Some random thoughts:

1. That’s a really fine song.

2. One of my favorite parts of this clip is Mark Trammell’s harmonic inflections on the choruses. A lot of people - including Trammell himself, judging by this comment - seem to take George Younce’s remark that Trammell was the best quartet man Younce knew to be an endorsement of Trammell as a marquee front man. But watching this clip makes me re-wonder if Younce’s comment might have actually been a way of acknowledging Trammell’s superior, understated ability to lay down some of the best harmony in the bidness from the back of the stage. You can’t have a great quartet, after all, without good harmony, and few people have demonstrated an ability to get out of the way and do their quartet jobs as well, with as little overweening showiness, as Trammell in the ensemble.

3. Kurt Young is mostly remembered as the guy who blew his performance with the Cats at the Doves and got fired. But this clip helps contextualize his brief stint a little better. He’s not without vocal ability, of course, and he has the right look for the Cats. But he also struggles to place his tones and, more deeply, he doesn’t have much a rapport with the audience - hard to put my finger on what it is that gives me this feeling … but … well, ok … look at the way he holds the mic at the very tip end of the wand, up and away from his chin, and the way his whole upper body remains bent back and away from the audience almost the entire time … used sparingly, this posture can convey a sense of rapture and awe before divine Providence shining down from above, but striking this pose as consistently as Young does here makes it seem after awhile to be emblematic of a certain coldness or distance that he gave off on stage.

4. It’s certainly not unique to this clip, but notice the way Glen Payne stands behind Young during his second verse and talks him up all the way through to the chorus … shouting little encouragements or annotating some note or line of particular emphasis with a short shout or happy hoot or hand gesture or whatever. Happens all the time,  I know, and most people probably just chalk it up to supporting a colleague at work. But of course there’s more to it than that. For one thing, when a more famous or well-known or beloved singer like Payne - whom audiences respect and implicitly trust to know what good music is - gets behind a singer like Young in this way, it shapes the audience’s response to the performance, particularly when the performance isn’t going as well as it might. Back in the day when I was hacking my way through songs at the keyboard for a regional quartet, our front man would often take to carrying on a la Payne in this clip precisely when solos were going downhill or starting to fall flat. Is there a shorthand name for this that anyone knows of?

Later this week, and mostly by coincidence, work on my book included a passage in which I was discussing The Steele’s popular polemic, “We Want America Back,” which in turn led me to the clip below of “The Road to Emmaus.”

And gosh, I had forgotten how fond I am of this song … the trenchant rhythm, the fully voiced chords created by the fifth part doubling key elements of the harmonic structures, the way Troy Peach inflects the front-end of his phrases with that little melismatic ornament and sings for the life of him like he’s right there on the Emmaus Road himself … God, grant that I may walk with thee!

It was a useful convergence for me personally, having to live anew through the dynamic of enjoying - really feeling the affective force - of a song from a group that, in this case, cultivated a politicized persona and embraced cheap polemics that always left me cold.

It’s not that I don’t encounter some version of this on a fairly regular basis. Comes with the territory for the unorthodox and noncomforming gospel fan, and you get used to it after a while (or else you just go take a Hagee Refreshment Break). And I’m not asking for sympathy or complaining or anything. Quite the contrary actually. It’s a been a while since I have been brought up as a starkly as this against the paradoxical pull of loving a song and … the singers’ personae, on the other hand … not so much.

To be fair, it should be noted that Jeff Steele subsequently walked back his use in the song of what he himself called a “mean-spirited,” “heavy-handed,” and “rabble rousing” approach. He also claimed he still would have said “99 percent” of the same things if he it to do over again (I for one would love to know what the 1% is he’d leave out!). So it’s not clear, as this blog notes, how much his reconsideration reflects a change of heart or regret that the song created an enduring image of the Steeles as … well, mean-spirited, heavy-handed rabble rousers.

