To begin at the beginning: those Goodmans know how to scratch each other’s eyes out for sure. And with no little amount of help from outside. I’m a rank amateur in the ways of the Goodman mafia and their family dynamics (except for secondhand stories about turkey bones slicked clean and Vestal double-parking outside TJ Maxx in her red Benz, darlin’), so I can’t speak to the long history of turf wars and sibling rivalries that seem to have as much or more to do with what’s going on today than Rick Goodman’s unapologetic merchandizing of his parents’ memory and music.

But clearly, Rick Goodman – both by virtue of his relationship with Vestal and Howard at the end of their lives and his place in the Goodman empire, such as it is, today – is understandably a lightning rod that collects all the dispersed energy associated with the Goodmans. An outsider like me always wonders if there isn’t more going on … like, does Rick get the family’s dander up so much because he sells the legacy so hard, or because, maybe, he continues to hold up rerelease of some of the old Goodmans music that some of the heirs may think is worth a lot of money.

But no matter. At this late stage in the life cycle of commercial southern gospel, it’s not at all clear whether someone like Rick Goodman and the Vestal & Friends enterprise is symptom or disease. Or both. Certainly the Goodman family took the flea-market approach to gospel music (selling anything to which value could be imputed by the right salesman and bought by the right fan) to a new level. As one commenter pointed out, in this regard, Rick is only doing now what he was raised to do and saw modeled in one form or another by his parents and other Goodmans of their generation. We can’t be THAT shocked.

The Goodmans, that is, were always shamelessly famous stunt pullers. Whether it was on stage – showing up in a limo or wearing outrageous outfits or entering the auditorium from the rear and singing “Hallelujah Thine the Glory,” or ending a song such as “Eastern Sky” like a harmonized pig call – or off stage: Vestal and Howard selling their autographed wing chairs or the family taking out an ad in the Singing News to denounce the GMA’s support of “night club acts in Las Vegas” to position the family as really and truly “Good.” The ad, dated September 21, 1971, would make Sister Bertha Better Than You feel hypocritical (hat tip, DA):

It seems that you [the GMA] have decided to promote and condone the more hippie oriented crowd, and night club acts, other than the gospel music.

To me, and the rest of the Goodmans, and many other groups that are not as bold to take the stand that we dare to take promoting and condoning this type of entertainment is not “Good News.”

….

In view of all these things, we are asking for the return of 600.00 for Life Time Memberships.

Even for 1971, hopelessly – or maybe, as commenter Scott suggests here, intentionally – naïve phrases like “the more hippie oriented crowd,” the self-congratulatory observation about the boldness and courage they demonstrated in placing the ad, the petulant demand for their 600 bucks back say as much about the Goodmans and a certain (perhaps willful) blindness they had about how they appeared to a wider world as it does reflect the values that they no doubt believed in entirely. How else could people smart enough, savvy enough about the ways of the world, to help engineer the Happy Goodmans’ explosive success in the 60s and 70s get themselves tangled up with self-evident hucksters like the Bakers in the 80s if not at least in part by self-delusion?

Of course we loved them for these stunts, for their audacity and outsized personality – both individually and collectively. But the long half-life of the controversy over the Goodmans low-brow style – “authentically” uncultivated or carefully manicured artlessness? – suggests that they stirred up more than just an appreciation for unadorned proclamations in southern gospel song of the “Good News.”

My hunch is several related issues and problems that largely remain submerged in southern gospel most of the time surfaced and received a particularly powerful articulation in the Goodmans music and success. It’s over simple to reduce it to ministry/monestry, but it’s certainly hard not to see the Rick Goodman brouhaha as a dramatization of this age-old debate: is an iPod full of Goodmans music worth roughly the same price as a “seed” in the Vestal and Friends prayer partnership? What’s the difference between charging $15 for a ticket to see Vestal and Howard sing old songs on stage with Johnny Minick and charging $100 for a chance to feel part of the Howard and Vestal “legacy”?

I think the average person sees quite a good deal of difference, that in one case you’re paying for religious art (or the chance to glimpse it in a few wonderful moments), and in the other you’re paying to keep a creatively lazy son of the not-so-rich-and-famous in the lifestyle to which he is accustomed. But if you grew up in a world where it was hard to tell where the art ended and the show, the production, the manufactured image of “the Happy Goodmans” began, it’s easy to imagine you might have a hard time making the distinction that those of us not named Goodman (or those of us who don’t wish we were named Goodman) have no trouble discerning.

The difference between these two types of people hints at a problem no one wants to confront but everyone fears, suspects, or knows is out there: that a lot of people get into southern gospel, cloak themselves in the mantle of religious ministry and Christian commitment, and charge people to see them do this … because this way of life comes easier to them than bucking 2×4s at a saw mill, or teaching school or driving an OTR truck, or rebuilding brakes down at Woodfords Amoco or roofing houses or doing taxes or selling insurance or any number of other jobs that might be available to the typical sg singer if he wasn’t singing. This doesn’t make them a fraud necessarily, but it probably makes them something other than the longsuffering saint that the fulltime singer is often made out (or makes himself out) to be. And the truth is, a lot of the people who clamor the loudest about their calling to proclaim the gospel in song for Christ do so as a way of rationalizing their own less than ministerial reasons for preferring sg to whatever form of heavy lifting they’d have to be doing if they weren’t singing.

