Still, the interns suggested that I send a big blog shout-out to Phillips for 60 years of unrivaled mastery of the gospel style. Indeed, one reason far less got done around here this week than I had hoped was that the interns spent hours trolling youtube for decent footage of Phillips in action. They report that someone could do the world of gospel music an eternal favor by capturing some high-quality audio-visuals of Her Eloiseness in action because there appears at the moment to be an astonishing and appalling lack of material. The available clips are invariably muddy, blurry, of poor quality, and often include some off-key voice exuberantly belting out the lyrics right into the camera microphone. To wit:

Though I get how good gospel piano makes you want to sing, in this particular case, it’s rather beyond me how anyone can stand that close to gospel greatness and think that this would be a good time to deliver oneself a spontaneous solo. Then again, perhaps this is fitting, insofar as it captures the way Phillips’ brilliance, humility, and grace have been gilding the southern gospel convention world for lo these many marvelous years.Congratulations, Eloise.

James,

I remember hearing people say that Grand Ole Opry favorite Del Wood (real name: Polly Adelaide Hendricks Hazelwood) “played like a man.” In fact, Wood deliberately chose a gender neutral pseudonym when she first started playing honky-tonks in the 1940s so people wouldn’t automatically assume she was a woman and discredit her before she had a chance to prove herself.

Some might take offense to you saying a lot of women “can’t” play Southern Gospel. Of course, there are many that can. In general, though, if you observe pianist as much as I have, you’ll note that most men play from their shoulders, while most woman play from their elbows. When a brute force approach is called for, men, in general, can deliver that style easier than women…and some SG calls for a forceful approach in order to be heard.

As a young girl, I dreamed of becoming a southern gospel pianist from the very first time I heard Rosa Nell Speer Powell tear up a song or two. When I was a very brash 13, I remember telling Shannon Childress at a Hoppers concert that he was fantastic but that I definitely wanted his job. I attend Stamps-Baxter School of Music for five years studying with Eloise Phillips and my original idol, Rosa Nell, to learn all of the hot licks in the so-called “hard driving style” that women allegedly can’t play. Hogswallop, I say! My ten fingers work as well as any man’s.

I did audition for a couple of groups. One was an all-male quartet and bluntly told me they couldn’t have a woman who wasn’t a wife or daughter traveling on a bus with them. This was around the time of the hire of Amy Lambert with the Greenes, so I found this quite ludicrous, but I supposed pianists were much easier than sopranos to find in the other gender. Another “family” mixed group explained that I had a wonderful talent and would fit well with their style but that a man would better suit them because he could help load and unload their equipment and assist with driving their bus.

That just about quashed my dream. In recent years I’ve chosen to just observe from the sidelines and comment occasionally. I do actually study with Shannon Childress now on a weekly basis, so even though I didn’t steal his job (by hook or by marriage like my fellow Stamps-Baxter alum), I do get to learn all of his great secret piano moves now.

I can only hope that those little girls who sit out there in audiences at concerts and who dream of accompanying the greats of the field get the chance that I was denied. Maybe one day groups will realize that women are just as talented as men and can give the same great show as any male pianist and that they don’t have to marry into their position or have their daddies to start groups just so they can have a spot in this field.

I bring this up for what it’s worth. Though I do wish there were more women on the piano benches in full-time top-tier sg (and more women generally in positions of power and influence in gospel music), I don’t think this decline of the female pianist is a sign of regression, necessarily. The women of a generation or two ago who played piano for major groups did so not least of all because in those early days of gospel music’s rise, there was enough residue of Victorian domestic values for piano playing to be associated with effeminacy and the woman’s sphere (remember, before the professionalization of church music, church musicians were almost always women). As soon as gospel music was industrialized, so to speak, men quickly ascended to the piano bench and have kept it ever since, for the most part (though do point out the instances I’ve overlooked please). Do as many teenage girls dream of playing sg piano as boys? Is the reticence of non-family gender mixing in evangelical culture (Mary Tom Speer Reid cited this in her comments for the Nashville Scene article about the lack of women in sg) still an obstacle to more females breaking into full-time gospel music at the young age it is necessary to establish oneself professionally? Have any group owners or managers auditioned female pianists (or other talent) or refused to because of ambivalence of the logistics of traveling with a woman? Or do women simply not apply for these jobs, because they assume they’ll be disqualified or for othe reasons?

