first Alleluia album was actually Alleluia: A Praise Gathering for Believers (circa 1971? Gaither’s books are persistently dodgy when it comes to specific dates, and there is, maddeningly, no complete or even partial discography of Gaither recordings in either book, perhaps because the long list of awards takes up the space that might have been used for a far less sexy but far more practical list of albums released under the Gaither name). But because Alleluia: Praise Gathering was technically a demo tape for the church musical of the same name, discographers appear to feel under no obligation to count it, for whatever reason, even though it sold well in its own right. Or is there a Master Discography In the Sky I’m missing?

Most disocgraphies (see for example, here, here and here) make vague but chronologically hedged references to Happiness (sans label, from “the 1960s,” which may or may not be a custom recording). But most begin to mark time for the group with At Home In Indiana, the 1970-71 project that put the trio on the map (ftr, Gaither refers to the project in both books, without fail, as “Back Home In Indiana”). But Gaither’s books mention at least three Benson projects in the early 1970s prior to Back/At Home that I haven’t seen listed in any of online discography: Sincerely, When God Seems So Near, and I Am Free. These projects were, if I understand the history correctly (and I may not; like I say, it’s all very muddled), after Bob Benson signed the trio and introduced them to producer Bob McKenzie, but before “Mac” and Gaither formed Paragon in the mid-70s.

But wait. It gets more interesting/complicated. Even though most discographies list At/Back Home in Indiana (circa “1970s” is as specific as they get), most don’t begin to specify exact years of release for albums until the 1972 Live recording (2 LPs). The consistency of the vagueness suggests something more substantive than neglect or lack of interest. Maybe the master file is just irrecoverably vague or obtuse. At any rate, I assume there’s a fairly reasonable explanation why several different discographies manifest similar kinds of inexactitudes surrounding the pre-1972 Live album.

But still … surely there are people out there (besides BG himself, who doesn’t seem terribly interested in discographical specificity in his books) who own the complete works of BG Trio before 1972 and who could pretty easily clear up what exactly is the chronological order of their releases and whether or not those releases were custom or label. Right? Surely?

First, I’m not sure why anyone would sign with a label that has a website as badly out of date of Spring Hill’s (the latest “newsflash”? Crossway ends the year with a bang … in 2004! And then there’s the roster of artists, many of which haven’t been with Spring Hill for a long time). Ok, maybe it shouldn’t keep people from signing with a label, but honestly. Do bonafide businesses still think the internet can be treated like an afterthought?

Anyway, I gotta say the deal was a little surprising. First I really had hoped that Crabb would sign with Canaan for reasons I’ve alluded to elsewhere. But my own sugarplum visions aside, Spring Hill is a hard outfit to figure out. As far as I know, it’s still owned by Gaither, Mark Lowry, and a couple of others (though correct me if I’m wrong here). But it hasn’t exactly shown signs of great life lately. In fact, I had always thought that when Gaither’s son-in-law Barry Jennings took things over a while back, it was to basically clean the place up (a work in progress I guess, since obviously no one has gotten around to that “update website” item on the to-do list) and then move back to the Gaither mothership.

But maybe Gaither has other plans. Why, I can’t imagine. He has the Gaither Music label to play with. Then again, Jennings is a super smart guy by all accounts and he’s obviously not just parachuting in for a quick clean up, so maybe there’s something else going on here.

All that said, there are plenty of reasons the deal makes sense, especially if you’re Jason Crabb. With Spring Hill he gets connections to the Gaither Music distribution network. And we should probably start looking for him on the fall Homecoming tour as well.

For Gaither and Co., Crabb brings with him an abiding popularity among a country/holiness demographic that Gaither could want to make inroads into. How Crabb’s Pentecostalism would play on the Homecoming stage is an open question, as I imagine it won’t be easy to control or contain the guy when he gets on a holy roll. But then again, Lynda Randall, a long time Homecoming Friend who came from a pretty heavy holiness background, exemplifies how an artist’s performance style can be Gaitherized into the mass-market Homecoming aesthetic. So who knows.

-This time of year is when I get really behind on a lot of things that aren’t absolutely necessary. Which means, among things, I have a growing stack of music I need/want to listen to, including but not limited to the Childress Family, EHSSQ/GVB Together (video and audio discs), GV Everyday People (and their hymns project which I haven’t heard in its entirety yet), Booths Harmony, and Ronnie Booth’s solo cd. I also want/need to listen more closely to the Talleys Stages, Perrys Look no Further and Gold City Revival. Any suggestions on what should move to the top of the stack and, for that matter, what else I should add?

