*In the light of a new day, the only amplification I might add is that there wasn’t much worth blogging about from my perspective. Others, obviously, do and should disagree. Sure, I could have talked about how Ivan Parker seemed to be suffering from and sounded like an affliction; that the Hoppers seemed unable or unwilling to make any distinction between classic songs in their past and boring old tunes that were retired for a reason; that Legacy Five seems to be earnestly trying but nevertheless still searching for the right material to generate a pulse on their set and sound; that I can’t recall the last time anyone got the kind of response Kim Collingsworth elicited for her assaultive rendition of the Hallelujah chorus on the piano; that Collingsworth’s giant arrangements and keyboard showmanship make Jeff Stice look like a regional showcase winner; that sometimes on stage there’s a mean streak to Gerald Wolfe’s emcee work that reminds me of a slicker version of Jim Hamill; that the Isaacs seem to be losing their mojo; that, if one were to judge by last night alone, the talk of Tim Riley’s legendary abilities might seem as much the work of the self-deluded who refuse to admit that group’s moment has long since passed as anything else; that the Kingdom Heir’s badly punned tune, “No Bones About It,” seemed positively in good taste compared to the vulgarity, crudeness, and adolescent nature of the humor on stage throughout the evening (there were bad butt jokes; unfunny bathroom jokes; and of course Gordon Mote blind jokes, which typically seem to stay just this side of inappropriate but veered across that line for me when, at the end of his set, Gaither had his arm around Mote and said “let’s go from lesser vision to Greater Vision”); that the Perrys bring a well-rounded set even when they have just an ok night; that Gaither occupies his own realm of power and glory in the hearts and minds of the southern gospel world; that dominionist militarism alternates with poverty profiteering as the two emotional poles of the non-musical portions of the official NQC show; that Peg kicked off her shoes.

But when all this fades from view and passes from memory, what I will have taken away from last night that mattered to me was the unadorned honesty and soft power of Chris Allman (with Stan Whitmire) covering “I Know a Man,” and Wes Hampton revivifying “He is Here.”

Until tonight, that is all.

Update: Last night it seemed to me the less said about Thursday’s lineup and experience the better, and sleep has only reinforced that inclination. One doesn’t, of course, come to NQC with the expectation of uninterrupted excellence, but even by this standard last night was rough going. A few moments stood out:

The Collingsworth Family: they are an unbreached and fully fortified wall of sound. This is not a new discovery, but each year, as those children age and their voices mature, the wall gets stronger and richer and rises up every higher and higher so that by the time near the end of the set when they closed with an a cappella arrangement, they seemed to be singing just a little lower than the angels. Theirs is an astonishing edifice of music that sounds so much like it’s constructed with the assistance of vocal tracks that I had to independently verify that the Cworth’s don’t use backing tracks with two separate People Who Know (this is, I gather, an edict of Mother Collingsworth; more on her momentarily). And this is true not just when it’s the six of them together, when it sounds like they’re doubling a trio arrangement and so might be expected by dint of sheer numbers to create a fully developed sound. It’s also true when it’s just break-outs of three or four of them. What I noticed more than anything else for the first time this year is Kim Collingsworth as a singer and stage presence. I could do without the Lady Liberace thing she does at the piano. I respect her abilities there and get it (a woman couldn’t bring the house down at the keyboard if brought 7 minutes of Stan Whitmire’s style), but the cooing tracks and the flashy parallel octaves aren’t any more interesting or less clichéd when she uses them than when Dino did. But not since Kim Ruppe Lord have I heard a female singer get non-ginned-up applause in the middle of a song for singing low notes. The woman has this kind of unadorned charisma and the charm of a preacher’s wife who probably should have been the preacher (I assume that’s a metaphor, since I don’t recall ever hearing that Phil Collingsworth was a preacher, but if he is, all the better for my point). The whole set was captivating.

Doug Anderson and Devin McGlamery: Aside from the Collingsworths, the only other set that regularly pulled the night out of the slough of despond and a sound that was for the most part swampy and sour all evening long was EHSSQ, particularly McGlamery’s lead work, which is gifted and endearing and probably doesn’t get the appreciation it deserves, and Anderson’s performance of “I’ll Take What’s Left,” off his new solo album. I suggested on Wednesday that the group needs to worry less about covering old Cats songs and get about the work of reimagining southern gospel quartet music as something other than nostalgia or self-righteous ministry – work that the group really seems more interested in and inclined toward anyway. And much of last night’s set seemed to provide a glimpse of just such a reimagination. The set opened with a few tunes from the group’s new album, which led to Anderson’s song. Befitting the song’s title, it was an acoustical spare and thoughtful solo, or actually, a duet really, with Wayne Haun on the piano. Haun has never occupied the typical piano player role in the group, serving more as arranger in residence who also plays keyboards. But last night he created a kind of musical dialog with Anderson’s lovely voice, amplifying the song’s textures and providing an instrumental harmony that was beautifully thoughtful and affecting. If, as the song’s lyric has it, this is all that’s left, I’ll take it too.

