NQC —
I don’t want to alarm anyone accustomed to the generally deplorable state of southern gospel online, but the National Quartet Convention has redesigned its website. And it is now abnormally attractive, uncharacteristically intuitive (though beware of getting rabbit holed in the PRODUCT pages, which launch as a separate site with a completely new home base), […]
At long last some, some final thoughts I’ve been kicking around since NQC. First, some odds and ends.
Dottie Rambo: To answer many email queries and comments I’ve received on this, there was no formal memorial or remembrance of Dottie Rambo on the weekend evening mainstage, assuming anyone remembers what happened almost a month ago […]
I will keep this brief, at least by my standards. Saturday night was something of an experiment insofar as the Fan Awards were moved from Thursday to here at the end of the week and though the Awards Show itself was nothing new, a Saturday slot for it definitely changed the feel and pace of […]
Some thoughts on Friday afternoon’s Celebration of Phil Cross’s Ego Phil Cross’s Songs of a Lifetime songwriters showcase, in no particular order.
The sound sucked. Mikes weren’t on for most of the singers and speakers for the first few minutes, including Cross’s. Songs had to be restarted including the first one, the Booth’s unremarkable “Welcome […]
Friday night the Easters had Connie Hopper join them for part of “Thank you, Lord,” in what I assume was a continuation of the effort to pair up different groups that’s been going on all week. Hopper sang this verse:
I know I’m not wealthy
These clothes, they’re not new
I don’t have much money
But Lord I have […]
Tonight’s lineup looked much stronger on paper than it sounded in person. Gaither and EHSSQ brought the crowds, as planned, but it wasn’t entirely clear that we got we thought we were paying for. More on that momentarily. It wasn’t just the centerpiece acts, though. As you’ll see from the fat cluster of comments in […]
Reader (and twitterpater) RF weighs in here on the the avfl Twitter feed, and/but I’d like to hear from some others of you twitter readers. Is it worth the trouble? There are so far about two dozen “followers” signed up for the avfl feed. Are other people reading directly from the avfl Twitter page or […]
Welcome to another year of live-blogging the NQC. For the newcomers, what follows is a nightly digest I put together after each evening concert. It’s written late (as I begin to write this, it is 1221 on Friday morning; as I put the final edits on it, it’s 235 301), and it’s based on a […]
So the interns (and M and C) have convinced me to try Twittering NQC this year. I emphasize “try” because I’m only half-sure I know how this whole thing works (if you’re unfamiliar and want to jump in the deep end, try this as an explainer). Nevertheless, I gather that if you want to be […]
From Charles Brady:
NQC really needs to question the benefit of providing live unmixed/poorly mixed feeds for solid gospel to broadcast. (What I heard last night sounded like the little kids may have been singing and doing the mixing. ) If you can’t get it mixed correctly most people just can’t handle the raw unmixed vocals.. […]
Via DBM’s liveblogging of the Solid Gospel Monday-night feed:
9:20 PM - The Inspirations begin with “Amazing Grace.” Fans are already applauding by the end of verse one. Archie Watkins sounds like a rooster[.]
Heheh. Sounds about right to me, though it seems awfully unfair to roosters.
I just got a chance to log on to Solid Gospel to catch a few minutes of the NQC mainstage lineup and mostly have heard a bunch of ads: ads for smoking cessation, ads for religious organizations pushing their “election guides” (uh huh), and ads with Gary Casto promising to put your group in touch […]
Consider this your open invitation to post about Monday night’s NQC opener, whether you’re in the hall or one of the splurgy homebodies who ponied up for the $60 NQC tv feed.
Update: Regarding the Matt Dibler/Inspirations question raised in the comments, Mickey Gamble, of Crossroads Records (the I’s label), wrote to say that Dibler resigned […]
Perhaps no greater bone of contention gets chewed over year after year at NQC than the mainstage line up each evening, and inevitably the squabbling and discontent comes down to the newish groups who may have generated a lot of excitement but still don’t manage to get a mainstage slot, while a group like […]
This is NQC’s 51st year, and for the student of gospel music history and culture, it’s hard not to wonder what the next 50 years will bring for this event. Looked at one way, it’s a remarkable testament to the enduring appeal of gospel music as a mass-cultural form of religious experience and expression that […]
The only showcase I attended last week was the songwriter’s thing that Phil Cross hosted, mostly because I’m always curious to hear about and see a little into the creative minds behind songs. So often the way a songwriter writes or imagines a song is simply nothing like the way it’s sung and though the […]
A friend of mine who attended the Friday afternoon Brooklyn Tab showcase was kind enough to write up some reaction to it. Obviously, she’s a real fan, so feel free to quibble. But I did hear from several people that it was pretty good stuff.
Friday’s Brooklyn Tabernacle Singers’ performance was one of the […]
An anticlimactic conclusion to three long days, with a long weak lineup at the center, tonight was both interminable and largely tiresome, to the extent that I simply could not make it all the way to Legacy 5’s final set (which would have meant wading through the Dove Brothers). So tonight’s report will be brief(er). […]
Tonight’s concerts were a strange mix of the mundane, the magnificent, and the mediocre all jumbled together. If, as I suggested last night, NQC feels different this year, it is equally true that NQC Friday and Saturday are no longer the climax days for the convention. I can remember when I first started attending 15 […]
So color me ignorant, but during the course of a conversation at lunch today, the topic of radio interviews with artists came up and I discovered that it’s a common practice for radio stations to charge an artist for an interview. $100 for 15 minutes on a prominent sg radio station. $900 to be featured […]