But no matter, and for my part, I appreciated the opportunity to confront this paradoxical experience, coming as it did so near the classroom encounter with this concept in the abstract. … at least for me. (My students, on other hand - most of whom are unfamiliar with southern gospel music and conservative evangelicalism - are already feeling and thinking and writing their way through this experience, thanks mostly to Peg and her preaching, and secondarily, to Hammil, who several students thought a crass bully and a showboat … and wildly entertaining and affecting.)

One of this blog’s core values has always been to take seriously the reality and legitimacy of gospel music and the gospel-music experience among those people whom I called early on in the site’s history “the rest of us.” And “Emmaus Road” helped reconnect me to one of the fundamental identifying dynamics of what it means to hail from that hearty remnant. Always a good thing, to have to live and feel, and not just rhetorically espouse, one’s values.

Update: Reader Janet boils things down a bit:

So…what you’re saying is that the songs are more about the message than the messengers? Wow - what a concept!

I get that she’s mostly having some fun with my …. erhm, prolixity here, and that’s well deserved, no doubt. And anyway, she’s right about message and messenger. But only so far as she goes. My point above is also that “the message” is not fixed, but shifts and morphs and changes as different individuals encounter the same song, even when “the messenger” intends only to be communicating what in his or her mind and belief is a single, static truth transmitted from singer A to audience B. In”Emmaus Road” terms, I’m pretty sure what I’m liking in that song is NOT what the author of “We Want America Back” (even after his reconsideration) thinks the song means or wants its audiences to take away from it. But in any event, it doesn’t matter what Steele or other writers or performers intend their music to mean. Once it’s out of their mouth, it’s also out of their control to determine or fix the meaning of most music (a song like “We Want America Back” is an exception for another discussion). In addition to being a very good thing, this dynamic of musical experience is also particularly overlooked in southern gospel.

This was the era of Mike Bowling and Nicole Watts, when the Perrys were still with Eddie Crook, and Crook’s fingerprints are all over the project stylistically: the driving country rhythms and often overbearing steel guitar; the unimaginative but satisfying endings that recycle variations on the same two or three basic patterns of resolution; and the uneven arrangements that strive for a sense of grandiosity but go strangely flaccid at key moments, as when the bridge of “God Sent Angels” borrows part of the chorus of “Angel Band” … the effect is clearly intended to be dramatic, the voices backing way off the dynamic level as if to listen for the rustle of angel wings, but the sotto voce rendering of the lines knocks a big sink hole in the emotional center of the song.

I mention this stuff primarily to note how mightily the album succeeds despite its somewhat primitive tendencies, and to mark the growth in the Perrys’ music over time. The Perrys’ sound has evolved so gradually during the past 15 years that one doesn’t think of them as has having changed as dramatically as they so noticeably have when one goes back and listens to an album like Center Stage.

And the evolution isn’t just musical: signing with Daywind has polished off a lot of the group’s rougher edges aesthetically, Tracy Stuffle’s continued use of the chainsaw schtick notwithstanding (and though I will admit that the memorial image of the Stuffles’ stillborn child printed on the cd’s inside cover brought me up short, I’m actually thinking mainly here about a certain lack of self-possession in the stage manner that is apparent even on a live album absent visauls: for instance, Tracy Stuffle’s emcee work is somewhat frenetic (as when he gets so busy trying to keep a barely funny bit of banter going during the piano player’s introduction, he forgets to actually tell us the pianist’s name), or Mike Bowling’s manic, machine-gun laughing at the ends of big tunes, which even Daywind’s unobtrusive A&R people would no doubt counsel Bowling to dial back (though in his defense, in at least one case – “God Sent Angels” – the laughter could be a nervous response to the screeching woman in the audience having herself a prolonged and disturbing spiritual fit at the first ending of the song and throughout the encore).

As for the changes to the music itself, I can’t really say I find one sound superior to another. They’re just differently good.

