Pierce says he didn’t know want to expect when he first reached out to The Hoppers. Nationally recognized, award-winning and Southern Gospel community favorites, The Hoppers have also worked closely with gospel legend Bill Gaither. Needless to say, HIV/AIDS patients and LGBT people aren’t the first groups of folks one might think of as fans.

“I reached out to them and said this is what we are doing,” Pierce explains. “It was a booking; they were going to take it. But the next thing I said was, ‘Let me explain. What we are doing, this is not your demographic. There will be a lot of gay and lesbian people in attendance.”

Pierce says Claude Hopper, the group’s father and founder, took a long pause and asked, “Tell me, son, exactly what the money is going for?”

Pierce told Claude how his clinic’s pantry shelves were getting empty, and how they provided basic canned foods and dry staples to those in need.

“If you came in with your family and needed food, you would leave with a bag of groceries to feed your family for the night,” Pierce told Claude.

The Gospel singer’s response was enthusiastic: “Son, we’ll be there,” he said.

Pierce sees the concert as an opportunity to build bridges. To his knowledge, the holiday concert and fundraiser will be among one of the first times a Southern Gospel group of The Hoppers’ caliber has stepped up on their own and offered their talent for an HIV/AIDS-related cause.

“Most of them won’t touch it,” Pierce says. “There is still that stigma with HIV/AIDS and the Christian community. We’re breaking down the wall a few bricks at a time.”

Full story is here. The event will also include Jeanne White Ginder, the mother of Ryan White, whose life with and death from HIV/AIDS galvanized national attention around the disease in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

A few thoughts:

• It would probably be wrong to read too much into this. I’m sure plenty of commenters will want to point that helping people with HIV/AIDS a)doesn’t mean you’re always helping non-heterosexuals (see the Ryan White story, though of course HIV/AIDS from transfusions accounts for relatively few infections) and b)doesn’t mean you’re endorsing “the gay lifestyle” even if you concede, as I assume Claude Hopper effectively did in agreeing to participate in the benefit, that helping people with HIV/AIDS means unconditionally and non-judgmentally helping a lot of not-straight people (smart bit of media savvy on the clinic’s part, btw, making it a lot harder for the event’s headliners to get cold feet and then back out on the basis of not having been told what they were getting into). Another way to illustrate this point: David Phelps has a new cd out that includes “For Those Tears I Died” - a song with a history of gay controversy in southern gospel - but I don’t assume that means he’s coming out or anything like that.

• By the same token, plenty of us gay southern gospelites and our straight gospel-lovin’ friends would probably like to also point out that it’s a lot easier to sing at a foodbank benefit for an HIV/AIDS clinic and get all the good-Samaritan points out of showing up than it is to knowingly ride with a gay guy on the bus and keep him on the stage and payroll. After all, there’s a lot of rank hypocrisy among southern gospel artists who rely on gay professionals to help make their music possible and gay fans to help support their music while doing little or nothing to challenge or moderate anti-gay attitudes and rhetoric in sg. This can be awfully cynicizing if you let it, to the point that one’s first instinct when reading a story like this could be to scoff and dismiss. It may not always be fair, but I can assure you that’s a not-uncommon reaction to this sort of thing. The man doesn’t tell Claude that “this is not your demographic” for no reason.

• All that said, props to the Hoppers. Maybe in a perfect world  someone with Claude Hopper’s safe, cemented, and financially secure status in the industry should do more to live out the Christian ideal toward the most controversial of the least of these, but if things were different, they wouldn’t be the same. In an industry that links gospel music to and rewards artists for aggressive, public denunciations of non-heterosexual ways of being, it’s not nothing for an industry leader to agree to something like this, eyes wide open.

• I would  love to know what made the clinic’s manager, Dale Pierce, decide to call the Hoppers in the first place.

And of course we’ll expect a full debriefing from anyone who happens to attend the concert. Tickets available here.

But if the Hoppers don’t want to have to, as one commenter put it, “come and out correct” erroneous facebook comments that claim Connie Hopper has had plastic surgery, then they might want to rethink some of their media kits. Here’s what  I mean. Below, an image of Connie Hopper and family from one of the images the group has been using for a while now in its publicity.

