Just read your post talking about union players on southern gospel sessions. Well, there are a couple of reasons why [so few union players work in sg]. Some of them are the very same reason why I won’t even think of touring ever again in Southern Gospel music. The main reason is money. Southern Gospel records do not sell as many units as other genres of music do, therefore will not pay as much money to the players as a country record will. Furthermore, even if they do agree to pay a rate, such as double scale, then there is also the issue of even getting paid. Working in the music business in Nashville taught me the biggest lesson: Christian artists are THE WORST at ripping people off. They either want it for free or they want it dirt cheap and then a lot of times they don’t pay what they agreed to pay in the beginning. Another reason is because of such tight budgets in Christian music, they push to get such a large number of songs into a single session. Working at such fast pass often makes the recording process a drag for players that are used to having more freedom to expand on a song. Look, I love Southern Gospel music! I enjoy playing it! I do not enjoy the people in it, nor the way they treat people! there are a few people in the business that I still respect and would work with on a limited basis. These people are real people and real businessmen. Now I have been in both environments, Christian and secular music. I much rather work in secular music, where people are treated fairly and with respect than work in Christian music, where you are backstabbed, black listed, under paid, under appreciated, and ripped off! And people wonder why Union players don’t show up more on Christian albums.

As part of their campaign to raise awareness of the July 15 deathknell, many internet radio stations are observing a day of silence June 26. A lot of good it will do them, but still … it’s something (are any sg internet radio stations planning to participate?).

In the process of discussing the protest, there have been a few particularly salient comments, one of which I’d like to excerpt in part because it suggests some of the socioeconomic forces at work in southern gospel – market dispersal and compression, and the decline of terrestrial radio chief among them – are present throughout the music industry more widely and in part because it’s just plain interesting in the polemical sort of way that manifestos can be. What follows is taken from a discussion post by a manager at Radio Dismuke:

The ONLY relevance the RIAA labels have left in today’s digital, Internet dominated world is their ability to promote their recordings and artists via FM air play. Thanks to today’s technology, artists no longer need a major record label in order produce and distribute recordings - there are plenty of ever increasingly affordable alternatives open to them. But to the degree that top selling recordings continue to be promoted by means of FM airplay, artists need the very one-sided contract with a major label if they strive to become famous as opposed to merely making a living with their music.

Internet radio threatens all this as it is very much on the verge of replacing FM as the venue in which people discover new music. And, unlike FM, Internet radio has no limitations on how many stations can exist and is global in terms of its audience reach. Unlike FM, the RIAA labels have no special advantage over Independents when it comes to getting airplay on the Internet. Even in their glory days, the major labels did not have pockets so deep as to be a able to spread payola and marketing clout around to countless thousands of Internet stations with relatively small audiences.

When venues such as Internet radio and myspace become viable alternatives for those musicians who strive to become famous - well, it will no longer be necessary for them to sign one-sided contracts with major record labels. It will make more sense for them to remain independent and thereby retain ownership and control over their music - and to keep any profits generated from it for themselves.

THAT is why the RIAA and its puppets at SoundExchange are so desperately trying to kill off Internet radio. It is not so much that the RIAA is concerned that current Internet radio blues listeners might not be buying hip-hop. They know that’s not likely to happen. What they are concerned with is the prospect of hip-hop listeners and all of the sheep out there who have little, if any, awareness of music outside of what is spoon-fed to them over FM might suddenly discover that genres such as blues, ragtime, jazz, dance bands exist and are pretty fun to listen to. Even more so, they are terrified that such listeners might discover and embrace all of the many talented independent artists out there in the major popular genres.

I have no problem with Internet radio stations paying royalties. That’s not what this is about. A rational system of royalties is NOT one which will, from the very get-go, bankrupt the entities which are supposed to be paying the royalties. The purpose of the new royalty scheme as well as the scheme that the RIAA backed last time around is to DESTROY Internet radio and NOT to generate a viable stream of revenue from it for copyright owners. Keep in mind that independent artists are just as much legitimate copyright owners as are the major RIAA labels - and this royalty scheme will destroy the only viable means of air play that such artists and copyright owners have open to them.

Internet radio is one of the most exciting developments during my lifetime. Obscure and forgotten genres finally have an opportunity to make themselves available to anyone who cares to discover them and to earn the sort of appreciative, modern audiences they deserve. Before the Internet, if a person wished to listen to, let’s say popular music from the early 1900s he either needed to acquire his own vintage music collection (something which very few people who are unfamiliar with the genre are likely to do) or be fortunate enough to live in one of a VERY small handful of markets where a station MIGHT have had a few hour per week program that MIGHT play such music. Now all one has to do is tune into Radio Dismuke which plays jazz and pop from the 1920s and 1930s. Or one can tune into Wiemar Rundfunk and listen to the same sort of music from places such as Poland, Germany, France, Holland and other countries in Europe. Or one can listen to Elite Syncopations which specializes in ragtime.

The RIAA seeks to destroy all that. Don’t let those bastards get away with it. They are nothing more than the modern day equivalent of the buggy whip manufacturer - and I am looking forward to them eventually meeting the exact same fate.