-Speaking of the GVB album … There seems to be a bit of a spat over what, precisely, is the latest Gaither Vocal Band radio single. The following was in Thursday’s SG Show Prep:

In an email labeled: “Urgent Radio Information” record promoter Rick Hendrix says a Gaither Vocal Band single sent to DJs should not be added to stations’ play lists. Rick told SGSP: “A single has surfaced at radio by Gaither Vocal Band.. ‘My Journey to the Sky’ It was our mistake. Please do not add this song. It is not from the new project and is not going to be promoted.”

Hendrix goes on to say that the current GVB single is “Love is Like A River” from the “Together” CD with Ernie Haase and Signature Sound. Rick adds: “I apologize for the error.”

And then, this afternoon, this message made the rounds to radio types, from Jeff O’Neal of Heritage Communications:

The new single you received from me [“My Journey to the Sky”] WAS approved by BILL GAITHER to go out. He told me he wanted that song to go out before the new project was done. So just in case you’re getting some other kind story from another promoter.

Presumably this all has something to do with a disagreement about exclusive promotional rights, but still, it seems like the left hand fighting with the right hand to me. Hard to tell, especially with no more understanding of radio promotion than I have. Anyway, it’s still amusing enough to be a decent distraction on a Friday.

-I’ve heard the Ball Brothers, a young and B-side family quartet with a funny name, may have caught the attention of Canaan Records. I’ll be interested to see if a deal actually happens (for that matter, I’ll be interested to see if Canaan is going to announce ANY deals besides their Hoppers arrangement from what seems like long ago). The Balls certainly have the look (think a slightly wholesomer EHSSQ), but if their last project was/is any indication, Canaan may want to hold off for a bit, unless they’re ready to invest heavily in these guys (which they may be … that is, after all, how labels are supposed to operate even if it’s mostly unheard of in southern gospel these days). You can hear a few songs from them on their website home page. “Mercy Said No” is a good example of their strengths (tight harmony, assuming they can pull it off live) and weaknesses (pitch control and breath support issues that create nasality and some thinning out of the sound).

Anyway, it would take some investment to get the Ball Brothers to sound as good as they look. The difference between the two right now doesn’t really matter on a night-to-night basis and won’t for quite some time, since gospel crowds eat up young artists. But in the long run, there’s enough vocal instability there to give a label pause (plus, I guess you’d need to weigh whether the EHSSQ phenomenon is a genuine style that can be piggybacked on with a SSQ lookalike/soundalike group or whether it’s just a fad … which would be a tough call to make). That said, Canaan/Word would be in a position to invest what’s needed. So yeah … we’ll see, I guess.

Update: Just one last item. From longtime reader JG, a youtube clip of what looks like a version of Mercy’s Mark (with Chris West and West’s brother) covering “Midnight Cry.” Whatever else one has to say about it, Josh Feemster pretty much takes over complete ownership of this song, as far as I’m concerned. Ivan Parker might have nostalgia in his favor, but he’s never sang it anywhere near this well. Plus, I think we can officially say that southern gospel has now discovered youtube.

Maybe a better question would be who is going to take Gloria’s place? From all I have heard from people who were often on the Homecoming series, she was the one with the plan.

An excellent point. For all my carping on and on about how overlooked and undervalued women’s contributions are in southern gospel culture, my own tendency to focus on mainly on BG at the expense of GG unfortunately illustrates how reflexively masculinist sg is. Color me chagrined.

Following up on Harris’s point, reader cdguy had this to say:

Ben, I don’t know about her having the plan, but I do know she has a heavy hand in selecting the songs. She has for many years, not just on the homecoming projects, or GVB, but even dating back to the trio days. Not saying it’s a bad thing, just saying that’s the way it is. In fact, I happen to think she’s done a good job. Except that they have been rehashing a lot of the same songs, in recent years. They could at least do new tracks and new arrangement, now and then.

In that regard, I think Suzanne and Amy could step in to help Bill. Suzanne seems to be similar to Gloria in writing style. Maybe she also inherited the gene that would help in the programming.

Don’t know if you’d noticed, but the earliest homecoming videos were not as structured, just sitting around the piano calling out song titles. Once they started programming them, I think the content got better. Probably Gloria’s influence, rather than Bill just playing with his friends.

I have no idea how much of the Gaither formula is Bill’s doing or Gloria’s. As with most of these sorts of things, it’s probably a healthy mix of both Bill and Gloria in the shows. And while it’s a mistake to think that Bill’s aw-shucks “just me and my friends up here sangin’” schtick on stage means he’s not shrewdly invested in constructing a wholistic concert experience, cdguy is probably onto something in suggesting that Gloria’s influence plays a big part in the way song selection creates the emotional trajectories of the Homecoming shows.