We are now auditioning piano players, and have heard some really great talent. More and more I am finding young people using the Nashville number system, and that fits quite nicely with my mode of operation.

This is good news as a report from the field, but I guess I thought (naively?) that it has always been standard issue for sg pianists who had any serious ambition to know the NNS. Even coming up in the small-time world 15 years ago and with a decade of considerable informal and some formal training already behind me, I had to learn it as a matter of course and plenty of music theory to boot. Was my case an anomaly?

Now that I think about it, perhaps so. After all, southern gospel is famous for how ignorant its musicians and vocalists can be of music theory and how little ability they can have to think abstractly about music and still succeed. Indeed, if you want to look for one of the many roots to the deep-seated problem of gospel music’s crisis of quality, the glut of untrained musicians (vocal and instrumental) is prime ground to till. Native or natural ability is all well and good. And a lot of players (and singers for that matter), of course, wear their lack of training as a badge of honor. In a culture skeptical of the worldliness with which formal training is often associated in southern gospel (long-haried or sissified music etc), celebrating one’s uncultivated talent can be a real crowd pleaser. It makes players feel exceptional rather than willfully ignorant, and it reinforces certain anti-intellectual predispositions among salt-of-the-earth fans.

But the widespread rhetoric of “God-given” talent and talk of divinely inspired ability or spirit-filled playing tends to exacerbate the problem of players who don’t understand the musical foundations of what they do and - worse still - to excuse this ignorance, allowing it to go unremediated, sometimes for entire careers.

Why does this matter? Because practically speaking, it limits a group’s expressive range. Even if a group is lucky (or smart) enough to have a vocalist who can also arrange and/or write music, it takes a live instrumentalist (usually a pianist) to transplant the arranger’s work into capital the group can spend on stage. Untrained players who don’t know or won’t learn how to build proper fills and to consistently construct harmonically complementary accompaniments means a group that can never really perform truly live sets.

Tracks, of course, are both a response to and a cause of this phenomenon. Thus the traveling hordes of sg groups that are functionally illiterate of music theory in all but its crudest and most dumbed down forms (your part is the high one … you end after me … make it sound real purtty and speerchul in this section). These groups are the norm: sing by numbers with band tracks that, if they require a pianist all, make the live accompanist’s job one of figuring out how to stand out from the track.

The typical account of how we got to this current state of affairs goes something like this: First they came for the drummers and the bass players and the lead guitarists and harmonica players (though I shed no tears for a single one of them … a pox on the harmonica!), and now it’s the pianists. Once the instrumental core of gospel music, the southern gospel pianist is now an endangered species, made irrelevant by tracks.

There is a certain amount of truth to this, but only some. Few people (especially the critics of tracks and mourners for the death of the band in gospel music) can recognize or will admit that pianists have relinquished a great deal of their authority and relevance to tracks. In the age of canned bands and orchestras, you can count yourself a bonafide southern gospel player if you can pick up a few licks here and there and content yourself with keeping time and smiling happily (or furrowing your brow reverentially) the rest of the time. This is why you hear so many players who “fill by number” – that is, do little more than play chords and keep basic rhythm with the track, waiting for the gaps in the singing to insert flashy, frilly phrases.

Another way to say this: part of the reason why it’s so deeply pleasing to hear a Justin Ellis or Stan Whitmire doing acoustical work is because it’s so rare. Probabilistically, my group owner friend whose email I led off with will likely end up hiring a guy (and he is almost always a guy these days) who for all his ability to arpegiate his way through a solo and dash off a few polished licks here and there, will for the most part lay down uninspired accompaniment and be virtually incapable of deviating from the (literally) preprogrammed set, unless it’s to sleep-walk his way through some tired old standard like “Beulah Land” or just sit silently by for an cappella hymn singing (cue happy smile or furrowed brow). Sigh. There’ll be no interludes (of the sort the Crabbs created so often) and no spontaneous reaction to a particular audience’s response to your set.

Sadly, of course, this is no obstacle to a career in southern gospel. By planting their butts in the seats of countless subpar or just-serviceable concerts and by buying and buying unnumbered pieces of crummy product, southern gospel audiences and consumers have practically decided that a southern gospel performer need only know how to create a reasonable approximation of a certain loosely defined musical style – without troubling himself with the structuring ideas and foundational concepts essential to the creation of that sound.