That said, of course, two of the three “biggest blunders” in gospel music, according to Uncle Roy, happened before 1980. This is not terribly surprising. Pauley has little to say of interest or use about anything that happened after 1975 or so. And too, it is puzzling why, precisely, Doy Ott’s getting booted from the Statesmen in the mid-1970s counts as one of the most important missteps in gospel music. Would Ott’s staying have lastingly altered the landscape or prospects for gospel music more broadly? Pauley doesn’t say (maybe because it sure looks like Pauley’s getting less space in the magazine than he used to, or am I imagining things?). In fact, he actually makes a pretty strong case that the real blow to the “Statesmen magic” was Jim Wetherington’s untimely death in 1973 and the affect his death had on Hovie Lister. Contra his own thesis, Pauley’s treatment of Ott’s dismissal leaves the impression that firing Ott was just more unfortunate fallout from that earlier tragedy. But anyway … best not to contemplate the imponderable logic of serial nostalgia at work in Pauley’s “Opinion.”

Unceremoniously, then, let me offer a few contenders for a more comprehensive list of Gospel Music’s Biggest Blunders. Please feel free to add yours and/or quibble with mine, for I’m sure I’ll miss (or misstate) something. In order of historical importance:

1. Southern gospel’s surrender of its influence and active participation in the Gospel Music Association, which – lest we forget – was founded by what is today known so parochially as “southern” gospel. The old guard – represented most prominently by Les Beasley, who sits as a founding member of the GMA board but has little more than titular influence – couldn’t have stopped the drift toward more contemporary tastes that gave rise to CCM in all its variegated forms. But a savvier, less petty and more visionary leadership would have seen that “southern” gospel could play a profoundly important role in shaping Christian entertainment as the founding artistic tradition of GMA, and in the process elevate its own status in the bargain. As it is, sg is at best a quaint bemusement to GMA, at worst (and more often) the bumpkin brigade.

2. Southern gospel artists’ giving away their own farm to Gaither in the 1990s. There’s a lot to this issue that is both beyond me and the space I have to give it now, but with 15 or so years at our back since the Homecoming phenomenon took off, it’s pretty clear that the terms on which artists agreed to appear on the Homecoming tour and videos redounded almost without exception to Gaither’s benefit … and cut the rest of the industry entirely out of the bargain.

The basic deal, as I understand it, was this (please correct me where I’m wrong): Artists invited to appear on the Gaither tour and tapes signed a release that allowed Gaither and Co. to tape their performance and sell it (this is, by the way, the way things still are, with some minor variations; Gaither used to pay some travel expenses but no longer does so, for instance). In return, artists received the ability to buy finished Homecoming product at wholesale prices (the same as retailers receive) and sell it at their table. Gaither pays mechanical and what are known as “sync” royalties on all sales, but there is nothing paid for the performance, either live or on DVD sales. [Later note: artists who appear on the Homecoming tour live performances receive a modest flat fee for their appearance … thanks to TK for bringing this up]

This “deal” seemed worth it initially, on the theory that Gaither’s rising tide would lift all boats, that the exposure artists would get in the bargain would elevate their careers and cement their status in the broader world of Christian music, make them stand out from among the rest of sg. What you take be “success” will determine whether or not you judge the result to have confirmed or debunked that original theory. The Isaacs strike me as the best example of a group that parlayed their relationship with Gaither into real gains in audience, demographic exposure, and sales. EHSSQ may well follow, but it’s not clear yet that they can sustain their current level of success once the Homecoming umbilical chord gets cut. David Phelps certainly hasn’t, but then again he also seems to be doing ok on his own, too.

What of the rest? Setting aside the clutch of old timers whose careers were revived in the 5 or 10 years before their death, there are those artists who have come and gone from the tour with relatively little change in their professional trajectory (or disappeared altogether): The Hoppers, The Martins, any number of soloists. That leaves a handful of artists who have essentially arrested their own development in the first phase of things, with their attachment to Gaither, without ever trying to capitalize on that association and launch off anew and improved on their own. The Easters, Jessy Dixon, Ivan Parker, Lynda Randall. There may be others.

For the moment, I’m not interested in debating whether or not Gaither has been “good” for these artists’ careers (and of course it’s possible that any of these artists and/or others have their own, financially more equitable arrangements with Gaither). Nor am I interested in debating the fairness or the ethics of having artists, many of whom were under contract to non-Gaither entities, appear with Gaither for free – though that’s certainly a debatable issue (one of the more fascinating ironies of this situation is that in order for the labels whose artists were appearing for free on the Homecoming tour to recoup on the loss created by these artists’ Gaither appearances, the losing labels would first have had to sue their own artists for breach of contract, secure a judgment against those artists, and then go after Gaither for inducing the original breach – a scenario that required the labels to essentially cannibalize themselves in order to get at any portion of the profits their artists were helping generate on the Homecoming tour … obviously no one chose that route).

But for the moment, my interest is in the fact that artists signed themselves, their rights, and their artistic value as Homecoming performers – en masse – over to Gaither & Co. This sort of arrangement is all but unheard of, not just in the music industry more broadly, but in publishing, television, and film. And for good reason. Not only does it imply a fairly low estimation of what an artist’s contributions are “worth.” Practically speaking, it has had the effect within the southern gospel industry of vastly widening the gap between Gaither’s success … and everyone else’s struggle. Normally, with compiled work, one label or entity asks another for a side-artist appearance agreement – reflected in those “So and So appears courtesy of Such and Such” statements in liner notes when guest appearances are involved. In addition, the interested parties set up a 6-10% royalty rate, pro-rate it and divide it among the artists involved in the product. This didn’t happen here and the consequences have been vast, for everyone involved.