And then there was everything else, or what I could stand of it (I was in and out all evening and left altogether halfway through the Dixie Echoes). The risk of even beginning to describe the remainder of the evening in a way that even approaches accuracy is that one would come off as gratuitously jaundiced, or just dumb for subjecting oneself to such a spectacle of speciousness over and over. But make no mistake, it was a bad night. As Betty Butterfield would say, the experience left me so stoved up I had to take six Celebrex. Well, at any rate, my head was addled enough by the swill on stage that I might have entertained the thought, had I had the means to self-medicate. Instead, all I found in my media bag was this:

I honestly am not sure what it is, but given the Pfeifers music, it seems appropriate: garish, plastic, and annoying.

Anyway, the general problem is primarily that so many southern gospel “singers” don’t really know how to sing that well (which isn’t to say they should necessarily sing a different style of music but that they don’t know how to create the sounds they want in ways that don’t degrade their voices over time). This is a common enough a problem, at least at talent contests and church, but instead of getting professional (re)training that you’d expect of people trying to have a career in music, they persist in their inability, seem to mistake it for a divine gift in no need of merely human cultivation, and make a calling out of professional musical malpractice.

That’s why the Kingsmen physically hurt my head (I’m not exaggerating; I wasn’t the only one in my section shielding my ears for much of their set). That’s why the track on Mark Trammell Quartet’s closing song was about as subtle and restrained as the finale to your average Transformers movie. That’s why, though I hope Brian Alvey, who is no slouch of a singer, gets the professional development someone in his position could benefit from and help the Talleys reinvent their songs and sounds (there were moments in their set last night which suggested that such reinvention is possible and full of great promise for him and them), I’m not hopeful. And that’s why even those professionals such as Arthur Rice and Debra Talley, who really did learn how to sing early on in their careers, and who are beginning to manifest the inevitable warbling vibrato that comes with age, they nevertheless don’t seem to be getting the support that would help them mitigate the unembarrassing problem (Rice, for his part at least, seems aware of the problem and it sounds like he’s trying to correct it by circumscribing his tones more, but the resulting sounds often have a serrated edge to them that shears away all the warmth and richness for which Rice became rightly famous).

Emerson (good Lord, what would Emerson have thought of the National Quartet Convention!) once memorably wrote that the moods of the writer do not agree with one another, and this could certainly be said of the music critic at NQC who didn’t drink the mood-stabilizing kool-aid. One arrives, year after everloving year, with great hope and anticipation of what moments of wonder might be possible, only to find the momentary pleasures overwhelmed by proudly unaccomplished amateurism calling itself professional music. The less moody writer might also note that last night’s line-up was pretty weak, even on paper, and tomorrow (or this evening) is another day. So until then, I’ll try to forget all the music that seems to plunder southern gospel’s past to distract from its present, precipitous decline, and as the song suggests, I’ll (try to) take what’s left.

 Presets on the console are of no use when the group sound man tweaks and toys with the faders. Groups justify the madness because they pay the guy whose experience includes a peavey board at the Miracle Ear Baptist Church.

Just so. We often want to reflexively blame The NQC Man for muffing the sound, but it’s worth noting that the groups can themselves often be responsible for their own mangled amplification.

Close second to griping about sound? Griping about emcees. Let’s look at the commenters tape:

Go back to having a real EMCEE who can keep the program moving and fill in the dead spots. Those girls [still Sisters] last night were horrible on stage holding a piece of people reciting facts about the next group which they obviously knew nothing about.

This seems a bit harsh, but the problem with this feedback is only a matter of emphasis, not kind. Jason Crabb is becoming badly overexposed in this emcee role, and he’s not that great at it in the first place. And anyway, it’s just unrealistic and unfair to ask him and Sisters to emcee all night, supply filler music when the show hits a transitional snag (Crabb had to yank Wayne Haun out of the artists pit to accompany him at one point), and then schedule those same overworked emcees for regular planned numbers in which they are expected to make an impression on a crowd as singers when they’ve been in the unenviable role of interrupting the musical as pleasantly as possible (which is what emcee work amounts to, after all) throughout the night. This does not endear you to audiences, no matter how much they like you as artists.

On other hand, do we really want to go back to the Jerry and Buck approach?

But of course one’s relationship to these type’s of events never remains stable. In 1993, the first NQC of my memory, I was a teenage fan boy by turns fascinated with and horrified by the prospect of a life as a gospel music professional (and obviously “the horror! the horror!” won out). Today, NQC is much less a fan experience than a professional research and networking opportunity for me as an academic who researches and writes about evangelicalism and music; just tonight I was able to make valuable use of John Ashcroft’s hackery appearance by meeting up with a fellow academic who also studies gospel music (and/but in Canada! h/t CU).

Which is a long way of saying, I no longer feel the desire or need to bring a pitch pipe and a stenography machine with me. I’ve done all that – a job for the young, if ever there was one – and I’m getting old. So what follows is far more impressionistic and less systematic than the treatments to which many of you have become accustomed. My aim is not to be comprehensive but to capture the impressions that I retain from a few key moments.

The Freedom Hall Sound: It still sucks, of course. And the sun also rises. The baffling nature of this particular suckage, though, is the way it can persistently be wrong through an entire group’s set (i.e. Signature Sound) and then seem miraculously to right itself for entire sets thereafter. A conspiracy theorist would be inclined to speculate about plots and subterfuge. A technocrat would wonder why one cluster of soundboard presets can go so wrong and another go so right. The ticket-holding fan (full disclosure: I was on media pass tonight) just wants to be able to hear what’s going on, which too often tonight was simply too hard to discern. Note that I didn’t say impossible. Perhaps more annoying than absolute silence is the experience of being able to catch snatches of what’s happening on stage. Call this the Bell-Tone version of NQC (“can you hear what other people are singing but not understand the words?”). The sense of distance and remoteness, without quite ever becoming full-on isolation, leaves the impression that those of us in the upper deck are being purposefully excluded. Not cool.