Update: A commenter writes:

Whether or not a pianist has learned the Nashville number system specifically has no reflection whatsoever on whether or not they know music theory.

This is a useful distinction that I think on rereading my post I didn’t make clear enough. I was mostly riffing off and thinking from my own experience here, which can be dangerous. In my case, I learned theory alongside NNS, on the premise that (as this same commenter notes) being able to read chart is useless without the ability to creatively interpret and apply what you see. That said, for pianists who have learned to play “by ear” and are largely lacking any formal theoretical training to understand what lays behind their improvisations, learning NNS has the potential to cultivate a more sophisticated comprehension and deeper appreciation of harmonic and chordal relationships, in turn helping pianists to figure out how to be smarter and more inventive players (i.e. using subtler passing tones). And it is this kind of connection between NNS and music theory that I had in mine when writing the post.

If this were Andrew Ishee’s Pianorama and not Roger Bennett’s, it might make more sense. Ishee seems ever-so-smitten with the weepy, stringy ballads and the showiness and upstagemanship and the flashing of “am I charming or what” grins at the audience that’s all associated with the Dino-Liberace line of solo pianists. But Bennett’s style - folksy and homespun and self-deprecatingly unserious - couldn’t be farther from Dino’s rhinestone-encrusted flamboyance.

I guess this could make for some passable comedy, and maybe the sheer incongruity of it all will bring out a bigger crowd. Because certainly the Pianorama is rather a one-trick, seen-one-seen-em-all kind of affair. But the danger in trying to enliven an old standard with a jolt of unfamiliarity is that you have to reach for ever more fringier “special guests” to outdo yourself from one year to the next. 2007: Jo Ann Castle! 2008? Piano playing pooches! Woof.

All of which should make it no surprise that my new favorite solo piano project comes not from southern gospel, country, Christian, or pop but from jazz: Eric Reed’s’ Mercy and Grace. It’s actually a jazz/black gospel hybrid, and if you like your solo piano down the center line this probably ain’t for you. But it does a lot of things right: includes old standards but genuinely reimagines and reinterprets them - rhythmically, melodically, generically; studiously refuses to schlock things up with band tracks or BGVs (this is jazz after all, where performers would be laughed off the stage for using tracks of any kind); and it manages to define a recognizable style of playing. That is, after listening to this a few times, you’ll immediately be able to tell Reed’s version of, say, “Just as I Am” apart from all others - without the help of rhinestones or candelabras or even slip notes.

Except not this time. Instead of classic sg, there’s a little grace note dropped in, a few intentionally slurred notes in the harmony, the rhythm becomes just barely syncopated, and it all combines ot have a loosening effect on the style. There’s a hint of R&B here, some echoes of the blues and black gospel. Just like that, we’re no longer in the stuffy heat of the tent revival. For just a few beats, we’ve been transported to the Brooklyn Tabernacle choir, or a James Cleveland concert. I laugh out loud at this point. The woman next to me shuffles her stale and crumply newspaper, moves away, feigning a cell phone call. Who cares. Let her be skeeved out. This is one of those instances when I get to be right: for all my harping on the inevitable hybridity of southern gospel (in the face of howling protest from the classicists), here’s proof of what I’ve been saying all along, smuggled in under the guise of a noveau-classic quartet number from Kyla Rowland. It’s not like Whitmire or Webb or whoever it may be sits down and says, “I think I’ll throw in a dash of Mahalia Jackson here.” This kind of thing just what happens when studied and careful, attentive and interested musicians listen widely and generously to what’s going on around them, what’s gone on before them, and then return to southern gospel informed by the stylistic contexts of adjacent genres. Instead, they play what seems right, feels natural, sounds appropriate or effective for the moment. And thus can the introduction of a commonplace quartet number morph effortlessly into a wonderful stylistic merger of complementary traditions … and then … in a flash, fall back into line, never (literally) missing a beat. These spots of time are the kind of thing that endears gospel music me (whether I endear myself to gospel music is another thing entirely). And it’s these spots of time that make me come back here, to talk to myself in hopes that someone else will be interested enough to eavesdrop on my publicly private discussion of something that exerts such a shaping force on so many.