I can’t say for sure I would have done differently had I been one of the artists offered a spot on the Homecoming tour. More to the point, the lack of any apparent hesitation on artists’ part suggests just how badly the industry craved a savior or a life boat of some kind, even during what we now know was the relatively stable days of the early 90s, compared to now. Obviously, there’s a case to be made from an artistic/religious perspective that Gaither saved gospel music, and that he rightfully profited off a concept that was (more or less) his and that this is all sour grapes. But if Gaither did save gospel music, it was a salvation that arguably impoverished a good deal of the industry in the bargain, not least of all the artists who signed themselves away, as well as the other artists left out in the rain trying to convince audiences who became quicky accustomed to Gaitherized sg that what was left of southern gospel wasn’t all wet.

3. The industry’s cheap, orgasmic embrace of digital band tracks/eliminating live instrumentation from the gospel music stage. The trend in southern gospel toward preferring the appearance of sophistication to actually achieving real artistic excellence can, I would argue, be traced in large part to the disappearance of the live stage band (and this desire for the appearance of succes also probably accounts for part of what more secretly drove so many artists to take the Gaither “deal” above; this, we should note, leaves unsettled the question of whether Gaither’s “deal” to Homecoming artists was an exploitation of small-time performers desperate for the heat of brighter limelights or one of the smartest bidness moves in modern music-industry history). Artists still want to be taken seriously artistically, but nine out of tend of them ultimately decide it’s easier to make jokes about their band leader, Mr. Sony, and justify the corner-cutting by telling themselves that making a joyful noise on the cheap is still a joyful noise.

Artists aren’t only to blame because their labels have abetted the process. Imagine what it would be like if labels only invested in groups they believed in enough to send out on the road with a full band and backing vocal support. No cheesy bgvs from a can. No over-amped instrumental tracks. There’d be far fewer groups out there, obviously. But judging by how satured the market is with steamy crap, I can’t see a market contraction, spurred by a survival of the fittest and calibrated by the artistic judgment that could or should reside in every major label, to be a bad thing.

If you’re going to really take seriously what makes gospel music good, you’ve got to invest in the live experience of the music. … live bands are what make (or made) possible that excitement that comes from seeing the band leader count off to the rest of the band, of anticipating that last big drum kick when you see the drummer’s head go down and the sticks go up, of watching as Hammil or Rex or Tim Riley turned to the players to call the next tune and wonder … what will it be?

Contrast this expectancy and anticipation to the current state of static affairs: Even “live” recordings these days are almost always heavily mortgaged to canned band tracks (see BFA in NYC and L5 in Music City). It’s not so much that these recordings are bad (they’re not, actually); it’s that we don’t expect more of them to begin with.

Which is to say, the demise of the live band dragged almost everything else about showmanship and production – on and off the stage – down with it.

4. The NQC/Gaither Vocal Band split. It’s not the only reason NQC is on the decline. Even if Gaither were still coming to Louisville in September, the industry would have to grapple with the diminished prospects for white gospel music in Christian entertainment. But NQC’s inability to bring Gaither back to Freedom Hall is emblematic of the larger poverty of vision afflicting the industry’s flagship enterprise. By extension, this implicates the industry at large, which has too often valued blind loyalty and indiscriminate fealty to concentrated knots of power and influence over artistic integrity (see No. 3 above). Not to mention that in this case, Gaither at NQC is smart bidness too.

The best NQC has to offer us at the moment is the American Gospel Music undertaking, a puzzling fizzle of an enterprise that, even if it were to succeed, would only further erode the Quartet Convention’s integrity by casting all but a handful of NQC’s artists as – quite literally – spiritually and artistically unworthy to be associated with the NQC-backed AGM brand. Royght. Instead of launching an administratively bloated, cripplingly risk-averse attempt to replicate Gaither’s success at brand recognition, NQC should be doubling down on its core product - The National Quartet Convention - and doing whatever it takes to reassociate NQC with Himself. In this NQC’s 50^th anniversary, it would be a fine year for a Gaither Homecoming Presents: A Half Century of the NQC, Live from Freedom Hall.

What have I missed?

*Edited for minor corrections

Update: David Bruce Murray makes a suggestion for an NQC/Gaither event:

If I were on the NQC board, I would try to set up a deal where Gaither’s film crew was in the building most of the week getting footage, from which NQC would receive a split of all profits. In exchange, I would let Gaither have a 1/6 share of the week’s ticket revenue, and he’d have complete control of the Saturday evening program…using his own artists just like it was a regular Homecoming tour event.

NQC is losing artists in the exhibit hall on Saturday night and I’ve heard attendance is down on Saturday as well. Fans are slowly realizing they don’t have the full benefit of meeting everyone in the exhibit hall on Saturday night, and let’s face it, the exhibit hall is as much of a draw as the evening performances on the main stage.

A Homecoming event on the last night of NQC would bring in new blood fans who might even make it a two or three day trip. Regular NQC goers would stay for Saturday night as well, because of the variety that a Homecoming event would offer.

Later Update: Another reads adds a blunder to the list that I missed:

I’d hypothesize that another mistake is the over-focus on radio chart success at the expense of sales success. The money and energy put into chart positioning stupefies me because anyone will tell you it’s completely unassociated with sales success. It really is a phenomenon unique to this genre. I could write a book on how this has hurt the business, but it might simply be symptomatic of the ego-driven nature of our business.

