I hadn’t intended to post on this since it’s already made the rounds over at DBM’s site, but watching that Josh Lesomething kid on AI last night, I was reminded of this clip (which really should have included more of the first guy) and so I spirited it away on email to a friend and then got into a subsequent discussion with said friend about the clip … and well … here we are.

As my friend put in email:

If only southern gospel could deliver the gospel like that.

I think he was speaking in generalities (he’s the founding member of his own personal Singing Cookes and Gaither Fanboy club, so it’s not like he’s a gospel hater). But I take his point. No, really. I’m actually taking his point: I wish southern gospel did more of this.

By this I don’t mean necessarily the style of music here (though more of this style would be fine with me). One of the central points of my book, as well as this recent article, among other things I’ve written, is that “gospel” is not really a specific style. Rather, it’s a way of being musically, psychospiritually.

And so much of southern gospel just doesn’t have this way-of-beingness (see Quartet Convention comma the National … on any given night).

Part of the problem is that the relative cheapness of band tracks has made a singer songwriter out of every group, even though the number of bonafide actual sing-the-glory-down songwriters in southern gospel is not much more than it’s ever been. The only thing that’s increased is the number of plastic, uninspired and uninspiring songs that are the mercantile equivalent of what you go to the Dollar Store to find. We’ve talked about this before.

In turn, this relatively low cost to point-of-entry into “the industry” has effected a shift in the center of aspirational energy in southern gospel. We’ve talked about this too: Lots of people out giggin’ on the road in southern gospel are more interested in the delusion idea of themselves as a “pro” than on making music that manages to bring that great gettin’ up morning right down here among us.

This is, I gather, what folks mean when talk about southern gospel as a bidness full of folks who like the threadbare, hand-me-down, pass-along, down-in-the-teeth, gimp-along-money-suckin-1976-Silver-Eagle trappings of success than musical success itself. Less wordily, it’s the difference between being a performer and an artist. And finally, of course, the fairly permissive tastes of southern gospel audiences means there’s very little weeding out. Southern gospel fans are just as happy - nay, happier, much of the time - with delusional performers than expert artists.

There’s nothing to do about this, of course. It simply must be accepted whilst we wait for something good to come along and break up the benumbing mediocrity. But for me at least, when the good does come along, it’s still good enough to wait for, so that, even if I can’t stand the rest of it, I just try to stand.

So let’s hear from my favorites of this group. First up, a young Franklin covering “Never Grow Old.”

The sheer gobsmackery of this clip still floors me. Here’s me raving on about it years ago:

Franklin was 14 years old when this recording was made, and though I expected that familiarity with the project over time would domesticate the novelty of her youth on this project, the more I listen to it the more difficult it becomes for me to comprehend the fact of her age when this was recorded. Fourteen. What’s more, she’s doing all her own piano accompaniment (every teenage artist in every genre ought to be required to listen to this recording every day for a month before ever setting foot on a stage). Anyway, near the middle of the recording she covers “Never Grow Old.” The critic Tony Heilbut has called this her greatest single gospel recording ever, and I think I know what he means. It’s not that the song is flawlessly or even expertly sang. In fact, it’s a messy, gigantic enormous performance of proportions that would give pause to the most seasoned and daring adult. But the song absolutely pulsates with Franklin’s raw spiritual energy and naturally (at the time) unpolished talent. She does things in the song that only the “don’t-know-any-better” audacity of youth makes possible: elongating the first “old” of the chorus until the tension of that single straight tone becomes nearly overbearing in its unrelenting brightness. Or later, when she tags the chorus and returns to the same place (”old”), this time she lurches up at the note three times, each time successively higher until she lands on an unimaginably high, full-voice F (unimaginable beacuse she’s not a soprano). I want to cringe and shout, to smile and cry all at once, but then at the last moment she embellishes the phrase with such spontaneous ease and descends into a more earthly range, so that every time I listen to it I find myself wanting to clap and stomp and hoot and carry on like the live audience, which comes completely undone when she belts out that F. Like so many irresistible unlooked-for moments of spiritual force, this is not primarily pleasing, though I derive a great deal of pleasure from the slightly unpleasant tension Franklin’s audaciousness builds into the song. Rather, it’s main quality is unavoidability. Like Mavis Staples’ voice, Franklin’s here demands a response, an account from everyone within its range, draws a hard line and burns away all obstructions to spiritual insight for a few moments, and though what we discover in such moments is not always entirely pleasing, it’s impossible to deny the centrality of the experience. Not bad, for a fourteen-year-old.

Full thing is here. I still agree with me.