Now here’s what we might best be called a more candid shot of Connie Hopper from around the same time*:

Mind you, Connie Hopper looks great here and she’s always a class act on stage. But I’ve asked two different people without interest or knowledge of sg in general or Connie Hopper in particular to look at that first picture and tell me how old they think the woman on the right is and one said late 30s, the other said early 40s. And they’re right. I mean, sure, good lighting and makeup can take a few years off but the woman occupying Connie Hopper’s position in that first photo looks like she’s just walked out of consecutive episodes of Nip/Tuck, Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style, and Queer Eye for the Southern Gospel Grandmother. And a reasonable fan who saw that first image after having seen Connie Hopper in person could, without knowing any better, fairly wonder about plastic surgery.

One final, updated thought: the Hoppers of course are free to do whatever they want in their publicity, and frankly, aside from making them look  a little vain and silly (I agree with this comment, that they all look touched up to varying degrees), this kind of thing is pretty harmless. But more substantively, it might do well for all of us to ask ourselves why it matters so much if Kim Hopper had plastic  surgery, yet we don’t go every man, woman and child to the internet to debate all the bad toupees and Just for Men mustaches out there from Jake Hess and Hovie Lister (and Claude Hopper, perhaps?) on down. No doubt gender bias and body image norms are a big part of it, but we need not conduct a gender studies seminar to note the disparity in the way discussions of male and female celebrity are conducted. From a purely personal perspective in the peanut gallery, I find the ridiculous hair pieces and the hair colors not found in nature that so many men are so badly indulging in (Ron Popeil hair paint, anyone?) to be far more visually off-putting than whatever plastic surgery Kim Hopper or any other woman may or may not have had (here, of course, I’m talking mainly about the sorts of plastic surgery that aren’t obvious to the average observer/fan; those cosmetic augmentations designed to elicit widespread notice are another story entirely).

*In case you want to check my work, here’s the source for the first photo (the Hoppers themselves are still using a version of this photo on their own site) and the second photo. I don’t have exact dates for either image, but they’re within a year or two of one another, at the most, I’d guess.

And this:

I’m actually not sure I prefer the big symphonic too-muchness of the latter version (though that wood-wind descant in the first verse is pretty neat and the brass section is a classy touch), but I don’t think anyone can listen to that earlier clip and think that the Hoppers would have gone on to dominate the 90s and remain strong well into the new century the way they have (of course, as you can also see/hear, Kim’s coming along didn’t hurt either). I mean, honestly, the icky, pitchy, self-conscious straight tones that Hopper slathers down during his verse in that first recording? Eee gad. That’s the kind of uninspired and flat-flooted vocalizing that gets you fired, unless of course you’re the boss’s son, which, in this case, evidently gets you transformative vocal lessons or a throat transplant or something else equally miraculous.

It took awhile, but the Hoppers finally made a lowkey but nonetheless public statement about the situation with Denice in their fairly recent biography. At the end of a fairly long chapter about Dean & Kim, the chapter ends with a brief passage under the subtitle “Difficulties in Life”:

“It’s important to remember that the Hoppers are real people with real problems. In spite of the many blessings, they also experience their share of challenges and heartbreaks.

“Mike met and began dating Denice Bradley during the 1990s when she was still in college. Denice, a native of Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, was attending Belmont University, in Nashville, eventually earning a Bachelor’s Degree in commercial music.

“She and Mike married in 1996. In 1998, when a position came open after Shannon Childress retired from the group, she accepted duties as the pianist for the Hoppers.

“Sadly the marriage didn’t work out and Denice and Mike legally separated in 2005. A terribly heartbreaking event for the family, the situation remains a private and tragic matter where Mike finds solace in Christ, his family and music” (p. 192).

So at least they’re on the record about it now, although I’m pretty sure that is the ONLY place in the book where Denice is mentioned (and she’s not in any of the pictures in the book, either).

Don’t know how current this is, but the page is still active and one would assume it’s still current: http://www.seasharpmusicacademy.com/new_faculty.html

Isn’t there a point when we reach (or perhaps already have reached) nostalgia exhaustion and heritage fatigue? For my part, I wish the Hoppers would put as much effort and time and money into making the kind of music that made them great rather than living off the echoes and memories of that greatness.