But listening to the album made me really wish that a mixed foursome of the Perrys’ style and quality today would adopt the female-male-female-male harmonic voicing that the Perrys had in the mid-nineties. One reason the formulaic endings don’t really hurt the album all that much is because when the parts are revoiced and Watts takes the highest harmonic position in the stack, the resonance created with Libbi Perry Stuffle’s alto against Bowling’s baritone-lead is transfixing. This happens, for instance, in the middle and at the end of the chorus on “Gonna Be Someday,” which – with just a handful of notes - Watts single-voicedly transforms from a ho-hum also-ran tune into a mid-tempo charmer.

Watts actually doesn’t prove herself much of a lyric soprano in her solo moments. She often experiences what one commenter in another context recently (and brilliantly) christened “pitch disorientation” (resulting in many cringe-inducing moments during “Marriage Supper of the Lamb”). And she rushes the front of her phrases when she’s got a tricky interval or a big note coming up (see “Marriage Supper” again).

But put her back in the ensemble and … dear Gawd. It’s positively incantatory. She quite literally brings down the angel choir to mingle among us on the ending of “God Sent Angels,” when the chorus modulates up a half step and she launches off on that ascendant final note, a fifth – a fifth – above the tonic. I admit that nine-tenths of the effect here may just be the sheer novelty; you simply don’t hear this much, at least not done well anyway.

Not the Hoppers (they’ve got all the upper-register power and range of Watts and then some in Kim Hopper, but Connie has none of Libbi Perry Stuffle’s vocal gravitas), not Karen Peck and her back-up singers, not Lauren Talley and her back-up singers, and not the Crabb Family, which I continue to insist was always actually two or three different trios recombined from among the various Crabbs on stage at any given time.

In fact, since the mid-nineties – not only the period from which the Perrys’ Center Stage configuration dates, but also Charlotte Penhollow Ritchie’s years with the Nelons - southern gospel has been without a mixed group presided over vocally by a commanding soprano, supported by a well-balanced ensemble beneath her.*

Except for the Lesters, which are (as is so sadly often the case) the overlooked exception. Indeed, they have all the right ingredients, assuming Brian’s son continues to get good vocal instruction, receives the right material for his voice, and doesn’t try to sing above his pay grade (and assuming in general the Lesters could somehow shake the perception that they’re a regional group that happens to tour nationally, a stigma that I suspect is part of the reason they are serially short shrifted). So, barring the Perrys sending Troy Peach back to the bus and hiring his wife to sing with them instead (sorry, Troy!), more Lesters please.

*An earlier rendering of this sentence didn’t really capture the point I was trying to make about the rarity of an evenly yoked ensemble sound built around a soprano, as reader JB notes in this complaint. My point isn’t that the Hoppers aren’t led by a strong soprano (Kim Hopper is, of course, one of the two strongest in the bidness, Taranda Greene being the other), as I point out in the paragraph above. Rather, it’s that the Hoppers aren’t as well matched throughout the rest of the ensemble as, say, Watts was in her days with the Perrys, or Ritchie (or Janet Paschal or Karen Peck) was with the Nelons. In the Hoppers’ case, it’s basically the Kim and Dean show, with Connie and Claude performing mostly non-musical roles that involve holding a mike through most tunes (though Connie does do often marvelous, subtle things harmonically within her range and abilities). Which is to say, these days, without backing stacks, the Hoppers couldn’t pull off the kind of live performance the Perrys deliver in Center Stage.

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.

The answer, I suspect, has to do with a faulty song-selection process common among groups - namely, the “I want a [fill in the blank of top-tier songwriter such as Lindsey, Griffin, Rowland, Sue Smith etc] song on our next project.” Which is to say, many hit songs have been written by Lindsey, Griffin, Rowland, Smith etc., but not all songs by Lindsey, Griffin, Rowland, Smith etc are hits. This may seem self-evident, but then if it that’s the case, then it bears repeating in an industry that’s so often obsessed with the trappings of success rather than success itself. For many artists, having Joel Lindsey’s or Rodney Griffin’s or Sue Smith’s name on their liner notes is more important than what the song sounds like. The value comes in being able to say to other artists or industry types “yeah we were in the studio this week working on that new Sue Smith song we’re recording.” But honestly (and all due respect to songwriters, whose work I deeply respect), big flipping deal. The real deal is in the writing: What does the song sound like? How well is it written? How about the hook? Cause even the most talented people lose their way occasionally. Remember Kelly Nelon Thompson and Legacy?