Even later update: An email this afternoon proposed a new blunder worth adding:

The Benson Co.’s campaign during the late 80’s and early 90’s to remove sg from CBA (The Association for Christian Retail). The effort to cut sg off from mainstream retail produced a kind of economic drought, creating the conditions under which the industry went looking for a saviour in the first place.

]]> http://averyfineline.com/2007/05/26/blunders/feed/ http://averyfineline.com/2007/05/16/what-a-label-can-do/ http://averyfineline.com/2007/05/16/what-a-label-can-do/#comments Wed, 16 May 2007 23:15:49 +0000 Avery http://averyfineline.com/2007/05/16/what-a-label-can-do/ David Bruce Murray posted this comment in the Canaan thread and it seems worth promoting to the main page, lest the point get overlooked in the mix.

If a group like the Hoppers can create great music on their own, that’s well and good, but the reality is they have no decent distribution plan in place. You either get _The Ride_ from the Hoppers or you don’t get it at all. Maybe they can make just as much profit from direct sales, but are their songs being heard? And if a person in Michigan hears one of their songs by chance and wants to buy a copy, how persistent are they likely to be in chasing down the one website where they can order it?

To the credit of Goss and the Hoppers, they are pursuing some avenues that other groups aren’t. Word Music just released a choral book of songs recorded by the Hoppers with the Hoppers’ name on the front cover to help sell it, arranged and orchestrated by Lari Goss. Several songs from the Ride CD are included.

It seems if Word Music was going to go to all that effort, Word Distribution would have worked out some deal to distribute the independent Ride project as well.

I’m not so sure independent is the best way to go. I think a better solution would be to create music independently, but then use some sort of distribution machine that’s already in place.

As for the Florida Boys, they’ve been needing a guiding hand in the studio for many years. As much as I liked Gene McDonald’s singing and as much as I like Josh Garner’s singing, the group didn’t/hasn’t made a really good recording in terms of production quality since either guy has been with the group. The Homeland stuff had a cheap sound…fake strings on “I’m Forgiven”…and the two Cathedral projects were just about as low budget as you could go. This is not a group that makes particularly good recordings WITH a label’s help, so I’d expect even less if they go it alone.

DBM makes an especially good point about excellent custom recordings never really getting heard because of “custom” distribution. But I would disagree slightly with him and suggest that even for the solid independently produced artists, labels can be good for more than just distribution.

If you want an example of what a new breed of nimble labels are capable of doing for artists who produce good music on their own, look at Janet Paschal’s new hymns project. I’ve just finished listening to it and ll have a review soon but suffice it to say it’s astonishingly good, exemplifying not only that a label brings with it the support of a distribution network for established artists (Paschal’s more recent projects in her post-Spring Hill days have mostly been availabe only on her website) but can also take really talented talent to a new level of accomplishment with the right artistic direction from the record company. Paschal has made excellent records by herself, but in the case of Sounds Like Sunday, she can thank her label for far far more than just distribution help. She got masterful artistic direction (from Wayne Haun, who has produced most of Paschal’s recent work) but also an investment from the label to give the project an artistic reach and stylistic scope (orchestrations, accompaniment, backing vocals, etc) to a degree that a custom recording would likely not have had.

I’ve been thinking about this a while (the news has been an open secret for a few months now), and the first thing to say of course is that there’s nothing much of consequence to say at this point in a recently launched venture that has only the echo of an established name for a track record. The Canaan records of yore, with all those great groups and wonderful music behind it, is practically speaking, dead. The real measure of the new Canaan’s viability and seriousness will be the talent it signs, not the talent it had. And in that line, there are some first-rate catches out there to be had, probably chief among them, the Booth Brothers, which would be a serious score for Canaan.

But in the meantime, the main thing that stands out in all this is Canaan’s head honcho, Dave Clark. He brings with him an impressive record of creative accomplishment in Christian music and entertainment that bodes well for the label. He got his start as a bass player and songwriter for The Speers, and then went on to have considerable success writing for CCM: “Mercy Said No,” “A Strange Way to Save The World,” and “Crucified With Christ,” to name a few of the biggest. But he’s always kept a foot in southern gospel world, and it’s not only reassuring but also promising to see someone at this stage in his career investing heavily in southern gospel.

Specifically, Clark and Co. represent the best chance out there right now to return artistically serious A&R direction to a major southern gospel label. I won’t rehash what I have already recently said about A&R direction in sg. Suffice it here to say that there is a deep crisis of creative responsibility at most major labels in southern gospel these days.

I’ve just finished listening to three new releases from prime talent at Daywind, just to take one example, and the mind would reel from the sheer lack of imagination that pervades these albums, if they weren’t so boring so much of the time. It’s as though a robo-producer program was booted up and put on auto-pilot, producing super-slick (but thoroughly predictable) tracks and equally professional mixes for material that is largely lumpish and creatively impoverished. Judgment day rhymes with time to pay and your times’ runnin out so I’ll ask again and again … Hey, hey … (repeat as many times as necessary).