The High Road: I refer, of course, to the name of a female trio of (former?) Belmont students who were featured as part of the showcase winners. They sang the group’s namesake song and left me slackjawed with the acoustic simplicity and force of the sound and songwriting. Think the Isaacs crossed with the original Ruppes leavened with the undaunted energy and irrepressible verve of youth. My faith in the discernment of the NQC audience was momentarily restored when the group was warmly received. Then Dennis Swanberg was warmly received and things went back to normal. But for a few lovely moments, the planetary system of fan culture and good music seemed to align for a glorious burst of musico-existential rightness.

Janet Paschal: For this part of our lesson, class, let’s begin with a question: How do you know Bill Gaither is not in the building? Answer: Janet Paschal does a set that doesn’t include “It Won’t Rain Always.” Srsly. Of course my fondness for The J.P. is no secret, and though I don’t think a good 2/3 of the crowd had a clue what she was doing tonight, it was a charming set of self-possessed songs that Paschal infused with a raw energy and unself-conscious vocal power and range that contrasts sharply to the “pretty singer” role in which she has long been (inadvertently?) type cast in the Gaither universe. Mind you, her set – built around two newish songs, a summer wedding tune that I think was called “I Want Enough” and a big-bandy number that I think went by the name “Case of Love” – was more suited to the Hurstborne League of Women’s Voters Thursday luncheon in terms of its subtlety and sophistication (think cucumber sandwiches and strong Manhattans and Sugarbaker sassiness). Truth be told, that’s unfair. My notes actually say “this song is in the tradition of the Broadway diva pre-intermission show-stopper.” Which is true. Whatever. Love me The JP. Even if most of the audience seemed to have no clue. Too bad for them.

Scoot Shelnut: His bass accompaniment of Steward Varnado’s somewhat plodding piano solo was muddy and muddled in the mix but a magnificently intrepid marvel of syncopation and wit all the same. The best moments often come from those who aren’t trying to steal the show do so anyway.

The Perrys: First of all, Tracy Stuffle has lost a lot of weight, and for the first time I can recall he looks comfortable in his body. Good for him. Really. I admire the discipline it must have taken to get to that point. The P’s set was no homerun but it held up ok. The baritone delivered some lovely passing tones in the harmony lines of “Celebrate Me Home,” though someone needs to get him an accurate copy of the lyrics for “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” There are not nearly as many “and”s in that song as he seems to think there are. Still it was nice to see everyone want to love him all the same. The tracks all felt like they were being piped in from another room and that gave the entire set a subdued and off-kilter feel. Matters weren’t helped by Libby Perry Stuffle singing a song from her new solo album with a badly-amped track and canned BGVs, while perfectly excellent singers and players sat/stood there through all but the last bit of the song. But I quibble: the Perrys are still the masters of grand religious feelings and towering spiritual sentiment.

The Singing Rambos Tribute: The good news is, the Rambos brought a seven piece band, which also turns out to be the bad news, in this case, because it was a seven piece bluegrass band, which comes about as close to capturing the innovation of the Rambos’ instrumental style as bringing hotdish to a potluck. Close but not quite. In any event, the only song that “took” (as they say in the beauty shop) was “He Looked Beyond My Fault,” for which Donny McGuire played piano, sang really quite movingly, and delivered three modulations and countless drum kicks and a waving of hands worthy of the Love Boat at bon voyage. Which is to say, I loved it. In all, it provided something of a sonic anchor to the otherwise diffuse and unfocused stringtastic pluck-off that sullied the sound for the rest of the set. If all the people who make an amateur sport out of Rambo hatin’ would get over their personal grudges and proxy political point-scoring with Dottie’s descendants, they’d hear some of the most insightful and enlivened music in southern gospel (and even if you don’t agree, let’s be honest: when have questionable fashion choices, unfortunate hair, and dubious personal lives ever stopped anyone from succeeding in southern gospel? Honestly). Evidently from the NQC program, I gather that Rambo-McGuire is a going sg concern these days, so I hope we hear more of them in their own right and not just as a gussied up Singing Rambos nostalgia set.

EHSSQ: To be honest, it was like there were two EHSSQs tonight. One was a likeable oldies cover band, the other a hardworking quartet trying to redefine what it means to sing quartet music. The only constant was that they got knobbed throughout the entire set, which was truly unfortunate. What was striking was the diminished role of conspicuous choreography for the most part. It wasn’t absent, but it was more tastefully deployed, so that when the overt dance moves did make an appearance toward the end of the set, the place went nuts, which just proves that people conditioned to expect a certain kind of gratification will love it all the more if you withhold it from them for a while. Anyway, the bass singer’s rendition of “I Believe” was earnest and effortful, but too often it seems that a certain belchy or forced tone stands in for a missing texture or tonal richness, which tends to scatter his force as a singer (wasn’t it George Younce who was fond of saying that singers shouldn’t oversing or force tones they don’t have and instead let their voices naturally grow into their own depth and range?). Still, the arrangement of the song is alluringly captivating … it sounds like something off a Broadway show (in a good way), urbane and understated and yet memorably affecting. This, combined with what sounded to me like a new arrangement of “Till We Fly Away,” created a promising vein of possibility for a more self-possessed, less twitchy and over-thought EHSSQ. Let the spirit move, guys.