I’ve heard enough of Suzanne, the Gaither’s daughter, on some of the videos to say confidently she got plenty of her mother’s propensity for sentimental recitations and overlong reflections on the wondrousness of God’s glorious grace. I’m no more a fan  of this from the daughter than I have been from the mother, but Suzanne could (and maybe already does), as cdguy notes, probably fulfill some of the same content roles as her mother quite well.

What sort of surprises me is that no one has been consistently groomed to take over the impresario role from Gaither. Rory and Lowry and Gordon … we know these names and faces well from their part in the Homecoming comic relief. But as the premise of our earlier thread made clear, there’s no obvious successor to BG’s on-stage role. I do recall seeing Benji Gaither get some face time on the Give it Away video for his songwriting on that African-flavored song, but he (and Suzanne, for that matter) will need a lot more carefully crafted exposure if any of this is supposed stay in the family beyond the reign of pater and mater familias.

Without Gaither, and all else being equal, pontificators like me would naturally look to someone like Gerald Wolfe as the kind person who could occupy an iconic position in the genre (Roger Bennett would have been as well). And certainly Wolfe probably will age into a kind of grand ole master role: someone who reminds of specific legacies but does his own thing more or less.

But post-Gaither, we don’t just expect a certain number items to be checked off on the What It Takes To Be A Legend list: musical ability, charisma/charm, proven success, appeals to a wide range of audiences and types of fans, recognized beyond genre as a leader in the tradition and style, etc. Now we also expect The Icon to essentially make his career (and I’m afraid it will probably be a “he” for some time to come yet) not just about creating music but also about being a kind of ambassador of gospel music to the outside world; not just about practicing the craft at a certain level but translating it and making it accessible, saleable, to a broader audience.

These are, I think, good things. But the question remains: who will it be after his Billness?

Reader gc thinks Ernie Haase, and certainly all available signals seem to be pointing his way. But kingmaking is a tricky bidness. Gaither’s endorsement and the connection to George Younce are undeniably powerful. On the other hand, Haase is almost entirely a confection of the nostalgia industry that Gaither (and to a lesser degree, Younce) created. Just watch and listen to the EHSSQ shows: beyond the choreography, the next biggest chunk of their act has to do with channeling Bill and George in one form or another. Can a kingship be built around echoes, shadows, and namedropping?

I’m really not sure. I’d be less uncertain if Haase had proven sustainability of his own out from under the auspices of his mentors. There’s a great deal of inside-baseball debates about how “real” EHSSQ’s sales and success are; that is, how much of it comes from Gaither’s coattails and the way Gaither’s product fulfillment translates into SoundScan numbers, and how much of it would persist in absence of the Gaither association. It’s hard to say, but I assume at some point we’ll find out.

Personally, my hunch is EHSSQ has staying power of their own, but I’m not so sure about EH as the new BG. Put aside all the X factors and the inside-baseball stuff, and Haase just doesn’t seem to have the necessary degree and kind of charisma and charm, certainly not to the extent you’d expect from The Icon. It’s not about his ability to be like Younce and Gaither. In fact, if anything, I think his showmanship as an emcee would work a great deal better if he stopped trying to be a pastiche of what he seems to think good gospel emcees act like (there’s a lot of breathy sentimentalism, which I gather comes from Gaither, and a comedy style that mostly seems to be an updated brand of George-and-Glennism run through the Gaither sketch-comedy workshop). Instead, he needs to find his own voice as emcee that fits whatever it is that EHSSQ is doing stylistically (though to be fair, this could be said of many sg emcees).

Because if Gaither has done one thing inarguably well, it’s been to create a performance style that reminds audiences of all the best things they recall of the music’s tradition but in a way that’s not quite like anything before it. EHSSQ is on its way in this regard, inasmuch as this dancing schtick recalls the Statesmenish and Blackwoody past while also clearing new performative ground. But it’s not at all clear how well this particular trick pony will age. Haase is a creative thinker who will figure out how to shift his appeal when something in his current mix goes stale. But vocally, Haase is also the weakest (and, if I recall rightly, the oldest) link in his group. If he has any ambitions to be The Icon, Haase needs to find a way to shift his primary role away from singing and toward being an impressario on stage, because it’s much more difficult to consistently deliver top-notch music arranged around a weak tenor than it is to work around a faux-bass like Gaither.

My money is on Mark Lowry. I saw his Be the Miracle Tour a few weeks ago in Florida and it was astonishingly good. And I say this not despite the fact that Lowry told extended jokes about Jesus and poop, old people sex, and the ineptitude of the Virgin Mary as a mother, but because he told these jokes, and absolutely killed with them. It was a mobscene at his product table – hundred dollar bills and elbows flying. Oh, and the music is often mindblowingly good.

