averyfineline

For the long weekend ahead, an open thread for you holiday revelers looking for your gospel fix. Some things to get us started.

Janet Paschal has the new No. 1 song. The Talleys had a No. 1 with “Life Goes On” in last month’s issue. Good to see good music at the top of the chart.

Have […]

Today’s round up is all about hellos.

Randy Crawford is back with BFA (mostly random aside: I’m pretty sure I saw Crawford at Jacksons in Nashville a month or so ago, and if you’re ever at Jacksons, make sure you visit that delightful used and rare bookstore across the street while you wait for your late […]

In an earlier post, I used a Gospeleer entry to explore some facets of economic populism in southern gospel. Here, I want to say a bit more about a related topic: aesthetic populism in sg.
By this I refer to that line of thinking that equates a thing’s popularity with its aesthetic/artistic value. Thus the […]

Judy Nelon’s GospelMusicUpdate.com is well on its way to becoming the go-to site for news from the world of southern gospel, inspo, and Christian country.
I actually find the site difficult to navigate (it’s a bit spastically designed and the recent news often gets lost on left).
But it’s such a welcome relief to see someone exercise […]

Jason Crabb
Jason Crabb
Spring Hill, 2009
ALI: 83%
The first line of the first song, “Somebody Like Me,” on Jason Crabb’s new album says a lot about his debut solo album:

The congregation parted like the Red Sea,
When that old drunk stumbled in down the aisle
And took a seat, right in the middle of Amazing Grace
It suffers alone […]

Mickey Gamble has an interesting post up over at Gospeleer about what he calls “the poverty mentality” of southern gospel:
There is a widely held belief in our genre that degrades both the value of the artist and the level of support that fans will indulge.  That belief is that our fans live lives of economic […]

Last week, you may recall a discussion on this and other sites about the Perrys streaming a concert live via the internet. Mickey Gamble praised it as a stroke of great foresight … by “someone.”
Indeed.
In the mailbox this a.m., a note from Libbi Perry Stuffle:
We had nothing to do with video streaming the youth conference. […]

What’s on your mind? Some things to occupy the time while you think.

Mickey Gamble over at Gospeleer thinks the Perrys have the right idea streaming live feeds of their concerts for free. My question to anyone who caught the recent webcast: what was the quality? And if you’re a diehard (what Mickey calls “followers”), does […]

Via Avery’s old pal, Dean Adkins, and apropos the “what’s lost with overproduced band tracks” conversation:

Plus, you gotta love orange suits and shag carpet.

A while back, I mentioned having wished for some time for an effective remake of “God on the Mountain.” I think, via Adam Edwards, I may have found it.
The audio is crap (sorry, Adam), and the quality is what you get when Uncle Bob or whomever at the family gathering does the video work, […]

I had a post up here earlier this evening about Greater Vision and popular taste vs being led by your creative lights. But it turns out the post was based on a bogus reading of the facts, so I took it down. The point I was trying to make about the limits of the “nobody […]

This may not be of interest to you if you A) don’t know what DRM is and/or don’t care, or B) don’t own a Kindle. But given our regular discussion of new media and digital commerce, this story about DRM nightmares with Amazon’s popular new ebook reader sure does feel like a cautionary tale about […]

Basically, it turns whatever it touches to trash, according to David Sessions (h/t, RDB). Money quote:
[A]s long as the lumbering Salem monopoly controls the Christian music press, what Christians read about God’s music will be just as bad as the websites in the Salem network look.
[snip]
For now, the Salem monopoly’s presence is here to keep […]

It’s official. Facebook is making the world go completely, solipsistically insane. Avery just received this message:
Kyle Boreing became a fan of Kyle Boreing on Facebook and suggested you become a fan too.
I’m no Facebook hater, but WTF. Reminds me of that Conan O’Brien joke from a few weeks ago. “In the Year 3000 … all […]

In the course of a discussion going on here about BFA’s failure to launch, reader SE diagnoses the group’s problem this way.

I think their last few projects are so pitch perfect and so sonically maximized that they leave the listener aurally tired after listening to an entire project. They electronically tweak the vocals to the […]

Great news, music fans. According to this comment, Daywind has released a slew of classic albums:
BLACKWOOD BROS/GIVE THE WORLD A SMILE SUNDAY MEETIN TIME
MASTERS V / CLASSICS OF YESTERYEAR & O WHAT A SAVIOR CD
OAK RIDGE QUARTET / RIVER OF LIFE & SING FOR YOU
SPEER FAMILY / FAMILY FAVORITES & KEEP A HAPPY HEART
STATESMEN / […]

I’m back, so let’s get started on the miscellaneous stuff we’ve missed in my absence.

Via Adam Edwards, there’s another clip out of the Perrys singing another song from their new album live.

Via Musicscribe, there will, evidently, be a sg quilt at NQC.

For those of you who enjoy southern gospel funerals, Burke has […]

From reader Paul:
I remember Susan Speer at Massey Hall in Toronto in the early ’70’s…I was a young university student and she sat in the back of the hall following intermission and fanned her face with a large stack of dollar bills received from album sales.
I love it.

My first reaction to the news that the LeFevre Quartet has “retired” the group’s family name - and rechristened themselves Priority - was WTF? As Adam Edwards said:

 Honestly, I don’t really understand this move whatsoever. … The group is based on Mike LeFevre’s name, status, history, etc., so is the expense of changing your name […]

Mickey Gamble, a Crossroads executive, has added his voice to the blogosphere. Since the southern gospel blog revolution back in the middle part of the decade, no single industry figure in sg has, to my mind, shown more meaningful curiosity about new media and music than Mickey. For artists and other insiders wondering what digital […]