Greater Vision: With Chris Allman back in the line-up, they deliver exactly what I imagine a bespoke suit would sound like if it could sing. And I don’t mean that as a put-down. Allman is clearly the understated star of this show, with his self-abnegating yet ever-palpable voice, and the mix of tunes tonight suggests a shift in GV’s style toward a more different kind of ethos for song selection, notwithstanding the tune about the importance of living for a Christ-centered future that seemed nevertheless to end up dwelling in the past. On the drive down to Louisville today, the car ride included some vintage Allman-Trammell-Wolfe GV from back in the day, and I found myself wondering what the group would sound like if they hadn’t gone so fully into the orbit of the Rodney Griffin universe. Perhaps we may still be able to find out, if only a little.

Paul’s Journey: I know very little about this group, other than that they were formerly called the Relations quartet (not the worst name ever, but close to it). In any case, the tenor is a rarity: he has the focused intonation of the classic quartet sound but texturizes his upper registers with a warmth and roundness that prevents his head tones from going shrill in the tradition of Free and Sheppard. I came rather to enjoy the motor memory reflex of just about beginning to cringe when I thought “ohup yeah he’s going to go nasally and flat” and then he didn’t! More of this, please?

Jason Crabb and Friends: After tonight, dear ones, I officially declare that the one pianist I would take on a desert island with me is whoever it is playing for Jason Crabb. Him, and Lori Sykes on bass. And that drummer. In other words, it was like a set of Austin City Limits in Louisville. Set me free.

Gold City: Frankly, they were neither as bad nor as good as the partisans on either side suggest. The two things that stood out to me were: one, Danny Riley’s sound has ascended into his head and gone all honky; and second, I have no idea what the song “Peter James and John” is about. It seems rather like “His Name Was John” x3. But without a discernible internal coherence. Huh?

Triumphant: These guys have the stage presence of a shelf full of Ken dolls of varying vintage and their up-tempo stand-em-up style (tonight this style was represented by “Saved By Grace”) is overly aggressive and off-putting to my ear, but they have their moments. Most particularly, the verses of “Love Came Calling.” I still feel like the choruses belong to a different song, a more ditty-ish tune that isn’t on stylistical speaking terms with the verses. But whatever. Scott Inman’s delivery of the verses and bridge is masterful. I’m glad I stayed, at least until the beginning of that white hanky of surrender nonsense. It may have been 11 p.m. in Louisville but it was 5 o’clock somewhere on Bardstown Road.

This is the first year I’ve made a Wednesday appearance, and given how demanding three nights of listening and writing is for me, I may be selective about feedback either tonight or some other night if the alternative would be four nights and overload, and thus turning (above averagely) cranky, as I did toward the end of last year’s marathon of mediocrity. But watch this space, and keep your comments and emails coming.

Several of you are itching to talk about personnel changes in the context of NQC, so here is your chance. And of course you can talk about other things, too (person trying to post about Jonathan Pierce’s decorating stint on HGTV, here is your chance!).

Have the floor.

Evidently, the folks at the NQC mothership have never heard of modulations.

Reader CVH was thinking along similar lines in a recent note:

Who’s it going to be next year? Are they going to roll out some fat has-been like Ed Meese?

In fact, CVH’s comment is worth quoting at length, if for no other reason than a duet is better than a solo.

The NQC press release states Ashcroft is a “noted singer and songwriter.” Really? Really? I remember him more for notable actions like covering up the exposed breast (or “nekkid tit” as my beloved Aunt Blabby used to say) on the statue of the Spirit of Justice in the Justice Department headquarters because “we can’t have that kind of thing.”

Brilliant.

Daniel Mount writes, “due to his (Ashcroft’s) long-lasting love for Southern Gospel music, his previous appearances singing, and the fact that he will be singing original Gospel songs accompanied by Greater Vision, there is likely to only be a minute fraction of the controversy that accompanied Sarah Palin’s appearance last year.”

Let’s hope so. At least he can clown around with Gerald and the boys which would be less offensive than Palin’s gaffe-filled comments. Her lack of knowlege and understanding were shamelessly on display. To quote our esteemed host, from last September, post-NQC, “does anyone really think Sarah Palin knows anything more about sg than what her handlers briefed her on before her speech and the odd cd she may have popped in for the ride over from the hotel?”

Indeed.

The mere presence of a politician is political, regardless of what they say or do. And because politicians are, by definition, opportunists, one can only conclude that the NQC is willing to let its event be used as a backdrop for the advancement of a political agenda. I don’t care whether it’s a right-leaning or left-leaning agenda. It doesn’t matter what the social manifestations of those agendas are, even if they’re in many ways agreeable to those in attendance. They don’t belong at an event that purports to be spiritual in nature. The cross, heaven, Jesus, the blood, grace, mercy and salvation are not the result of anything America (or the Republican party) has done. And the future of Christ’s kingdom doesn’t depend on whether President Obama is re-elected or not. Get over it.