Judging from this kind of work, one gets the impression that “A&R” has come to mean “Affirm & Reinforce” whatever the artist already thinks, wants, likes or prefers. How else to account, for instance, for an album full of songs from a very young new group’s very young new leader, songs that are of the earnest but nevertheless half-inspired sort one would expect to come from the pen of your averagely gifted young adult songwriter still in the early stages of professional development? Your A&R guy should be warning you away from projects like this that early on establish professionally self-indulgent habits (of course you’re the most brilliant thing in Christian music since Michael W. Smith! … absolutely let’s record eight of your songs for your debut album), not steering you toward them and taking credit for the missed opportunities.

If Canaan can disrupt this pervasive habit of substituting uncritical encouragement and joyful noising for responsible creative direction and resist cattle calling as many artists as possible early on in favor of investing long-term only in artists who A)have the goods (by the standards of “A Strange Way to Save the World” or The Speers in their heyday) and B)want to do more than let go and let inertia, then the label has a real shot at building something exciting. There are, for sure, a lot of groups out there ready to do something different than the typical label deal. But of course (say it with me now), only time will tell.

Update: David Bruce Murray offers his own take on the Canaan possibilities. It’s worth reading.

By now you’ve may had a chance to read other summaries of what went on at the Crossroads headquarters in Arden, NC, Friday. For all the significance imputed to this gathering, it was a fairly modest and inconclusive affair. This outcome seems about right to me.

I didn’t go with many preconceived notions about what would happen. That said, I also assumed that if the label executives who invited us were worth their salary, their invitation to talk about the future of southern gospel music with bloggers implied a certain amount of self-interest (a two-way street, that one; certainly I went for reasons that weren’t without self-interest).

I’ve never written very favorably about many Crossroads artists, and for that reason I suppose someone might convene a gathering like this attempting to curry favor or peddle influence. But to those people who think this was one big wet kiss from a recording company trying to make nice with the sg blogosphere, I would say that if a blogger could be bribed by a BLT and (in my case) a 36-hour stay in Fletcher and Arden, NC, his writing probably wasn’t of much solidity or worth to begin with.

Similarly to those who assume some concrete conclusions and “real answers” were arrived at in Arden and are now being nefariously withheld (what motive we’d have for doing this escapes me, unless the world is thought to revolve around Chris Unthank), I would only say that your assumptions bespeak a profound cluelessness about the way change, power, discourse, inertia and influence do – and do not – work, especially in Christian entertainment and gospel music. Speaking only for myself, I can say that, as someone who has a life and a career with no professional ties to southern gospel, there’s not much gospel music professionals have that I could be bribed with; and in turn, there’s not much I have to offer people so thoroughly enmeshed in and a part of the deep structures of the southern gospel music business and culture.

So much for the dark side.

No one who has paid any attention to gospel music in the last decade or so would have been surprised by what we discussed: radio, charting, distribution, labels, Gaither, digital technology. That sort of thing.

Conclusions? We agreed about a lot of things: the need for quality in music and production, the scourge of professional amateurs, the blight of so much of sg radio, the need for reform to the SN chart, the importance of supporting writers and other non-performing creative talent, Gaither’s profound effect on the music and the industry. I’m sure there were other things.

We disagreed about some things, too: I for one remain unconvinced by Crossroads’ claim that remaining two or more quarters behind on royalties payments is an unavoidable byproduct of a label’s vital role as a creative industry’s venture capitalist who must wait to see a return on its investment, and so sometimes get in arrears with royalties. Songwriters royalties are - or ought to be considered - expenses for the recording, just like studio players and production costs and graphic designers and the refreshments bill that can’t be deferred and otherwise put off. If the concern is that returned units might require adjustments in the payout, keep a reserve of a 20% and pay on the rest.

We also disagreed, if only implicitly, about what “quality” means. I confess I accepted Crossroads’ invitation in part because I was curious about a label that would sign both the Talley Trio and the Inspirations, Lauren Talley and the McKameys. I think I understand the logic by which this paradox might be reconciled: each artist does what he or she does in the way that he or she does it, in such a way that one is no better or worse than the other, only differently talented.

And I appreciate Crossroads’ effort to represent these artists for what and who they are and not make misrepresentative claims about their abilities.

But at the end of the day, there was – because there is – very little accounting for taste, or the pestiferous relativism lurking in that “to each to his own talents” rationale.

You may believe that the McKameys know how to sing well and choose not to. You may believe that they do indeed sing well but with a heavy mountain accent. Or you may believe that they sing often uninspired music out of which has occasionally emerged a song that comes to life in the vernacular style of Peg and her family. Believe what you will. The fact is they sell. So do the Inspirations. And southern gospel is and has been (and probably will continue to be) committed to this fact, and subsequently organized around the aesthetic vision of the average McKameys or Inspirations fan. The fact that other, better music exists within the domain of southern gospel is true only to the extent that it does so without unsettling the expectations or challenging the assumptions of the folks at Piska Heights Baptist Church.

Just as I am by turns fascinated with and appalled by the myriad effects of Bill Gaither and the Homecoming phenomenon on gospel music, so too am I sympathetic toward and impatient with a recording company like Crossroads. On the one hand, I do believe them when they say they want quality music. On the other hand, they represent the Inspirations. The Inspirations do many things well. Singing is not one of them. If you profess to be serious about serious music (that is, music that withstands artistic, and not just religious or theological, scrutiny), it is difficult for me to understand how you can also represent the Inspirations (Crossroads, needless to say, is not alone here; only the example nearest at hand in this conversation).