What I’m driving at here is that southern gospel music has always been in some respects a means of socioeconomic advancement, mobility, and validation for usually rural, typically southern white evangelicals who would face otherwise options for self-actualization in their adult lives that seem far less actualizing than singing gospel music in front of mostly adoring crowds. Goff makes this point more or less, if I recall rightly, in his book Close Harmony: one reason that singing religious music as one’s sole or primary means of support developed into a profession of its own was because it revalued a purely spiritual, aesthetic, or recreational exercise (singing gospel songs with family or church friends) into a professional artistic culture among a people whose other skills and abilities (mining, farming, and other forms of hard manual labor) were treated by the wider world as a sign of the artless and unexceptional, or at best ordinary. There’s nothing wrong with honest work, of course, but there’s nothing especially glamorous about it either if the smell of diesel fumes is what gets you up in the morning.

For many people, the world is vastly different today than it was for the Goodmans of the 50s. And for a lot of other people, not so different. The things about southern gospel that seem rank with small-timerism to me, or are obviously bogus hucksterism to you, might to someone else seem like the only way out of a dismal dead-end of unskilled labor, the hamster-wheel of go-nowhere jobs, or an average life of unremarkable ordinariness.

At least this is the way I understand the origins of the flea-marketeerism of southern gospel. I don’t like it. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense to me. And I’m afraid it’s going to be with us for the duration. Just as for every Beverly Sills (the majestic operatic soprano who never sang a note after her retirement from the Metropolitan Opera because, she said, she wanted to remember her voice as it was, when it was good), there’s a Pavoritti, blundering his ill-considered way through a late-in-life duet with the Spice Girls and showboating one too many encores of “O Sole Mio” with the Three Tenors – so too for every George Younce there is a perpetually limited supply of Vestal’s hankies for sale, or used sunglasses autographed by Dottie Rambo available on ebay.

Postscript: A note from Tanya Goodman Sykes:

I have resisted responding to this thread for quite a while. Only after assumptions were made that I HAD commented, did I decide jump into the fray. Whatever comments I have, I stand behind and sign my name.

I daresay that most of us, and by us I mean humankind that extends far beyond those of us who cast our lot with traveling bands of singers and musicians, are part of a family that is at best a motley crew. A random sampling of our dna pools reveals a mixture of salt of the earth grannies, uncles who drink too much, worthless brothers-in-law, hucksters, hard workers, Sunday School teachers, doctors and dock workers, you name it, we’ve got it. Do I agree with everything my family was or is or does or represents? Certainly not, and I’m not just referring to public life. We all know that on any given day we are convinced that certain of our family members MUST have been switched at the hospital, they cannot possibly be the flesh of our flesh. Do I love my family? Absolutely! I pray for them, encourage them and from time to time mutter under my breath that I must be the only sane person I know.

In the nearly 48 years I’ve been around, I’ve also come to know that little change is wrought in people’s character by our rebuke, whether gentle or harsh, well meaning or mean-spirited. That is work best done by someone with a much higher authority than you or me. Still, there seems to be a dark side to all of us that revels in casting about hoping to dredge up some flaw in someone else in order to push back our own creeping dread that we ourselves are flawed beyond redemption. I’m sure some of the comments made here are well meaning and come from a pure heart, some are merely thinly veiled professional jealousy. I confess, I’ve read some of these threads and nodded along smugly. God forgive me…

In the last year or so of my life, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time asking God to fix what is broken in me. Be careful what you wish for; it’s tedious work. On a good day it causes me to look at the world around me differently, with a little more compassion. Lest you think I’m waxing self righteous, remember I did say a LITTLE more compassion. My advice to us all? Pick your prophet, Bradford or Urban, and try to remember their words “but for the grace of God, there go I.”

According to a press release from Goodman Family Ministries, the organization is offering, through an authorized seller, furniture items once owned by Howard and Vestal Goodman. The media info says that Southern Gospel Music fans and Music Memorabilia collectors may visit eBay to bid on.. “a beautiful leather sofa with two matching chairs and ottomans that were used daily by Howard Goodman and his wife Vestal Goodman of the Happy Goodman Family. “The seller adds: “Howard and Vestal Goodman sat on these daily while drinking their coffee and reading their Bibles. If this set could talk, oh my, what stories it could tell. Many of Nashville’s music industry elite would stop by the Goodmans’ home for a visit and a piece of Vestal’s famous coconut cake.”

The link to ebay that Chuck provided says the item is no longer available. Which I guess we can take as another of life’s small blessings.

All in all, this is pretty disappointingly derivative stuff. Like mimeograph copies taken from an original that has been recycled too many times, both the copy and its master suffer in the reproduction. And you gotta wonder what we’re doing here in the first place. Because the truth is, a studio project is an odd way to pay tribute to the Goodmans. They did their best work on stage, where they could slip the chain and head for the woods in a full gallop. Their work always felt slightly misplaced and stunted when forced into the constraints and narrowing demands of the recording booth, the animating zest in the Goodman voices that made them great somehow depleted in the isolation and carefulness of a studio. The best Goodmans albums are the live ones, which is why I don’t know anyone who talks of this or that Goodmans’ studio project being life-changing or even that memorable.