God doesn’t need to be wrapped up in the American flag to be who he is. God doesn’t favor America. And he certainly doesn’t vote Republican (or Tea Party for that matter). And before anyone gets their red, white and blue stretch pants in a knot, he doesn’t vote Democratic either.

I realize I’m taking an untenable position here. The social and cultural history of southern gospel music is, largely, as much about your politics as anything else. Unlike any other style of Christian or religious music, southern gospel mixes simple gospel truths with a right-leaning, conservative, US-centric mindset; and gets away with it because of who its audience has traditionally been.

We have occasional discussions here about the decline of SG, the quality, market share, aging demographics, etc. If the genre is going to survive and grow, it’s going to have to address the tastes, values and yes, political mores of a changing society.

Someday NQC might not just be about strawberry ice cream, fake hair, bad sound and toe ring vendors. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

P.S. Do you think Ashcroft will autograph my King James Bible?

It may well be that this keynote won’t cause as much controversy as the choice of Palin. Or, it may just be that not that many people really care about these speeches all that much.

Sure the eight or so of us in the world of southern gospel who don’t hail from Teabagistan will push the  Sisyphean boulder of our discontent up the hill a few feet in the run-up to and in the immediate aftermath of the event. But I’m not talking about that kind of caring, because we’re not the audience for whom these speakers are allegedly aimed. No, I mean, how many of the loyal Tea Party Patriots and proudly right-wing Republicans who comprise the bulk of the NQC crowd, and will probably themselves go hear just about any preachy polemicist gussied up in the garb of politics and given a showcase by our NQC overlords  — how many of these people would really care or be upset if there was no keynote?

Given that we all got by just fine for decades when the keys and notes at the convention were left to the singers and players, one gets the distinct impression these political sideshows are pretty transparently vanity projects for the NQC leadership.

I’ve just finished a piece of writing on Dottie Rambo, which involved reading Buck Rambo’s as-told-to biography of the Singing Rambos, and all this talk of distractingly buffoonish gasbaggery at NQC puts me in mind of a line attributed to J.D. Sumner (of course) just before he gave the Rambos (at the time going by the name the Gospel Echoes) their first slot on the NQC mainstage:

Don’t talk. Don’t preach. Just sing.

Just so.

Let’s let the mighty eagle soar  … somewhere else.

The absence of the Fan Awards left NQC without a center or organizing experience in some ways. This isn’t because the Fan Awards were an irreplaceable event (something else, properly conceived and executed, could probably do the trick). It’s just that in retrospect, the Fan Awards, coming on Thursday, served as something to look forward and then to refer back to as the week progressed.

Until they weren’t there anymore, I never realized how much the outcomes of the awards – particularly song, album, and group of the year – helped infused those final two and a half days with a sense of possibility surrounding the winners’ subsequent mainstage performances. With fans primed for a confirmation of the big win from their favorite groups and the artists themselves energized by their awards, there was a certain fusing of desire and ambition and great feeling that may not have always paid off but that helped give some kind of affective shape to the weekend all the same. Something to look forward to. 

This year, there just seemed to be one artist after another. And then some video clips. And some lame stand up. And some profiteering preachers. And then some more performances. Gaither sort of gave the week a high point insofar as people flock to see him and there’s buzz – I mean, really, literally: there were catcalls and screaming fans … I actually wouldn’t have been surprised to see panties thrown on the stage when GVB came on. So maybe that argues for a larger Gaither Homecoming style event. I dunno. Everything seems so Gaitherized these days, it may not be that big of a deal. But the afternoon singalong certainly seemed to be a big enough hit that maybe that needs to be moved to the evening mainstage.

I dunno. In general, my sense is the affliction ailing NQC is less a programming problem and more a symptom of a long goodbye going on to the relevance of this sort of event. No, NQC’s not going to go away any time soon. But it certainly has ceased to be the force it once was, for reasons tied to other forces that are not going to magically undo themselves … ever. I’ll talk more about some of these dynamics in the coming weeks, after I’ve rested and cleared my head. But for now, the salient point is to listen and look for those moments that catch you off guard and hold you in their force field, if only for a fleeting note or two, a transient phrase, the briefest bar. Theoretically, those moments could shrink and shrink infinitely off into the distance without ever actually ceasing to exist altogether, but I hope I don’t have to find out where my threshold is. I still want to go back, but I’m not sure for how long.

Which leads me to my other main observation: I think my Friday night epiphany – that the unstoppable force of my affection for the music had run headlong into the immovable wall of sonic contrivance that dominates so much of the music today – left the impression that I was not very implicitly longing for some golden age of musical accomplishment and authenticity.

Let me say for the record then: I don’t really believe such an age ever existed. Here’s why. When the music today is really good, it’s as good or better than the best music I’ve heard from any previous era. The corollary to this observation is that today’s worst music is not worse than that of earlier moments.

What is different about today’s music is the plastic, preprogrammed, conspicuously artificial and coldblooded nature of the technically enhanced sound so popular with all but a few artists.