This doesn’t quite reduce to the ministry/monestry debate. But it comes close enough to suggest the intractable nature of the problem: the captains of the gospel music industry benefit in profits and prestige by the cultivation and support of artistically inferior music, and too many hide behind the pieties of ministry-mindedness to evade responsibility for their role in the mess.

Thus one of the more refreshing parts of the Crossroads conference for me was the open acknowledgement from the industry professionals in the room that they have at times in their careers all compromised their own standards for what gospel music could and should be (though to be clear, no record label people openly or implicitly disparaged their own artists in any way). As I have not yet attained to any measurable portion of perfection myself, I admire that honesty and their interest in persevering despite imperfect judgment.

At the same time, I’d be less than honest to say I’m not disappointed that people so smart, good, and extremely likeable as the Crossroads folks don’t – as I said at the conference – take more risks to move in the direction in which they themselves believe better music lies. There’s not enough challenging of their artists to defy conventions (put out a record full of songs that can last for more than a year or 18 months) or to cut against the grain (as one record label person suggested, put out an album with only five or seven carefully chosen tunes instead of 10 or 12). It’s hard to muster the energy to buck the status quo, and recording companies aren’t solely to blame. Times are tough all around and it’s easy to despair of change. Who can hope to make any real difference in the way things work when the odds for success are so bad? And yet, a force as elemental as a recording company has to shoulder some of the responsibility for - and the obligation to help reform - the mess things are in. Like I said, modest and inconclusive.

No one should expect all this ambivalence, or the forces that give rise to it, to be resolved in one direction or the other – not over the course of a Friday in NC, certainly, but really not ever.

Gospel music is a name and a set of socio-religious practices and musical conventions that support innumerably different ideas about big, difficult, important things like truth, grace, goodness, beauty.

I care about those things and so did everyone with whom I talked and laughed and argued and shared sandwiches and soda (the BLT was very good) in NC. And to care in this way, about these things, to any meaningful extent, and to act accordingly, inevitably this creates conflicts, failures, impasses, and quandaries, disagreements, different visions.

The best one can hope for, I think, or reasonably expect, is open dialogue across the boundaries that separate people. Cultivating honest conversation – even if it doesn’t issue in a five-point memo of bulleted action items – can only be a good thing, especially in a culture where open and honest dialogue is often tantamount to backsliding.

Speaking of money … How much are we speaking about? $400 a week is $20,800 a year … $500 a week is $26,000 annually, $600 a week is $31,200. And how many groups are paying more than that? Somebody mentioned “benefits” such as health insurance, retirement. How common are such benefits? Do non-owners get any share of CD sales? Are singers treated as independent contractors who pay their own social security? The poverty level for a family of four is somewhere around $29,000, I think (haven’t checked that recently), so you might be on the road with a gospel group and qualifying for food stamps. So much for stardom.

Just so. When you’re making this kind of money, the fantasy of stardom, however paltry it may be, is sometimes the only benefits package available. It also makes what most of us might consider fairly modest differences in earning potential between one group and another seem too good to pass up.

So now put yourself in Jeremy Lile’s place: you’re sticking it out with a group you may very well believe in but with whom the magic of those first exciting, “getting by on White Castles and a prayer” days have given way to the ordinary work of everyday travel. Clearly, the dreamed-off success that helped launch the quartet to begin with will take years to achieve. On top of impinging realities like this, you’re making a barely livable wage. And though a single 24-year-old guy can live on far less than most and still be quite happy, the $100 a week more that BFA offered Lile (I’m not just speculating here) – combined with the visions of sugarplums and grand acclaim that were no doubt dangled before eyes that had not sparkled quite that expectantly since Crystal River’s hopeful debut – obviously was one too many enticements to be resisted.

One might speculate that Lile will burn up a lot of that raise fueling his car for the 3-hour drive he’ll now have to make to catch the BFA bus in Atlanta. But the fact that young, talented people like Lile are willing to do this in the first place – and consider it a promotion – suggests that to talk of “loyalty” in southern gospel misses the point entirely.

As with any bidness, in southern gospel music you get pretty much what you pay for or are willing to be paid, and you agree to pay or earn pretty much what it takes to get what you want. In gospel music, it just so happens that the going rates are pretty crappy and the fringe benefits pretty illusory for all but the most starry eyed, lazy, committed, or powerful.

When people say that gospel music “gets in your blood,” one thing they could be said to mean is that there will always be a new crop of kids willing to work for less (or at least no more) than the last guy.

Update: a comment worth promoting from the discussion thread:

I sing with a well known sg group and I’m making less than 450/week. I’m an independent contractor and have NO benefits. If it wasn’t for my spouse’s job I couldn’t afford insurance nor could I afford to cover my taxes.

So why’s he do it? Read the rest here.

I can imagine the shrinking remnant of Crystal River might feel something similar right about now. If there’s any silver lining here, it’s that you can pretty confidently count yourself among the solid middle tier of gospel music when a revolving door of talent regularly blows the papers off your desk before ink has dried on the latest hire.

Just ask Ed O’Neal. The owner of the Dixie Melody Boys famously says all he ever wanted to do was sing a song, but he’s spent a lot of his career filling holes in his line-up created when one of his many many boys has taken the next best offer.

The cynical (or economically realistic) might cast a sidelong eye at all this and surmise that groups like the DMB and Crystal River essentially function as farm clubs for groups with more money to offer the stand-outs.