The better way to pick tunes would be to demand a blind submission process and song-review: listen to and make song selections for projects without knowing who wrote the song. I’ve only heard of one CCM group doing this, though I’m sure (or at least I hope) there were others in other genres. The advantage of this method should, I think, be obvious. And I want to be clear that I’m not bemoaning the fact that good or successful songwriters get frequent cuts. In fact, a blind-review method would probably end up landing established writers at least as many (and maybe more) cuts than they already get. This is not only because good writers are good because they write consistently good songs (to be somewhat tautological) but also because blind-reviewing would eliminate the need for writers to work on volume basis, which inevitably means writing a higher percentage of throw-aways and duds. Volume-writing is a fact of life in sg song-selection as it is practiced now … both for new writers, who have to blanket the earth with submissions hoping someone will take a shot on a no-name with so many big names in the mix, as well as for established writers, whose success means lots of people want more songs from them than they can possibly produce without sacrificing something. But there’s a better. Don’t believe me? Don’t think you’ll ever lose by betting on a name? Just ask Kelly Nelon Thompson and Legacy.

There’s a covenant sweet
It was written for me
It’s a promise that I could be healed
From all my sin and my shame
Even heartache and pain
It was signed and confirmed on a hill.

But you really must hear these lyrics as sung by the Perrys if you’re to begin to understand the power and force of this song (for a clip of part of this verse, click here). A while back I suggested that the next step for the Perrys was to acquire a definitive sound of their own and sustain it. This song is precisely what I’m talking about. The harmonics and intonation are so tight, the contours of their voice, the texture of the ensemble possess a richness that deepens and authenticates the lyrical idea. Listening to this song, I know why people bankrupt themselves, bust up relationships and ruin family ties to get on a bus and sing for a pittance … all for the sake of just the chance to recreate for yourself the feeling that this song stirs up inside you.

It doesn’t hurt of course that the song is about as well produced as any you could ask for (for this, we have Wayne Haun to thank). There’s nothing here that, by itself, will knock the top of your head off. But the restraint, the creative discipline and the careful attention to subtle accessories are enough to make me giggle like flirtatious schoolboy. Two examples. First, the little flute accompaniment after the word “shame” in that first verse. It floats in, as if form an open window somewhere, softening the confession of failure in the lyric, humanizing it … and just as quickly it drifts away. It’s thievably good.

And second, the trio lines in the next verse:

Don’t feel sorry for me
When you see I’m in need
There’s a judge who grants mercy and love
All my burdens he lifts
All my sin he forgives
Every trial is won through the blood

For a split second, the vocals almost sound like Gold City in their finer moments of years past, but this is mellower, more considered sound - not least of all because the arrangements use Tracey Stuffle’s bass voice in creative harmonics. By avoiding the easy applause lines of pot-bellied low notes, the arrangement is freed up to bring Stuffle’s lines into more of a baritone’s range, generating a beautiful, mellifluous sound (this happens in a few key places on the Life of Love project as well). The harmonic repositioning of Stuffle’s voice gives just the right amount of intimacy to the trio lines and produces just the right emotional pitch to the lyrical idea of struggle turned to strength through unmerited favor.