Here’s what I mean: listening to the Hinsons set at the 100^th Anniversary showcase, I heard plenty of bad singing: pitchy, unblended, occasionally just downright unmusical. But it was entirely and unequivocally live … alive, immediate and urgent, and so, deeply felt. These songs, as I’ve noted already, were so obviously written as much for a live band as for singers themselves, so that artists, performers and listeners alike were able to inhabit the music-making experience as the tunes unfolded on stage (this also what I was trying to describe about Jason Crabb’s set on Thursday). Sure, it wasn’t entirely spontaneous. They may not have rehearsed much, by all available evidence, but everybody knew the basic arrangement. Yet the liveness of the music – not least of all a band of first-rate players rather than professional showboats – cloaked the imperfections of the music in a felt and endearing humanity.

My point is not that having a live band is a license to suck, as you know all too well if you’ve been following some of the more spirited NQC threads elsewhere on this site (though obviously “live band” is a tricky term, since even most of the groups with multiple live instruments were still using tracks). But when you hear mediocre, amateur or otherwise subpar singing accompanied by an orchestral track of stratospheric proportions and the kind of facile perfection only digital technology can provide, it leeches that intrinsically human dimension out of the music, calling attention to the flaws not as honest failures of musical ability but as the residue of a small-time fixation with the appearance of greatness, with a sheen of accomplishment, with the unearned applause that, say, a flat-VI, flat-VII, tonic tag, annotated with brass fanfare and rolling tympanis will generate almost every time among gospel audiences.

And so, you see these artists down there bowing in motions of gratitude or pointing humbly heavenward as the crowd roars … and you realize that genuine though the vast majority of them doubtless are in their desire to give credit to the Lord, the credit’s often borrowed, leveraged to the hilt against a symphonic soundtrack and the marvel of pushbutton bands that leech out the essential human element, leaving little more than karaoke. I can hear that at Larry Parrots down the street, but have more fun, because I could get a drink there too.

I ran across a line a novel I was reading on the plane back from Louisville Sunday that I’ve been thinking about a lot apropos this topic. The passage discusses a character’s thoughts on a musician he’s listening to at a club, and it went like this: the singer “was performing sincerity, and when the performance threatened to give the lie, he performed his anguish over the difficulty of sincerity.”

Great stuff. Sincerity must be performed in southern gospel, of course, as in any other performance art organized around the performer’s authenticity, whether anyone is willing or able to admit so or not. But in sg, when the performance starts to give the lie – when the tracks call attention to themselves and the dearth of any real possibility for artistic spontaneity (which is, I think, what most people mean when they talk about artistic authenticity) – when this happens, there’s no way the gospel performer can recur to the crisis of sincerity as a source of energy, no way to plow the anxiety of performance back into the song, because no one can admit there’s any artifice afoot in the first place.

In the southern gospel imagination, there must be no daylight between seeming and being. And yet perversely enough, the commitment to “authentic” singers has led us to this place where so much of the music couldn’t be more patently, obviously, absurdly artificial. So the tenor screams a little louder and the bass kicks the subwoofer in and the other two suspend their resolutions even more lengthily … and all the while the sound guy keeps pushing the track slider up a bit higher, as if to drown out any doubts that may linger on either side of the footlights about the dubious wisdom of relying on canned music to mobilize the mysterious and powerful movings of good gospel music.

In my perch tonight, my mind keep wandering - and I didn’t bother trying to stop it - and so I let myself start thinking back to some of my earliest experiences at NQC, in the early 1990s. I remember that effusive woman who used to sit on the front row and dance and clap and wear outrageous homemade superfan tshirts. And then there was the old preacher lady who used to shuffle up to the stage stairs and grab aholt of Connie Hopper and Peg McKamey with one hand and wave her bible with the other while beckoning the heavenly to host to descend in a language only she and God seemed to understand.

I was musing on this stuff more or less free associatively, and what to my wandering mind should appear, but this message from a dear friend, with whom I’ve been commiserating via email on and off all weekend and whose mind and memory seem to running in a similar direction. It captured much more comprehensively the drift of my own thoughts and so I offer it as a far a more fitting commentary on this evening, this weekend, my experience, than anything I’d have to say at the moment.

My version of NQC has been listening to Solid Gospel, commenting on your board for change, and then wishing I had turned the radio off earlier than I did.  Maybe I’ll drive up next year, maybe I won’t.  In the meantime, I was thinking about the moments that stand out to me from years and years of attending NQC.

I remember the Talley’s doing “Triumphantly, The Church Will Rise.”  I thought the

Lord was coming back in the middle of the song because I was caught up.

I remember the year the Talley’s started a set with, “Love Will.”  I’d never heard those percussive sounds on a recording in my life.  Ever.  I was blown away.

 

Remember when the little old lady would take her Bible down by the stage every time Connie Hopper was on stage?  Such a sweet soul.

 

Then there was the year the Hoppers brought in the Music City Mass Choir. I believe they did “Mention My Name,” but I can’t swear to it.  Regardless, my memory of it is what matters.

 

The Cathedrals.  Every single time they sang, the merchandise area emptied.  There was a sound–a blend–that has never been duplicated.  There was also a brand of class that I cannot articulate which went away with them.

 

Remember when the Nelons’ debuted the video to, “Famine in Their Land?”  So cutting edge.

 

Oh, the year the McGruders tore the place apart with the live band.

 

I remember the first time the Vocal Band came back.  It was electric.