Is loyalty dead in southern gospel?

Empirically speaking, I’d be surprised if people are averagely less “loyal” today than they were in times past, if we define loyalty narrowly as “staying with the same group for long stints.” But of course we’d first have to define “long” (two years? Four? Five+?) and then analyze personnel records of a fairly representative sample of acts and individuals. And I just don’t have that kind of energy.

I do see in my handy Murray’s Encyclopedia of Gospel Music that in the 19 years between his start in gospel music and joining the Kingsmen, Jim Hamill sang with the Songfellows, the Weatherfords, the Blue Ridge Quartet, the Rebels, and the Oaks. That’s an average tenure of less than four years with a group. George Younce had a similar experience, singing with at least five different groups in the space of about 20 years. And/but these are just two of the most well-known figures. How representative they are is debatable.

I suspect group owners and managers would disagree, but four years doesn’t seem like that long to me in the arc of a 50- or 60-year career. But I also recognize that four years is a lifetime by the gospel artist’s professional clock these days. My judgment is also blissfully unencumbered with the stress of staffing (and keeping rehearsed) a high-turnover group for a roster of dates to which I am contractually obliged (any time an emcee says the new guy just stepped right in and sang with us like he’s been here forever, you know they’ve either had to rehearse like the dickens or default to singing a lot of old standards and greatest hits that any averagely alert singer would roughly know the parts to already). And too, personnel changes can get expensive (Danny Jones has suggested the number heads toward $10,000 for one change in some cases, which strikes me as a tad hysterical, if not impossible).

All this being said, though, it seems unfair and, from a bidness standpoint, unrealistic to expect – in this or any other era of gospel music – long tenures in the name of loyalty if the market will bear more money for a person’s skills. (Plus, personnel changes make for great gospel theater and even better blogging.)

What has changed, it seems to me, is the socioeconomic context in which personnel changes take place. Gospel music has always been a bidness, but one way to view the history of gospel music’s rise in the last half century is as a story of increasing professionalization.

What started out as a clubby, avocational undertaking for a lot of people who were attracted to life on the road not least of all, as James Goff notes, for “the camaraderie of their fellow singers,” has given way in these latter days to more unabashed careerism among artists and performers who see themselves as individual marketable commodities rather than equally yolked members of an artistic or business enterprise. Inevitably it starts out this way for most groups high on idealism and low on experience. But Palmetto State’s demise is an instructive example: most of the group members were official owners of the group and things still fell apart within a few years.

This kind of thing is, I think, both a reflection of increased economic strain that gospel music is under as an industry (you have to look out for you and yourn, as they’d say back in the hills, when times are tough) and a broader cultural trend in modern American life toward a valorization of the individual over group identity.

Of course people can and do enjoy the road today for the same reasons they did in olden times, just as artists today can bond and stay together for years at a time a la George and Glen (or Rodney and Gerald or Libbi and Tracy). But the blandishments of stardom (however small time it is for most sg stars) have pretty definitively trumped the sense of a business compact or covenanted bond that might have helped the center of groups in an earlier time hold faster, longer.

I first noticed the absence of the Cathedrals name on the L5 website. Basically the same brochure that is in the February issue of the Singing News (p44-45) is posted online, except that the word “Cathedral” – as in “Cathedral Tribute” – has been dropped so that it now reads simply “Tribute Concert” (a pdf of the current brochure is here). But then again the word “Cathedrals” is used in a the running text a few lines later. So thinking I was maybe just making something out of nothing, I did a little research (ok, all I did was compare two L5 eletters but still … this is a blog, so “research” is a loose term)

Turns out, though, this is not just some coincidence. The January 31 eletter contains an ad for the “Cathedrals Remembered” concert. The February 7 eletter? “Reminder on Currington Promotions concerts,” the headline reads. “Just want to remind you about the special tribute events featuring Legacy Five, Greater Vision, the Mark Trammell Trio and Danny Funderburk.” The word “Cathedrals”? No where in sight.

It is Friday night and I am sitting at home catching up on a week’s worth of miscellaneous reading and browsing, but still … if I were a more a cynical guy, I might wonder if somebody’s legal muscle isn’t leaning on Currington and the groups affiliated with these “tribute concerts” to cease and desist using the Cats name. Assuming the Cathedrals estates haven’t authorized the use of the name (and I don’t know one way or another), are there any copyright or intellectual property lawyers out there who can weigh in on the likelihood that using the Cats name in these “tribute” concerts is actionable?

Just on the non-Gaither purchases, Get Away Jordan did extraordinarily well by pretty much any southern gospel standard. Indeed, even gospel albums that play really well on radio might not sell as well in any given week three or four months out from release as EHSSQ did on its own - minus those “non-traditional” Homecoming sales - with this album’s debut. And/but clearly the Gaither brand adds substantial value to an already popular product.

Rather than spending time dreaming up or implementing gimmicky promotions to draw new-media consumers to southern gospel, gospel music should focus on getting as much music and video from every era of southern gospel history (including, of course, the present) onto iTunes in the proper categories and cross-listings.

For one thing, the iTunes approach has got to be the least costly way to tap into the single most proven paradigm for provisioning music and other entertainment media digitally. It also simply doesn’t make sense for labels, artists, or distributors in a economically struggling genre to dump resources into any other web-based product or digital service line that will - even it’s wildly successful - only reach a sliver of the gospel-music buying population as it currently exists.