The Perrys are not art-house singers. No producer who throws flat thirteens and sharp nines at them is going to get back the kind of sound he or she had in mind. Leave that to First Call, or the Ruppes. The Perrys are the combined effect of their unadorned voices, and they rise and fall not on the complexity of the music but the indelible imprint of genius stamped on the lyrics and arrangements they sing. “I Rest My Case” works - like all the Perrys’ best music - because the music (the arrangements, the accompaniment, even to some extent the lyrics themselves) get out of the way of the vocals. Once the Perrys are allowed to inhabit their songs, the instrumentation can return and build in layers of aura and intensity behind and around the voices. The result is that you rarely ever say, “Wow, that was a great arrangement,” even if it was; or “The Perrys really sang that bridge well,” even if they did. Instead, you may - if you’re like me - find yourself slightly stunned, left dumbstruck with little else to do but pull off to the side of the road or sit down or stand up, hit the play button again, and mutter silently to yourself: “My God, what a song.”

Those he did foreknow he did predestinate
to be conformed to the image of the great incarnate,
Oh blessed hope precious promise so sweet
Lord hasten that day our redemption complete …

This is part of what JG meant, I think, by strong lyrics. Another aspect of that strength is less theologically dense and more plainly aesthetic. The Ruppes choose songs crafted with extraordinary rhetorical care and writerly skill. Consider these lines from “The Father’s Compassion”:

Life was so lively there in that far country
….
Every bit of his treasure was wasted pleasure
Feeding the swine became his occupation
The life he was leading, the swine he was feeding
Showed how he was needing the father’s compassion.

These stealthily written lines (especially the last two in which “leading,” “feeding,” and “needing” pile on greater and greater force) lead onto a narratively and musically powerful third verse in which the prodigal returns, the harmonies - gorgeously poised and executed - expand into a chorus that rings out with the power of redemption: “Compassion was known, for compassion was shown …” The passive voice has never been so beautiful.

(II of III)
Reading these lines without hearing them is misleading, though, because they may seem clunky and blockheaded when in fact they come off, in the Ruppes’s hands and mouths, beautifully. The first verse of “Put that on my Account” contains some of the most delicate harmonic suspensions in sg, and the voicing in that song, as in most of the Ruppes’ best work, is very well blended, a product of vocal discipline and family kinship. One result of this perfect storm of training and biology are really pleasing low notes, a rarity in sg (lines like “My sins were oh so bad / and great was there was amount”); another is the Ruppes’ ability to sing songs that’ll knock your head off without ever modulating (see again, for example, “Put that on My Account,” whose force derives mostly from the tag; its instrumentation and voicing combine in simple and elegant power to bring definitive closure to the tune without recourse to fancy schmancy modulations and such). But the real essence of the Ruppes is consistently smart, original arranging. “When Jesus Speaks Peace,” from Seasons, washes over listeners like a rising tide, lifting the spirit higher and higher until the old familiar hymn appears “Peace, peace, god’s (wonderful) peace …” But wait … this isn’t just another medley. As it turns out, the hymn gets smuggled in under cover of an intricate exercise in musical counterpoint, as the hymn and the original song get woven in and out of each other seamlessly.