 

What about the big Amy Lambert debut with the Greenes?  She nailed it, too.

These are just a few of the things that I personally think of as ‘worth the trip’ events.  And, when I turned off the radio last night, these are the moments I went back to.  The truth is, after eavesdropping this week, of all the years of eavesdropping and of showing up, I really needed to remember, this year more than any, that there was a magic that brought me here in the first place.

For me personally, I might have preferred that the memory of some of the groups like the Speers and the Downings and their music to stay undespoiled by these rather pale re-creations of them from among the remnants and spare parts of long-ago configurations dismantled by age, infirmity, death and scandal. But the rather smallish crowd (at least it was smaller than I expected given all the hype that surrounded it) was enthusiastic, especially for Gold City and the Hinsons. And I can’t say I didn’t enjoy myself.

My own favorites were the Hinsons and the Rambos. The latter’s set stood out for being the most intentionally and carefully arranged … there was medley of songs with some interesting transitions instead of just truncated clips of old favorites that started and stopped. Dottie Rambo wrote such vivid and visceral songs, and well know this, but something about hearing them revivified with a full, live band seemed to reanimate this truth. At any rate, the first verse of “Remind Me Dear Lord” brought me up short:

The things that I love
I hold dear to my heart
they are borrowed and
not mine at all

Nothing special in these words alone, but marry them to her melody and the way the score breaks up and emphasizes the thoughts, both syntactically and musically, and you begin to realize what made Rambo such a genius.

As for the Hinsons, they specialized in songs that just beg to be staged with live instruments, and though, like all the performances in this showcase, the singing  consistently ranged from uneven to pretty rough, the scarcity o f both  live bands in sg and material like the Hinsons’, which is written with a band as much as vocalists in mind, made their set stand out.

As a card-carrying member of the Arts and Crafts crowd, I’ve always known that for me and my kind, enjoyment comes in moments fleeting and tenuous, rare and precious, but powerful and longlasting. We store these moments up, and then live off them during long droughts of musical mediocrity that the True Believer noisily applauds.

But tonight, dear readers, your humble correspondent nearly starved to death. The night’s music was a thin gruel that left me woefully malnourished in the face of Screaming Kingsmen (didn’t Harold Reed used to be able to sing?) and any group that has “boys” in the name (I had to invent a new term – “serrated tones” – to even come close to capturing the ordeal of Down East’s tenor). MNP insists this is worst single night at NQC that she can recall. That seems pretty bold, given that she and I have been coming pretty consistently for nigh onto two decades now. But sadly, I’m not sure she’s wrong.

One operative principle of this whole enterprise of listening and responding publicly to NQC is that honest engagement with the music and an open embrace of competing perspectives (that’s you) encourages a more meaningful appreciation of gospel music’s value when it’s good. But this evening’s experience may have broken the back of that ethos.

So tonight’s report will look a little different. Specifically, I’ve scrapped the normal three-tired structure of categories I use to organize my thoughts because … well, frankly, they don’t apply to what I heard tonight. Instead, I’ll highlight a few things that stood out up in the nosebleeds and then remark on a few trends embedded within some of the more problematic moments.

Stuff That Didn’t Really SuckJanet Paschal: She brought three friends with her tonight – Cheri (sp?) Parker, Joy Gardner, and Katy Peach – and it was by far the most musically accomplished and compelling ensemble of the evening. The set opened with “God Rides on Wings of Love,” her newest single, and it’s frankly a dog of a tune, but that really doesn’t matter because the set ended with “I am Not Ashamed of the Gospel.” A friend joined MNP and me up in the bitter barn near the top of Freedom Hall and turned to me when the song was over and said: They should take that on the road. ME: where can I get tickets? The sound was rich and warm, full yet harmonically focused, big and encompassing (despite the fact that Paschal’s slider in the house mix was way too low), yet unforced and naturally fluent. It was impossible not to fall in love with this rewarding sound, and given that so many male quartets stink so badly, it’s easy to wish for a quartet convention along these lines.

Cody McVeigh is the Kingsmen pianist, but don’t hold that against him. While Harold Reed was hacking his way through “He’s All I Need,” McVeigh’s light, tasteful touch provided a welcome and classy respite from the lashing vocals. But it was also an impressive display in its own right, made all the more so for his lack of self-involvement at the keyboard. He reminded me of Wayne Haun during Sig Sound’s set.

Speaking of Signature Sound, I’m going to wait to reserve judgment on their Cats’ Reunion until I see and hear the full album, but tonight it was interesting to get a glimpse of that material in a live setting. I’ll say this for the group tonight, they certainly can’t be accused of over-stacking their set. It was very alive and warmblooded, full of nostalgic enthusiasm made more human by the noticeable rough patches in a few places.

The verses of Triumphant’s “Love Came Calling,” their new single, are melodically lovely, and Scott Inman treated them with very pleasant care and nuance (I hope you see that I’m really, really trying here to make a purse out of this dumbo-sized sow’s ear).