I’ve raved on about Lowry at NQC, and there’s not a lot I would say about his full-length shows that would surprise anyone who read my NQC thoughts (which is why I didn’t do a concert review). But it shouldn’t go without saying: the way Lowry uses LordSong and Stan Whitmire in combination with his own voice and comedy is nothing short of ingenious – both clearly a descendant of the Homecoming tour stage style (and so familiar enough to earn audience’s trust), and yet entirely different from it (just as Gaither’s approach with the Homecoming Friends both borrowed and significantly departed from the singing convention style … and Charlie Waller’s GOGR, depending whom you talk to). And most brilliantly of all perhaps (and this a lesson learned from Giather, no doubt) there’s nothing about this set-up that wouldn’t work with other talent, save Lowry himself of course.

All this is very subjective, obviously. I guess it sounds a wee bit convenient that an act I like is also my pick for the heir apparent. But Lowry’s is the first gospel music show I can recall in ages that I’d go back to see the very next night even (or especially) if nothing changed. And I suspect I’m not alone.

I’m drawn to Lowry’s irreverence and his unconventional habits of mind as a religious performance artist. Many of the jokes he tells on a given night would be familiar to anyone who’s heard his act recently, and yet it’s not a paint (or dance)-by-number “show.” Lowry spends a great deal of time more or less free-associating with his audience and weaving the main features of the tour’s script into whatever comes to mind that night. It sounds simple, but to watch it happen is like witnessing … well, a miracle.

Boreing’s post implies a larger question though: what’s up with increasing reliance on stacks in Gaither’s music.

Through his facetiousness, Boreing suggests the EHSSQ concert is a sufficiently special occasion to account for the use of stacks, but I wonder if, instead of being a sign how far and polished the Gaither musical phenomenon has come, the artificiality of the sound in 2002 doesn’t actually help at least partly explain the erosion of the GVB’s and Homecoming tour’s popularity (and by extension, Gaither’s symbiotic decision to sponsor EHSSQ). In 1993 the Gaither Vocal Band (and with it, the Homecoming Tour) was really starting to take off. Its rise was fueled largely by the electrifying experience of hearing the kind of impromptu live music that the Franklin-Lowry-English clip captures so marvelously. At its best, the GVB/Homecoming of 1990s guaranteed ticket-holders that they’d hear similarly marvelous music every night. By the time of the EHSSQ taping a few years ago, the Homecoming bubble had burst. Gaither and EHSSQ are now creating half the magic with twice manpower (but, alas, about the same amount of hair product). So why is Gaither so much more dependent on stacks now than in the past (which is not to say stacks weren’t part of those early performances, just that they weren’t nearly as central and regular a part as they are now)?

Partly, of course, everybody’s doing it. Beyond that, the answer may have partially to do with the reality of inevitable decline. Gaither and Co. created an unrivaled musical empire in those heyday years. But of course the sound was not sustainable for any number of reasons. For one thing, there’s the rare and inimitable mix of certain voices. And too the very voices that made that sound so rare and wonderful cashed in on their rising stock price and launched off on their own (or went bust on bad judgment). On top of all that, there’s the haze of nostalgic hindsight that tends to airbrush the past into the good ole days (though judging by those old GVB clips, it’s hard to see how they could get much better, unless you got everybody a hair and wardrobe makeover). And yet, the expectations continue to be just as great or greater, at least among the people whose esteem Gaither is likely to care about. The more he achieved, the more was expected of him and his music; the more he expects of himself. And so nudge by nudge, up goes the vocal stacks in the mix.

It’s not that simple, of course. But you get the idea.

At the same time, there’s the pressure of multi-media bearing down, and along with it the larger issues of market fragmentation that digitization has helped create. Compared to today, those first Homecoming and GVB videos were recorded in the stone age, technologically and economically. In the early years, there was a VHS and then a companion cassette tape. The songbooks and tchotchkes and flea-marketeering would come soon enough, but it’s a testament to how popular the concept (and shrewd the marketing) was that such a comparatively bare-bones product line sold so well. Gaither has of course stayed on the leading edge of technology for the last 20 years, an investment that has helped him in these latter leaner days offset the diminishing take at the box office with a diversified product line that can secure multiple purchases from a smaller core of brand-loyal consumers. But technology is more than an economic force. It has aesthetic effects as well, namely toward slicker and slicker productions, including slicker vocals (read “higher stacks”) at a time when, as we already noted, the mix of live voices in the vocal band can’t really compete with their ancestors.