(III of III)
Seasons, which is to my mind, the Ruppes’s best project, does not - as far I can tell - contain an uneven line. Every lyric terminates coordinately, sibilant phrases are crisped expertly, the plosives are released precisely. It’s pretty untouchable stuff. Conceptually, the project is robust and well-rounded, containing familiar-feeling, marketable standards like “Angels in the Room” alongside more sophisticated stuff like “Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory,” which is a simultaneously expansive and controlled dramatization, vocally and instrumentally, of the mystery of faith. The latter song depicts, at the conceptual level, the duality of belief in which seemingly infinite spiritual uplift coexists with a privately held, deeply confined sense of personal redemption. In “Redemption Complete,” the final bars proceed familiarly and reassuringly, and yet they’re not a bit stale, in large part thanks to the symphonic ending, which transforms the song from traditional praise-and-worship music to a majestically orchestral anthem of religious experience. (This is much like the powerful bridge from verses to chorus in the Ruppes’ breakout hit, “Under His Wings,” a song whose only flaw, as far as I can tell is a clump of synthesized quivering strings in the second verse, which overemphasize that line about being out in the cold shivering; the song was unforgettably performed at he convention a few years back, and, as an aside, either Brenda Ruppe can cry on command or she’s the most genuine performer on stage today). The best song on the project, though, is probably “Light from heaven,” stylistically similar to “Angels in the Room” but musically far superior. For one, it’s much more psychologically textured and subtle than “Angels.” And too, “Light from Heaven” is more melodically varied and complex. A repeated section toward the middle of the song uses the musical score to render the emotional reality being described vocally: as the Ruppes sing about the hope that dark days of doubt, insecurity, or trial will give way to brighter days of renewed strength (”any day now, some way and some how, the light from heaven will come breaking through”), the melody alternates in and out of a minor tonality, shading the passage with an emotional coloration appropriate for the lyrical content. (And also notice how the little piano riff after the phrases “any day now” and “some way and somehow” answers back instrumentally in knowing agreement with the lyrics.) Lately, the Ruppes have seemed to move away from the more traditional vein of Seasons and Through the Fire to more contemporary sounds that, to my ear, aren’t any less well done but are far less satisfying, and if I had my way, they’d stay closer to the shore of traditional sg. Either way, though, the Ruppes possess rare voices that don’t really seem to get louder or quieter, to work more or less to achieve their effects. I know they actually do, but the effect of their music gives the feeling that their voices simply expand and contract imperceptibly along the dramatic arc of a song, hewing to the musical line fluidly until something divine has happened without one ever really knowing how.

Jesus said it; I believe it:
Life will be sweeter some day.
I’m gonna trust him, never doubt him,
No matter what the folks may say.
CAN’T TURN AWAY FROM HIM LIGHTLY.
[Trammel’s line:] Because the joys of heaven I’ll miss.
[Ensemble again] And I will live on, up in glory, after while, after while.

I first “reheard” this song on my way back from Chicago in the summer of 1999 about 3:30 in the morning somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin. I do this every so often, rediscover a tune buried on a CD somewhere that I’ve forgotten about and then, having “found” it again, will play it until I sing it in my sleep, wake up with it on my lips and in my ears, reflexively hear its arrangement, solos and modulations and harmonies in my head without intending to, get perfectly sick of it even though I can’t seem to hear it enough. Anyway, this tune opens with four bars of Gary Lunn bass and Lari Goss keyboards in a lilting, soothing simplicity that the tune sustains, like a meditation, throughout. I thought then in the middle of all those dairy farms, as I do still now, that that style and form are quintessential Cats: four voices, a bass and a keyboard. I cried in the car, listening to it over and over, laughing out loud at the stunning brilliance of the keyboard-and-bass bridge of 16 plain, classic bars … no notes more complicated than basic quarters and eighths, just tastefully played with the expert sense of rhythm and beauty that transforms the tune from the mundane world of a dashed-off anniversary sale-bin special to something nearly supernatural, yet so palpably real.