Really, though, it’s somewhat stupefying (but entirely emblematic of sg’s lack of vision as an industry) that we’re still talking about this, that gospel labels have been so slow to put even a modicum of their artists’ music on iTunes, to say nothing of all the old music for which they hold some rights of distribution.

I have argued for quite some time now (and here and here) that sg has to think about and begin committing to digital content provision, and/but the ubiquity of iTunes makes it the only sensible focal point for digital media initiatives for southern gospel right now (though, full disclosure, I have advocated my own overcomplicated proposals at times too).

Indeed, given the inertia among individual labels, one could make a pretty persuasive case that the Southern Gospel Music Guild and/or GMA - in their roles as promoters and custodians of white gospel music - have an obligation (or at least a really prime opportunity) to spearhead a task force solely charged with coordinating the effort to get gospel music on iTunes. SG on iTunes is not just good bidness but one of the best ways to keep gospel music from becoming (even more) obselescent, or worse, entirely forgotten in the age when things cease to exist for all practical purposes if they’re not accessible online.

Focused primarily on comparing the number of dates the group sang now and then, DBM concludes that “when Southern Gospel was supposedly riding high [in the 1970s], before ‘CCM’ had ever taken hold, the Kingsmen Quartet were already working themselves ragged.”

DBM seems to be suggesting the “decline” of southern gospel is an historically unsupported misreading of the data, that in fact white gospel music has always struggled, or at least had to work above averagely hard even in its heyday. There is doubtless some truth to this. Gospel music has long preferred nostalgia and dubious oral histories to factual reality.

But this claim almost entirely ignores the most striking feature of the Kingsmen comparison: percentage of “big dates” worked. In 1976, almost 30% of the KM’s dates were big ones. Today it’s less than 3%. Even allowing for the subjectivity of what constitutes a big date, that’s a staggering decline.

When you work 10 or 15 dates a month and a third of those are large, packed houses, the break-neck schedule mainly betokens demand. Working 10 to 15 dates a month in front of mostly small-potatoes crowds suggests that’s what you have to do to stay afloat, that these are the only people who will listen to and support you.

What these statistics can’t fathom, though, is the cultural component so heavily influencing gospel music. Gospel radio stinks for the same reason gospel music is glutted with hackilious “talent” and groups have to work a dozen dates a month just to make their modest payroll and immodest fuel bill: gospel music fans – and a preponderance of artists and industry professional – are perfectly content dealing in mediocre music as long as its robed in pious sentiment.

Things need not have turned out this way. There is – both obviously today and historically – a sustainable appetite for good gospel music. The Blackwoods, Statesmen, Stamps and the rest of that high-flying crowd created music as popular on a 1950s scale as the Homecoming brand headlined by the Gaither Vocal Band is today.

What interests me about these success stories is that both mid-century white quartet music and the Homecoming series emerged from within a religious context but placed more emphasis on superior musical artistry (sophisticated, disciplined arrangements and accompaniment sung with precision and stylistic integrity by people of superior talent, both natural and formally cultivated), excellence in stagecraft, and consistent attention to the ephemerals of the complete music experience (lighting, seating/venue, promotions, etc). In short, both are examples of professional entertainment by contemporary secular standards. This music isn’t purely nor, I’d argue, even primarily, religious. Rather it’s good music that happens to have a Christian inflection.

When people talk vaguely but wistfully about the “quality” of those mid-century quartets or Gaither’s “genius,” what they really mean is that this music can, did, and does hold its own with the best secular entertainment of its time.

Sadly (and, I think, stupidly) most of southern gospel as an industry seems, over the past quarter century or so, to have not only surrendered the audience for, but also eagerly portrayed gospel music as an alternative to, mainstream Christian entertainment.

DBM’s charts render statistically the reality of this stupendously bad decision: southern gospel today is mainly a scramble among groups to “out minister” each other for the attention and meager resources of an ever-dwindling subset of Christian music fans – denominationally affiliated, mostly rural or non-urban conservative evangelicals – who prize fundamentalist religious enthusiasm over all else.

Some independent artists have tried dealing directly with distribution companies, but that doesn’t generally work.

Take a look at a distribution company’s list of projects. 99.9% of them are on a label. When distribution companies deal with a label, they’re getting a number of releases per year with a guarantee of a certain level of quality across the board. In contrast, independent artists left to their own whims in the recording studio might turn in a terrific project one time, and one with little commercial value the next. The major distribution companies in Christian music…Word/Warner, EMI/CMG, and Brentwood-Benson…aren’t going to get caught up in the minutiae of negotiating individual agreements with independent artists. They need the quality control a label can provide in place before they’ll agree to expend money promoting a product for sale.

Read the whole the thing.

Update: A comment worth promoting to the main page:

An interesting thing to watch will be the release of Jeff and Sheri Easter’s “Life is Great and Getting Better” this coming Tuesday. Besides the full production being under control of Jeff and Sheri, it will have the advantage having been repped to independent and chain Christian Bookstores by Word road reps plus the full effort of the New Day phone staff. Unlike many “independent” artists, an official Street Date of 1/23/07 will hopefully make a splash on the Soundscan Charts. It has had sufficient time at radio for the leadoff single “Over and Over” which has gotten good response and chart position. They have the luxury of being seen frequently on the Gaither tour and videos - sounds like all the earmarks of a successful album launch.