I’m not sure they’re unable to create the same magical moments, because individual taste aside, I don’t think there’s much less raw talent in, say, a Penrod-Phelps–Hall trio than Lowry-Franklin-English. But for whatever reason and though they do many things very well, the current GVB has lost that certain something. Watching the Homecoming tour last year when it came to town, I was struck by how the very thing that made it impressive – the precision and timing and perfection of … well, everything – was exactly what made it compare so unfavorably to the years of Mark Lowry in a garish suit and Gaither tinkering away at the piano, half-dumbstruck by the beautiful music whose creation he was both responsible for and watching develop right in front of him (on stage these days, Gaither wears his trademark sense of wonderment like a cheap suit).

I see when I look back at my notes from last year’s performance, I jotted “Homecoming fatigue” in one of the margins. And that’s about the simplest way I can come up with succinctly describe all the lines of force running through any explanation for the GVB’s increasing reliance on stacks.

That said, of course, two of the three “biggest blunders” in gospel music, according to Uncle Roy, happened before 1980. This is not terribly surprising. Pauley has little to say of interest or use about anything that happened after 1975 or so. And too, it is puzzling why, precisely, Doy Ott’s getting booted from the Statesmen in the mid-1970s counts as one of the most important missteps in gospel music. Would Ott’s staying have lastingly altered the landscape or prospects for gospel music more broadly? Pauley doesn’t say (maybe because it sure looks like Pauley’s getting less space in the magazine than he used to, or am I imagining things?). In fact, he actually makes a pretty strong case that the real blow to the “Statesmen magic” was Jim Wetherington’s untimely death in 1973 and the affect his death had on Hovie Lister. Contra his own thesis, Pauley’s treatment of Ott’s dismissal leaves the impression that firing Ott was just more unfortunate fallout from that earlier tragedy. But anyway … best not to contemplate the imponderable logic of serial nostalgia at work in Pauley’s “Opinion.”

Unceremoniously, then, let me offer a few contenders for a more comprehensive list of Gospel Music’s Biggest Blunders. Please feel free to add yours and/or quibble with mine, for I’m sure I’ll miss (or misstate) something. In order of historical importance:

1. Southern gospel’s surrender of its influence and active participation in the Gospel Music Association, which – lest we forget – was founded by what is today known so parochially as “southern” gospel. The old guard – represented most prominently by Les Beasley, who sits as a founding member of the GMA board but has little more than titular influence – couldn’t have stopped the drift toward more contemporary tastes that gave rise to CCM in all its variegated forms. But a savvier, less petty and more visionary leadership would have seen that “southern” gospel could play a profoundly important role in shaping Christian entertainment as the founding artistic tradition of GMA, and in the process elevate its own status in the bargain. As it is, sg is at best a quaint bemusement to GMA, at worst (and more often) the bumpkin brigade.

2. Southern gospel artists’ giving away their own farm to Gaither in the 1990s. There’s a lot to this issue that is both beyond me and the space I have to give it now, but with 15 or so years at our back since the Homecoming phenomenon took off, it’s pretty clear that the terms on which artists agreed to appear on the Homecoming tour and videos redounded almost without exception to Gaither’s benefit … and cut the rest of the industry entirely out of the bargain.

The basic deal, as I understand it, was this (please correct me where I’m wrong): Artists invited to appear on the Gaither tour and tapes signed a release that allowed Gaither and Co. to tape their performance and sell it (this is, by the way, the way things still are, with some minor variations; Gaither used to pay some travel expenses but no longer does so, for instance). In return, artists received the ability to buy finished Homecoming product at wholesale prices (the same as retailers receive) and sell it at their table. Gaither pays mechanical and what are known as “sync” royalties on all sales, but there is nothing paid for the performance, either live or on DVD sales. [Later note: artists who appear on the Homecoming tour live performances receive a modest flat fee for their appearance … thanks to TK for bringing this up]

This “deal” seemed worth it initially, on the theory that Gaither’s rising tide would lift all boats, that the exposure artists would get in the bargain would elevate their careers and cement their status in the broader world of Christian music, make them stand out from among the rest of sg. What you take be “success” will determine whether or not you judge the result to have confirmed or debunked that original theory. The Isaacs strike me as the best example of a group that parlayed their relationship with Gaither into real gains in audience, demographic exposure, and sales. EHSSQ may well follow, but it’s not clear yet that they can sustain their current level of success once the Homecoming umbilical chord gets cut. David Phelps certainly hasn’t, but then again he also seems to be doing ok on his own, too.