Next up, the Hoppers.  Hard to choose here (I could have gone with this or this or this, among many others), but the last few bars alone earn this one pride of place:

God bless Connie Hopper’s sense of an ending.

Vision TV in Canada is running a series called God’s Greatest Hits in which each of five shows features one hymn or spiritual.  Some choices were pretty obvious (Amazing Grace, Ava Maria) but I was surprised they went with Wade in the Water on spiritual night rather than Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Abide With Me (rather than How Great Thou Art) was another interesting choice.  Hallelujah Chorus rounded out the group.  Have no idea if I’ll Fly Away was considered (but will watch show and let you know if it is mentioned).

More here. We’ll keep you posted if God makes any other interesting choices to which NG alerts us.

Mount claims that I argue that Aldine Kieffer is the “father” of southern gospel today, and then proceeds to dismantle this claim by showing that everything that’s important stylistically, technologically, and economically about southern gospel today was actually popularized and institutionalized by Vaughan.

And here’s Murray, in a similar vein: “Saying Aldine Kieffer contributed to some of the traditions that Vaughan built and expanded on is fair, but saying Kieffer started what we now call Southern Gospel is rather absurd.”

Indeed it would be absurd to say that, if that’s what I said (just as it would have been pretty silly to try to argue that Kieffer was somehow more instrumental in innovations such as radio and phonographs and traveling quartets and other things that didn’t even exist in his time than Vaughan). Except that I don’t say these things or make these arguments.

What I actually say with respect to Kieffer is that I’m interested in “tak[ing] seriously the notion of Kieffer as founding figure in southern white gospel and explor[ing] the implications of this view for our understanding of the music’s cultural function that continues into our time” (55).

Though my choice of “founding figure” (rather than the founding figure or founding “father”) was quite purposeful, the key phrase here is “cultural function.” Now I get that academic prose can seem purposefully obtuse or appear needlessly “flowery,” as both Murray and Mount (and many of their readers) point out in different ways. That’s often true, and I’m sure there are plenty of places in the book where I could have been clearer. But this particular question is one of those cases where paying attention to language is really important – both for me as the writer who chose the words and for readers engaging meaningfully with the argument (which, I should say, I’m delighted Murray and Mount are doing on this issue … it’s the kind of substantive give and take I’ve always wished there was more of in the southern gospel blogosphere).

If you assume a phrase like “the music’s cultural function” is a piece of academic sophistry or just a highfalutin way of saying “the music’s history,” then it will indeed seem absurd to suggest that Kieffer was more important in any understanding of southern gospel as we know it today than Vaughan (or Sumner or Gaither or whomever else from the more recent rise of mass-market professional southern gospel).

But the history of modern southern gospel – the documented story of how one thing led to another in the past to get us where we are today – has already been ably written by James Goff in Close Harmony.

Of course knowing the history of the music is essential to understanding southern gospel, and I have great respect for – and have been influenced by – Goff’s work (the introduction to my book discusses what I’m trying to accomplish in contrast to Goff’s more traditional historical account, and footnote 13 on page 185 discusses the relationship of my book to Goff’s in more specific detail). But as I write in the book, there are limits to what we can know about why southern gospel music matters if we focus only on the “changes over time in the way the music was created, sold, and consumed.” This approach leaves “very little room for any meaningful engagement with the sonic experience of southern music in all its lived, immediate, soul-stirring power.”

It is this power and the way it has operated in southern gospel as a means for people to form and express a particular kind of religious identity that I mean by “cultural function,” and though this function is related to the rise of quartets, custom coaches, record labels, gospel radio and other countless factors that were indispensable to turning shape note singing at the turn of the twentieth century into the modern industry most people think of as constituting “southern gospel” today, it’s not the same thing and doesn’t require all those modern technological and business innovations to exist and thrive.

In this light, I’m interested in Kieffer because his life and career powerfully capture the dominant ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving that have been part of southern gospel in its modern form, which I date from Reconstruction. The states of mind, feeling, and the expression of feelings associated with what we now call southern gospel were made much more widely available in America by the technological innovations and entrepreneurial insights that Vaughan pioneered. But the deeper reasons people were and are drawn to music and what they get out of this experience - that is, the emergence of gospel’s cultural function - predate Vaughan’s career and took formative shape, or so I argue, in Kieffer’s time and were embodied most vividly in his life and work.

Murray thinks I’m just moving the historical goal posts (“Doug would only need to jump back to the hymn writers like the Wesley’s, Crosby, Watts, and Newton and say they started Southern Gospel”). But that’s because he assumes I’m making a case for Kieffer on Vaughan’s terms. I’m not. Rather, I’m proposing to highlight a different set of issues and dynamics that are at least as - and, I argue, more - important in order to understand southern gospel, and then trying to understand the people and events associated with these other factors.