Unfortunately, the same thing might now be said of the Perrys nobly flawed imitation of Goodmania. Take, for instance, the money song, “God Walks the Dark Hills.” It’s nice, but Libbi had already outdone herself at NQC’s Remebering the Greats concert last year, when she sang the song with her husband, Tracey, Gerald Wolfe, and Mark Trammel. It’s not just happenstance; the difference between a live setting and a recorded one for the Goodmans could not have been vaster, starker, or more insuperable. And I’m half surprised (but only half) that the Perrys let their nostalgia get the better of them long enough to pretend this wasn’t true (the other half of me knows perfectly well that, in addition to being the product of the Perrys’ genuine affection for the Goodmans and their desire to honor them, the project will also sell and perform quite well). Maybe the best thing to say about the project is that it gives the Perrys an excuse to create more Goodman memorials on stage like the RTG performance. Beyond that, let’s hope this gets the Goodman bug outta the Perrys’ system. The best way for the Perrys to honor the memory of the Goodman legacy is to unleash their own music, sung in their own way, upon the gospel world. Discovering what that means and sound like is, as I’ve noted before, what stands between the Perrys and the proverbial next level

“It’s Different Now” was a big song for many groups in the early to mid 60s.

It was written by Rev. David Beatty. If my recollections are correct, he is a cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Gilley. He recorded an album with the Oak Ridge Qt around 1965. If vocals and piano styles are any indication, I’d say he is certainly related to Gilley and Lewis.

On the cover of his LP, “It’s Different Now”, he looks quite the part of the country preacher complete with the dark gray suit, black shoes and white socks as he sits in the sun outside a mansion that could be in the garden district of New Orleans.

From the liner notes:
God is certainly using Brother Beatty as a a song writer. A few years ago while David was working his way through Lee College, he borrowed the money to record two of his songs, “I Praise the Lord” and “It’s Different Now”, to sell in his revivals that he preached while attending college. To his surprise, the record began to get popular, so he decided to get sheet music printed. He tried to get several music companies to take the songs and print them, but no one was interested in his music. An editor of an outstanding publishing firm told Dave that “no one will ever sing those songs but you”.

Finally he decided once again to borrow money to get the songs printed. The Lord blessed this effort of faith and everyone began to buy his music. The firm that didn’t believe anyone would ever buy his music started to purchase it in orders of 100 at a time. Then, the Faith Music Co. for Atlanta, Ga. wanted rights to print the music and after this, the Statesmen Qt. recorded it. This was followed by almost every major quartet in the nation. David’s recording is much different as he sings and plays his own unique way to bring praise to the Lord.

Reader KD widens the scope a bit with this additional info:

[The song was] re-released through the “35 Biggest Hits” box set. Album info says the song was written by David Beatty. The liner notes written by Rusty Goodman state, “Our thanks to the Nashville Musicians who provided “THE NASHVILLE SOUND” (Walter Haynes, David Jones, Autry Inman and Willie Ackerman).” There’s no mention which instruments these men played.

The song has also been recorded by Gold City, the Merits, Landmark Quartet, Blue Ridge Quartet, Statesmen, Friend Brothers Quartet, Cathedrals and Jimmy Swaggart.

“I’m in a New World” was released on “The Best of the Happy Goodmans” and also the “35 Biggest Hits” box set. It was written by someone with the last name Ellis. J.G. Whitfield wrote the liner notes and basically gushes about the Goodmans, and doesn’t mention anything about the songs.

The song has also been recorded by the Four Galileans, Eugene Smith and the Harmonettes (instrumental) and the Echoes from Calvary.

There you go.

So go study a Gaither concert set. Really watch it. Analyze it. Figure out what his priorities are from the choices he makes on stage and in the music. Here are a few: Gaither values broad Christian notions of community, heritage, and love over doctrinally specific (and often divisive) messages. This essentially ecumenical emphasis allows Gaither to thread disparate music styles and sounds together by organizing shows around touchstone moments: his favorite, I think, is a song like “Loving God, Loving Each Other.” No matter how little I think of Gaither’s voice, it’s hard to listen to and watch him sing that song without realizing how deeply he feels and believes in its meaning:

Loving God, loving each other
Making music with my friends.
Loving God, loving each other
And the music never ends.

It would be a challenge to fault a guy for being too worldly when he envisions this kind of intersection of music, community, and faith. Join this vision with his commitment to creating a dramatic experience that includes but completely transcends the average audience member, and you can begin to get a sense of why Gaither not only exists in a class all his own. He essentially created the league he plays in and dominates. So saying that Gaither helped grow sg is about as accurate as saying the Beatles or Elvis helped popularize rock n roll. Gaither didn’t “help” anything grow. As others like the GMA see us, he’s just about the only thing keeping sg alive right now.