What of the rest? Setting aside the clutch of old timers whose careers were revived in the 5 or 10 years before their death, there are those artists who have come and gone from the tour with relatively little change in their professional trajectory (or disappeared altogether): The Hoppers, The Martins, any number of soloists. That leaves a handful of artists who have essentially arrested their own development in the first phase of things, with their attachment to Gaither, without ever trying to capitalize on that association and launch off anew and improved on their own. The Easters, Jessy Dixon, Ivan Parker, Lynda Randall. There may be others.

For the moment, I’m not interested in debating whether or not Gaither has been “good” for these artists’ careers (and of course it’s possible that any of these artists and/or others have their own, financially more equitable arrangements with Gaither). Nor am I interested in debating the fairness or the ethics of having artists, many of whom were under contract to non-Gaither entities, appear with Gaither for free – though that’s certainly a debatable issue (one of the more fascinating ironies of this situation is that in order for the labels whose artists were appearing for free on the Homecoming tour to recoup on the loss created by these artists’ Gaither appearances, the losing labels would first have had to sue their own artists for breach of contract, secure a judgment against those artists, and then go after Gaither for inducing the original breach – a scenario that required the labels to essentially cannibalize themselves in order to get at any portion of the profits their artists were helping generate on the Homecoming tour … obviously no one chose that route).

But for the moment, my interest is in the fact that artists signed themselves, their rights, and their artistic value as Homecoming performers – en masse – over to Gaither & Co. This sort of arrangement is all but unheard of, not just in the music industry more broadly, but in publishing, television, and film. And for good reason. Not only does it imply a fairly low estimation of what an artist’s contributions are “worth.” Practically speaking, it has had the effect within the southern gospel industry of vastly widening the gap between Gaither’s success … and everyone else’s struggle. Normally, with compiled work, one label or entity asks another for a side-artist appearance agreement – reflected in those “So and So appears courtesy of Such and Such” statements in liner notes when guest appearances are involved. In addition, the interested parties set up a 6-10% royalty rate, pro-rate it and divide it among the artists involved in the product. This didn’t happen here and the consequences have been vast, for everyone involved.

I can’t say for sure I would have done differently had I been one of the artists offered a spot on the Homecoming tour. More to the point, the lack of any apparent hesitation on artists’ part suggests just how badly the industry craved a savior or a life boat of some kind, even during what we now know was the relatively stable days of the early 90s, compared to now. Obviously, there’s a case to be made from an artistic/religious perspective that Gaither saved gospel music, and that he rightfully profited off a concept that was (more or less) his and that this is all sour grapes. But if Gaither did save gospel music, it was a salvation that arguably impoverished a good deal of the industry in the bargain, not least of all the artists who signed themselves away, as well as the other artists left out in the rain trying to convince audiences who became quicky accustomed to Gaitherized sg that what was left of southern gospel wasn’t all wet.

3. The industry’s cheap, orgasmic embrace of digital band tracks/eliminating live instrumentation from the gospel music stage. The trend in southern gospel toward preferring the appearance of sophistication to actually achieving real artistic excellence can, I would argue, be traced in large part to the disappearance of the live stage band (and this desire for the appearance of succes also probably accounts for part of what more secretly drove so many artists to take the Gaither “deal” above; this, we should note, leaves unsettled the question of whether Gaither’s “deal” to Homecoming artists was an exploitation of small-time performers desperate for the heat of brighter limelights or one of the smartest bidness moves in modern music-industry history). Artists still want to be taken seriously artistically, but nine out of tend of them ultimately decide it’s easier to make jokes about their band leader, Mr. Sony, and justify the corner-cutting by telling themselves that making a joyful noise on the cheap is still a joyful noise.

Artists aren’t only to blame because their labels have abetted the process. Imagine what it would be like if labels only invested in groups they believed in enough to send out on the road with a full band and backing vocal support. No cheesy bgvs from a can. No over-amped instrumental tracks. There’d be far fewer groups out there, obviously. But judging by how satured the market is with steamy crap, I can’t see a market contraction, spurred by a survival of the fittest and calibrated by the artistic judgment that could or should reside in every major label, to be a bad thing.

If you’re going to really take seriously what makes gospel music good, you’ve got to invest in the live experience of the music. … live bands are what make (or made) possible that excitement that comes from seeing the band leader count off to the rest of the band, of anticipating that last big drum kick when you see the drummer’s head go down and the sticks go up, of watching as Hammil or Rex or Tim Riley turned to the players to call the next tune and wonder … what will it be?

Contrast this expectancy and anticipation to the current state of static affairs: Even “live” recordings these days are almost always heavily mortgaged to canned band tracks (see BFA in NYC and L5 in Music City). It’s not so much that these recordings are bad (they’re not, actually); it’s that we don’t expect more of them to begin with.