In their understanding of southern gospel, Murray and Mount (and as I try to suggest in Chapter 3, most of the southern gospel world) privilege that part of southern gospel history that looks and sounds and acts most like what we call southern gospel today. All roads lead to Vaughan in this view (or maybe Sumner). Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just not the argument I’m making in the book.

So two things, in a slightly different direction.

First, reading the article’s discussion of the “chauffeured Bentley, which TBN says is used to ferry television guests in proper style,” and the “working dinners” that total at least $300,000 per year, I’m reminded that no small part of the Crouches’ gravitational pull for the many guests who regularly appear on their show must surely be the free-flowing largesse of the TBN empire.

Just as the Crouches probably tell themselves they’ve done the hard spiritual labor to justify their lifestyles, the musical performers, preachers, missionaries, and other guests who appear on the show probably tell themselves that a free feast and a chauffeured Bentley to and from the hotel are justifiable perks for reaching millions of TBN-loving souls all over the world with the message of the gospel.

Second, I would lie to say I’m not fascinated by the sheer, overwhelming, unbounded gaucheness of televangelism … the pink hair and bejeweled costumes and makeup applied with a trowel and the bedazzled sets of gold lame and props from long-ago proms of the 1980s. It’s all fascinating to me.

True, I tend to have more tolerance for this pietistic too-muchness in a Vestal Goodman  than in Jan Crouch. Personally, I like gospel music better than bad preaching. But more generally, I also think musical performance is more readily understood as … well, a performance and a transaction. You pays your money and you takes your chances. But this a distinction of emphasis, not of kind.

In any event, it’s harder to get at what this is all about – the big hair and linebacker shoulder pads and preference for gold lamé and Lee Press-On nails – than most people assume. One explanation I offer in the book is that the “cartoonish extravagance” of the Tammy Faye style you find on TBN and in some quarters of southern gospel offers to the ordinary Christian viewer at home an example of Christians simultaneously succeeding in the world without becoming part of it.

The outsized proportions of evangelical celebrity [like the Crouches or the Bakkers] signal ascendancy to wealth and success. … At the same time, the unmistakable gaudiness of the Tammy Faye aesthetic has the self-authenticating effect of binding the evangelical celebrity to her fans. Outsiders see in the celebrity evangelical appear a tacky amateurism and transparent fraudulence; to cultural insiders, this appearance communicates a refusal to surrender or succumb to the blandishments of the secular celebrity’s worldly elegance and the human frailty it hides. That this style may appear “cheap” or “overdone” is the point at some level. … The gospel diva … revels in her appearance as a conspicuously pious Christian. As the mascara runs down her cheeks, she demonstrates her abiding concern with the gospel in song [or the preaching of the gospel] over the allure of secular celebrity’s stylistic equipoise. (147)

I’ve got other fish to fry in this chapter, so my treatment is not exhaustive by any stretch. But it was (and is) important to me to take this stuff seriously and not just dismiss it as spiritual hucksterism or a “false theology” that’s been a “huge embarrassment to evangelicalism” (as the SBC’s Al Mohler puts in the NYT article). It may all be true, but that’s like trying to explain Moby Dick by pointing out that the whale was white and really tarnished the whaling industry’s image.

Exactly why people keep sending money to the Pauls and Jans of the world is another book probably (though I don’t think I’d have the stomach to write it), and there really isn’t any short or single answer.

Here’s one: After my last post on this topic, I was contacted by a southern gospel professional with ties to people who regularly appear on TBN. His main point was to politely suggest that though everybody’s heard rumors about Paul and Jan for years, no one really talks about this stuff in public because TBN has a lot of good, honest Christians followers who rely on the TBN ministry for real spiritual support and guidance. Essentially, the argument here is: God works through many cracked vessels.

Another common explanation you often hear is a corollary to the first: that people who form intense connections with - and make financial commitments to - the Crouches and Bakkers of the world are unwitting dupes or rubes or sheep or whatever. This is the “sucker born every minute” argument.

Whichever version you prefer, these arguments have never been very satisfying to me, not least of all because they require the use of a fairly unwieldy paint brush and a heavy dose of cultural superiority (and in the case of the cracked-vessel argument, it’s more than a little self-serving  coming from folks who are fond of eating well on the TBN working-dinner account and getting to and from their guest appearances on the show in limousine).

For my part, I’d say some people are greedy, some people are needy, and at a certain point just about everyone will suspend disbelief when the need or greed is great enough.