“Oh What a Savior,” revisited (II of III)
One morning not too long after rediscovering “Life Will be Sweeter,” I put in the “Cathedrals Alive: Deep in the Heart of Texas” and turned it up (I lived in the far northern reaches of Minnesota at the time and my very unsouthern neighbors must surely have wondered). By the time I am out of the shower and dressed, “Oh What a Savior” is playing and Ernie Haase is standing ‘em up with that second verse and then the rest of the guys join in … “Oh what a savior, oh Hallelujah / His heart was broken” … Roger Bennett plays that little riff to bridge the phrases, and in the quiet of the moment just before the vocals return, some guy in the back rows (standing, I imagine to myself, as I walk into the living room and reach for the remote to increase the volume yet again), shouts “Praise the Lord.” George hears the guy and chuckles in that way he had, as if to say, “Oh, my goodness we’ve been so blessed,” and (here’s the best part) instead of singing the next line with Glen and Fowler and Haase, George, ever so kindly, lightly really, almost to himself, it seems, says, “Thank you Lord.” And that’s it. I can’t take it. I hop around my little living room, laughing and crying and just can’t stand it. The song tumbles toward that final climax, first gently, then more intensely, then fantastically, powerfully … the voices rising, reaching … Fowler’s bass falling, thumping steadily, syncopated against George’s attacks on the descending bass notes … until finally the resolution sets in and the crowd screams, babies fly, arms wave, hands clapping. … And George instinctively takes control of the moment: he laughs with such genuine rapture at what’s just happenned, “Yeah! … Ernie Haase … ” more rapturous laughter, “that’s thuh waytta sing that song right there, boys, Oh, whatta savior! Glooory!…” and so on and so forth. That’s the first time I had heard truly what was going on in that song. I had heard, of course, George chuckle between phrases in the chours every other time I had listened to the track. But that morning, with my freshly showered self and my scrubbed ears keenly peeled, that was the first time I’d ever heard the guy in the back rows of the audience … listen to it yourself: turn it up and put some head phones on (squeeze them really tight to your ears); you’ll hear him too, I bet. He couldn’t stand it any more either, just had to shout, and George magically makes that guy’s declaratory outburst a part of the song, a part of the moment, the phrase, the praise. It is not, in George’s deft, capable, brilliant stage hands, an interruption, but an augmentation to this tune they’ve staged countless times before. With that simple rhetorical trick, that split-second awareness, George gave those folks in that big Baptist church not the umpteen-thousandth rendition of “Oh What a Savior,” but a tune just for them, a creation of that night only, one that they won’t ever forget hearing.

The case for the Cathedrals’ greatness (III of III)
I remember Ernie Haase at the quartet convention’s Catherdals reunion a few years back, describing what George said to him once when he, Haase, complained about having to sing “Oh What A Savior” night after night: “George told me,” Haase said, “’some singers go their whole career without having even one song to call their own. ‘You should be thankful,’ he said to me, ‘that you have that tune.’” Remarkable. Unbelievable brilliance, not just from George Younce (a genius to be sure), but in a way, a summation of the ethos behind the group’s success. The Cats went out night after night for most of the last three decades of the twentieth century with nothing but a keyboard, a bass and four voices. No stack tracks (at least not many), no DAT bands, no dubbed choirs (at least only a few now and then). Just them. And they sang, most of time (except those few years there toward the end of the Funderburk era that weren’t so swell, Funderburk being at the time so out of shape vocally and all) with a degree of expertise and mastery that astounds me even now. Some groups lurch about for years, decades constantly reinventing themselves (”We sing the classic quartet music of the 50s and 60s;” “We’re the ones with clever, reliable stunts;” “Look, over here … we’ve got a flag corps and a petition you can sign”). Which is to say, some groups, to adapt George’s line, are lucky ever to find one stable style of their own. But with discipline and diligence, the Cats patiently tilled the fertile ground that George and Glenn staked out for the group from the beginning. The pricey clothes and the classy stage presence, the snazzy bus, the posh island at the convention exhibit hall, the glossy PR - these things didn’t pave the way for their success but proceeded from them and the elegance embodied in that wonderful name, Cathedral. Their first worry was not so much their look, or their signature stunt, or a trick to set them apart, but the sound, THEIR sound. Not the sound of their voices with DAT tracks and voiceovers and dubbing, but their voices, alone, and whether or not they could stand, vocally and instrumentally, on their own if the power went out. They could, of course, and the plan worked … famously well. The class and the elegance came later, maybe naturally, from the graceful, skilled way they did their music. The first-rate emcee work, the tasteful, right-on comedy, the balance of two old codgers and three young guys - all that came later. What propelled the Cathedrals’ success and enabled their unforgettable music, and what sustained their unrivaled dominance of southern gospel music was that delicate cocktail of style, real style: a sound that is easy to recognize, difficult to describe, and impossible to imitate.