Which is to say, the demise of the live band dragged almost everything else about showmanship and production – on and off the stage – down with it.

4. The NQC/Gaither Vocal Band split. It’s not the only reason NQC is on the decline. Even if Gaither were still coming to Louisville in September, the industry would have to grapple with the diminished prospects for white gospel music in Christian entertainment. But NQC’s inability to bring Gaither back to Freedom Hall is emblematic of the larger poverty of vision afflicting the industry’s flagship enterprise. By extension, this implicates the industry at large, which has too often valued blind loyalty and indiscriminate fealty to concentrated knots of power and influence over artistic integrity (see No. 3 above). Not to mention that in this case, Gaither at NQC is smart bidness too.

The best NQC has to offer us at the moment is the American Gospel Music undertaking, a puzzling fizzle of an enterprise that, even if it were to succeed, would only further erode the Quartet Convention’s integrity by casting all but a handful of NQC’s artists as – quite literally – spiritually and artistically unworthy to be associated with the NQC-backed AGM brand. Royght. Instead of launching an administratively bloated, cripplingly risk-averse attempt to replicate Gaither’s success at brand recognition, NQC should be doubling down on its core product - The National Quartet Convention - and doing whatever it takes to reassociate NQC with Himself. In this NQC’s 50^th anniversary, it would be a fine year for a Gaither Homecoming Presents: A Half Century of the NQC, Live from Freedom Hall.

What have I missed?

*Edited for minor corrections

Update: David Bruce Murray makes a suggestion for an NQC/Gaither event:

If I were on the NQC board, I would try to set up a deal where Gaither’s film crew was in the building most of the week getting footage, from which NQC would receive a split of all profits. In exchange, I would let Gaither have a 1/6 share of the week’s ticket revenue, and he’d have complete control of the Saturday evening program…using his own artists just like it was a regular Homecoming tour event.

NQC is losing artists in the exhibit hall on Saturday night and I’ve heard attendance is down on Saturday as well. Fans are slowly realizing they don’t have the full benefit of meeting everyone in the exhibit hall on Saturday night, and let’s face it, the exhibit hall is as much of a draw as the evening performances on the main stage.

A Homecoming event on the last night of NQC would bring in new blood fans who might even make it a two or three day trip. Regular NQC goers would stay for Saturday night as well, because of the variety that a Homecoming event would offer.

Later Update: Another reads adds a blunder to the list that I missed:

I’d hypothesize that another mistake is the over-focus on radio chart success at the expense of sales success. The money and energy put into chart positioning stupefies me because anyone will tell you it’s completely unassociated with sales success. It really is a phenomenon unique to this genre. I could write a book on how this has hurt the business, but it might simply be symptomatic of the ego-driven nature of our business.

Even later update: An email this afternoon proposed a new blunder worth adding:

The Benson Co.’s campaign during the late 80’s and early 90’s to remove sg from CBA (The Association for Christian Retail). The effort to cut sg off from mainstream retail produced a kind of economic drought, creating the conditions under which the industry went looking for a saviour in the first place.

]]> http://averyfineline.com/2007/05/26/blunders/feed/ http://averyfineline.com/2007/02/13/gaither-taping-creates-heavenly-rain-nashville-friends-to-sell-umbrellas/ http://averyfineline.com/2007/02/13/gaither-taping-creates-heavenly-rain-nashville-friends-to-sell-umbrellas/#comments Tue, 13 Feb 2007 23:35:52 +0000 Avery http://averyfineline.com/2007/02/13/gaither-taping-creates-heavenly-rain-nashville-friends-to-sell-umbrellas/ Breaking news tonight: Hundreds of Homecoming friends record audienceless in front of selves, report best Gaither video ever. Up next: birds of a feather flock together, and flock, and flock, and flock, and flock, and flock, and flock, and flock, and flock, and flock, and flock, and flock. After that: methinks thou protesth too much. And don’t miss our bonus feature tomorrow night: people have said this is the best ever Gaither video taping, and we got to be on it … there’s a limited supply on sale out there at our booth, and when that limited supply is gone, we’ll go to the bus and count our money and get some more of them tapes.

In the meantime, expect a name change for southerngospelreporter.com to nashvilletaping.shill.

Update: First, let me direct you to the ever-wise comments of regular reader CVH. When Avery retires to Del Boca Vista (“how long till that happens,” I hear many of you ask), I want CVH to take over.