Everything Else

• To start with, there’s just a lot crummy, overlong, unfocused and uninteresting material out there. I’m not talking about people having a bad tune here or there in their mix. I mean, entire groups have built not just NQC sets but their whole identity around songs of Amazonian length, set at a funereal pace, with  no lyrical or emotional core, and musically uncentered. The Freemans (last night), the Talleys, Crists, Melody Boys tonight (at least what I heard before I walked out) … the list goes on and on. For a lot of people, NQC is the only time to hear most of these groups. If you’ve got a captive audience and there’s a premium on time, why call a downbeat, dirgy soulsucker  or a downbeat and dirgily arranged evergreen (Talleys again!) that takes up more than half your allotted time? This is a risky proposition in general, given the size of the performance space, but if you do this after, say, 9 p.m., you’re just begging to be ignored. Material and judgment are both in far too short supply.

• Tears may be the language God understands, but judging by the choice of tunes they call, most artists speak primarily in large, loud, bursts of sonic bombast. The Gaither Vocal Band was the primest illustration of this maxim. Their set resembled nothing so much as finger painting with boxing gloves.

• I realize that there’s never been a golden age when all the men were good looking, all the women strong, and all the kids were above average in southern gospel, but it’s pretty undeniable that southern gospel is currently enthrall as never before to massively overproduced tracks, backed up with vocal stacks of Mormon Tabernacle Choir proportions, to achieve effects historically created primarily by vocal talent (this is also true for piano soloists like Kim Collingsworth and Jeff Stice – Tim Parton is a notable exception; though he used a big backing track, he had some really originally conceived passages, most especially a segment near the middle of his rendition of “Wonderful Grace of Jesus” that arranged the tune in the style of a Chopin Etude). In addition to making singers lazy (see below), this approach also makes it almost impossible for singers to not violate Harrison’s First Law of Tracks and Stacks: don’t draw attention to them. Tonight the GVB sang as bad as I’ve ever heard them, or maybe not. Maybe they just had the tracks backed way down more often than usual. Sure, David Phelps sang an A-flat in full voice. And Wes Hampton, who is probably the group’s most comprehensively gifted singer, had some really pleasing passages on a regular basis. But these moments were far outweighed by sloppy endings, showy harmonies riddled with pitchiness, and a general sense of apathy (David Phelps didn’t even bother to try to act like he wasn’t less than bored by all moments when he wasn’t stealing the show). In some cases these kinds of errors can be humanizing. But when you’re always singing with pitch perfect stacks, glimpses of humanity become conspicuous gaffes. 

•  Out of shape, sloppy, lazy, or otherwise serially unmusical singing. I’ve already mentioned the Harold Reed fiasco. But I’d hate to leave the impression that he stood out in anyway. This phenomenon is the great common bond of southern gospel, reaching from the Skyline Boys to Michael English to David Sutton (he gave McCray Dove a run for his money in the Incomprehensible Diction Department).

• Lazy showmanship: it’s not an unpardonable offense to sing the same big song this year that you relied on last year, but if you’re, say, Michael English, and you set up your rendition of “Please Forgive Me” last year with how great it felt to be back home and accepted after a long journey in the barren land of an inconstant faith, and the crowd roared – last year  … well, it’s probably not really necessary to ask forgiveness again and tell everybody how great it feels to be back home and accepted after a blah blah blah. You’re forgiven already.

• The real shame of all this is that it makes the Arts and Crafts Type less likely to give a singer the benefit of the doubt because there’s so much accumulating evidence that mediocre is the new must-have of the season industry. I don’t, for instance, dislike the Easters and I really wish Morgan Easter well as she grows into her part in the group, but by midnight of an evening like this, all I could think during the Easters set was, I miss Charlotte, who provided a civilizing counterbalance to the intensely vernacular texture of the Easter family vocal style. Ditto the Perrys. Troy Peach seems like a super nice guy and he’s got the right onstage mojo for an emotional group, but I simply walked out and headed for the car when he started singing the first verse of … whatever it was he was singing. Masticated vowels and pitch shaving galore … it was like being inside a snow cone machine. Maybe earlier in the evening his folksy charm would have won out, but you can’t follow a night full of suckiness and get by on charm at 1230 a.m.

Yeah, sure, I know, I’m in the minority here, just as I know I’m among the minority that thinks that the Foxification of NQC is a thing to mourn (tonight we were treated to the unexpected “surprise” of Fox News/CBS talking head Rita Cosby hyping her new book about the flag, and fathers and faith). Just like I know I’m probably among a minority who believes if children are starving, that fact, all by itself, is the first, best and only reason Christians need to feed the hungry (a fact I had nearly 15 minutes to mull over while Gerald Wolfe assured us he really wasn’t putting the hard sell on for Compassion International).

I suspect these minorities aren’t as small as the majority likes to imagine when it’s clapping for marriage, mom, and apple pie Fox News. But even if I’m wrong, I can’t imagine I’m the only one who’s noticing the steady erosion of the event’s focus on music as it slides in a swampy soup of profit-taking preachers, politics, and predigested pap. Which is to say: Not only does there seem to be less and less live music. There’s a marked deterioration in the quality of the music that’s left. And that’s bad news for everybody.PS: as always, it’s late, I’m tired and there are doubtless errors of fact or spelling here. Please let me know via email and I’ll fix asap.

Enjoyed your report on Thursday’s doings.  I’m wondering if these time wasters between acts is to reduce the amount of competition between groups.  In the 70s, groups came on one after another (not much technology then) and it could be tough or easy to outdo the previous act.  Same thing used to happen at concerts then when groups were fighting (not always fairly) to sell more records.