I see Hope’s Cal signed with Daywind. Good for them, I guess. The few times I’ve seen them they’ve had their act together mostly, and they clearly know how to sing (even if the vocal histrionics are still a bit too often in play). But I would thought they’d signed with Wayne Haun and Kevin Ward’s new label, especially since Hope’s Call has had such a longstanding relationship with Ward – which is to say, Ward’s engineering and producing work was essential in Hope’s Call early years, helping to keep their sound first-rate while they built a fan base and enough professional credibility to launch into the tier above the middling-to-fair category in which they began. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Hee Haw lately but I keep hearing the lyric from that old skit … “you met another and … [thuhhhhht] you were gone.”

And then Loren Harris left the Perrys. No great sound lasts forever, it just remains embalmed in a thousand chat rooms and discussion-board threads about how superior were the “real” Gold City (Tim, Ivan, Mike, Brian) and the “real” Kingsmen (Hammil, Reese, and whoever was your favorite baritone for Hammel to pick on and your favorite tenor who ruined his voice in all-night screech-a-thons) and the “real” Cathedrals (G, G, Danny, Mark) to everything that came before or after. [Interesting tangent: The Hoppers. The same personnel is intact from their heyday back in the mid to late 90s but they’ve managed to lose Shannon Childress their mojo all the same]. Perhaps it’s a mark of excellence or greatness or at least a sign that you’ve passed some magical point in your career as a group when you find that too-perfect sound that depends on something irreplaceable in each person’s voice and creates a cultlike identification among fans. If so, the Perrys found – and with Harris’s departure, lost – that sound.

I’m not sure what Libbi Perry Stuffle was thinking when she claimed that promoting baritone Joseph Habedank to lead and hiring someone else to fill the baritone spot “will keep our sound basically the same as before.” There’s a world of difference in that “basically” — the sound will be basically the same, much the way the Supremes would have sounded basically the same if Diana Ross had gone off to spend more time with her family. David Bruce Murray has described the Perrys late sound that developed with Habedank and Harris alongside the Stuffles as a “hard singing” style – by which I think he means to describe the considerable strength (not just volume, but control, pitch, blend) equally distributed at each vocal position.

I don’t know for sure why Harris left, but the usual cabal of whisperers in my ear who are usually right about these kinds of things certainly weren’t using phrases like “wants to spend more time family.” And Habedanks promotion to lead – coming as it does on the heels of the Perrys putting two songs written or co-written by Habedank on their latest project, despite the fact that the songs were B-list beginners work at best and despite the other fact that the Perrys are, or ought to be, at a place in their career when only the best songs (and not just the ones written by people you really like) get cut – well, these are the kinds of decisions that presage a decline. Let’s hope I’m wrong.

Finally, David Bruce Murray has made sghistory.com a wiki. Go read about why that could be a really BFD.

Of course the real juicy bit in all this is the Hopper’s scheduled appearance at Fanfair- quite a coup for Wilds. It remains to be seen whether Fanfair turns out to be anything remotely like a rival for NQC. But no matter, it’s clear that Fanfair aspires to rivalry, and in that case Claude Hopper’s decision to play the date only solidifies my sense that Hopper is both a shrewd businessman (if not one of the nation’s leading businessman, and his bio rather self-aggrandizingly claims) and no toady for the NQC. For a while now I’ve heard that he and most of the rest of the NQC board differed over the direction of the Great Western Quartet Convention, or whatever it was called back when NQC had a stake in it - the difference being that Hopper thought it was worth investing in and the hardliners on the NQC board didn’t (it’s my understanding that the Western Convention is now jointly controlled by Hopper and Les Beasley). Taken together with outbursts like his “political speech” as NQC this year and his Fanfair appearance, all this stuff makes a pretty persuasive case for Claude Hopper: Not a Pure NQC Partisan. Given the agenda-discipline of NQC and the fortified front it tries to present to the public, Hopper’s independent streak is noteworthy (of course his kind of independence is made alot easier by his considerable financial clout). I suspect Hopper’s participation in Fanfair derives from his own sense that Fanfair isn’t going to undercut NQC in any real way and from his longstanding practice of getting the Hoppers out in front of the best crowds anywhere they are assembled (whether in Louisville, Chattanooga, or Somewhere Out West). Now let’s see if any other groups with ties to NQC sign on to Fainfair. Anybody (except the Baptists of course) wanna bet on who will be in and out among the NQC-board groups?