Anyway, conceding that the first rule of deadpan is never to flinch after you deliver your lines, I confess I’m bemused and mildly baffled by longtime readers’ surprise that I would take issue with “news” stories – even news (or “news”) from Chuck Peters, whom I’ve regularly singled out for praise (though I won’t hold my breath for valentine’s bouquets from Chuck’s sweetheart club, or are they bodyguards?) – when that news amounts to little more than some perfectly predictable quotes from above-averagely biased sources commenting on how wonderful the Nashville taping was (and no, I’m not suggesting the comments I posted from Negative Nelly are any more or less representative … notice I called it “an” unvarnished take in that original post, not THE unvarnished truth).

Let’s review: …

• The news source: Chuck Peters, of southerngospelreporter.com, made it quite publicly clear that he was personally interested in seeing more comments about the Nashville Homecoming from people who (say it with me now) build up instead of tear down. So, this wasn’t just another day on the job for Chuck. He didn’t just go out and get a few appropriately effusive quotes from notable performers at the taping. He didn’t just rewrite some press releases (to his credit, Chuck rarely ever does this). But neither did he write an original, enterprising human interest story that consisted of more than a bunch of gushing from sg luminaries over the “best Gaither video ever” (and no, a Mark Lowry quote about Rory under the bleachers and Bill Lost in Space doesn’t count as an enterprising feature story). Instead, Peters took it upon himself to make much of the “good” news he felt was missing from this story. And his whole project was based, if I understand rightly, on one crabby comment from an artist at the taping.

• The “news”: We heard primarily from two types of newsmakers: A)artists who have mostly been denied a spot on the Gaither gravy train up to now and who will quite naturally take every opportunity to have their name (finally!) associated with Himself; and B)artists who have a substantial amount of their career and credibility already inextricably connected to Gaither and are saying nothing different from what they would say anyway about any taping that Gaither Inc. had built up as much as the Nashville Homecoming (hundreds of groups! People who’ve never been on a Homecoming before!). What’s more, artists in this latter category have everything to gain by (pre)positioning themselves on the Great Gaither Nashville Homecoming as the new Old Friends singing with the really new friends who were finally let in out of the cold. That they obliged with ready-made quotes is definitely something, but it’s not (just) another day at the office for southerngospelreporter.com.
  

• Some surmises: Does that mean all those artists were lying about the taping? No. Is there anything wrong with soliciting and printing a few quotes from artists about how great the event was? Of course not. That’s showbiz news 101. Doest that mean it’s great work? Again, no. Do I actually think the taping was a flop given all the allegedly dispositive evidence of Peters’ reporting? I have no idea (if you’re still interested in what I think of Gaither’s work, better to go read what I’ve already written about it and judge for yourself).

I do think the tapes will be a success, and probably above averagely so. But at this point in the Gaither life cycle, it’s difficult to say what will be driving that success: the product itself or the mythic status of the Homecoming brand in gospel music. Another way to say this: Will the Nashville taping be great because something magical happened or because Gaither is Gaither and decided to resuscitate a fading phenomenon by, as CVH suggests, doubling down on what amounted to “Homecoming Comes Home for the First Time”? Gaither reliably produces quality stuff, but empirically the Homecoming phenomenon peaked a while ago. So when the only debate is about just how much better this Homecoming tape will be than what’s come before, that’s a pretty good sign that a reality check’s in order.

Now, didn’t you like me better the first, terse time around?

Then there’s an unvarnished version, from an artist who was at the taping:

The taping was, well…let’s just say Bill’s going to really have to do some stretching to find enough magic in what happened [today] to make a full-length dvd. He had a ton of new people there, but no one who just blew it out of the water. You know you’re in trouble when you’re sitting there wishing he would let Sue Dodge sing.

Janet Paschal had a sweet moment with the much-overused IT WON’T RAIN ALWAYS. “What? You’re singing a song Bill wrote? How surprising?” The Perrys sang I WISH I COULD HAVE BEEN THERE and made me miss Loren Harris. Some awful group from Knoxville called “Shepherd’s Voice” or something like that reminded me of a bad SNL skit. A bluegrass group called Cherryholmes (who really ARE great) just wasn’t the right fit for this crowd. Sig Sound and The Martins both sang and did good but seemed to not really win over the crowd (composed wholly of their peers … there wasn’t a live audience). Greater Vision sang. Legacy Five sang “Strike Up The Band,” which was okay. Jeanne Johnson sang IF THAT ISN’T LOVE using what sounded like a cassette track. The Lewis Family sang “Flying High.”

The stage was beautiful and I think it will look great. The singers did enough clapping and whooping that I don’t really think an audience will be missed. And Russ Taff’s over-exuberance was everpresent. Either I’m terribly jaded or the magic of Gaitherworld has faded. Or both.

Update: Photos of the event are here (dig deep enough and there’s even a shot of the long-lost Nelons).

***

“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 dis