But whatever the complete answer, if support for televangelism can withstand the withering reality of what goes on off-screen with the help of all that money (and it can; it has; it does), then I think we have to be ready to stipulate up front that in addition to the televangelist’s high tolerance for ethical dissonance, there’s probably also a lot more self-awareness among televangelism’s viewers about the part they play in all this.

In other words, there’s plenty of embarrassment to go around.

As you might imagine, he is not, on the whole, impressed or compelled by what he read. He obviously spent considerable time with the book, and it’s equally obvious that he’s working hard in the review to appear as fair and evenhanded as he can. So I don’t assume he read the book primarily in search of evidence for what he already thought he’d find in it, or that he purposefully overlooked or misread or simply omitted any mention of those portions of the book that trouble his image of me as an imperious academic sneering my way through the world of southern gospel. But there were times in the review when I wondered what book he was reading and who wrote it.

Even so, the review’s actually better than I imagined it might be when I recommended that the publicist at the U of I send Mount a review copy, and I appreciate Mount’s having taken the time to engage the book with a review.

So I don’t really watch television on a regular basis at all. And the only interactions I have with primetime programming are long after it’s originally aired and shown up for rental online.

Which is why I’ve just recently discovered The Good Wife. It’s perhaps not as all-that as this suggests, but it keeps one’s attention well enough, especially if one – like me – enjoys snappy West-Wing, 30 Rock, Sports-Night style writing.

Anyway, at our house we’ve recently started with Season 1 and are working our way forward, so last night I just saw an episode late in the first season that involves the good wife’s husband, a scandal-besotted Chicago pol (basically he’s the Elliot Spitzer of the Midwest), trying to rehabilitate his image by, in part, seeking to publicly atone for his transgressions under the spiritual auspices of one of the city’s most powerful black ministers. Cue inevitable black-church scene on Sunday morning.

Or at least, cue a scene set in what an urban black congregation looks like after it’s been flown out to LA, focused-grouped through made-for-tv content processors, and repackaged for sale in the culturally demilitarized zone of prime-time television (a rather unrevealing still shot of the scene is here; it’s not remarkable enough to make youtube, as far as I can tell).

It’s not impossible, of course, that the architecturally breathtaking church where the scene was shot is the real deal or close to it for an evangelical urban congregation somewhere in Chicago, and maybe it is not entirely implausible that a pastor as politically powerful as the one portrayed in this episode could get to be so on the basis of a sermon style that, judging from the brief glimpses we get of it, compares unfavorably to watching grass grow and paint dry. Whatever. It’s tv.

But I chuckled out loud at the show’s muffed attempt to do gospel music. Of course it was gospel, because there were black people in bright robes swaying and singing (I go on at some length about this culturally universal language of “gospel” here and here). And thank goodness for those unsubtle hints. Otherwise the scene would have resembled nothing so much as a House of Denmark commercial smashed into a United Colors of Benetton ad.

I think the song was “This Little Light of Mine,” or some such. Sooooo, so-far so good. And the singing was ok, so far as it went. But the piano … sweet merciful Martin Cook.

Ok, it wasn’t that bad. In fact, it was very ably played in general. But as an example of gospel  piano, this was … something else. Rhythmically, it was living in another land entirely, with no feel of the enlivening left hand nor any of that ineffable sixth sense of how to play artfully around the down beat that’s necessary to make traditional gospel work well. Someone had clearly taught the keyboard player a few standard gospel-style runs and fills between phrases, which were dutifully dolloped into the arrangement. But the heart of the style was still hopelessly supper-club politesse that never wandered out of the middle two ranges more than a half-octave in either direction. It was like Aretha Franklin singing with one of those portable Casio keyboards parents buy children who claim to want piano lessons but will probably quit after three weeks.

I’ve always wanted to sit in on the script writing workshops that lead up to this kind of scene. Does no one care to get it more than vaguely right culturally, and so, the polished distortion of this kind of anemic, half-recognizable mise-en-scene-by-visual-shorthand arrives before us in direct proportion to the writer’s half-assed effort to understand what he claims to portray? [Scene opens in black church with swaying choir in bright robes singing gospel song jubilantly] … we nailed that, boys, didn’t we?

Or, perhaps more bemusing (and horrifying), this sort of scene is actually the result of the opposite: of a meticulous writerly effort to “get it right,” except the that the effort is just colossally, hopelessly abortive given the cultural distance between tv-script-writing workshops and urban evangelicalism  … the rough equivalent of a court reporter trying earnestly to create a faithful record of a trial by listening through one end of a green-bean can attached to a string.

I actually get the impression that in the case of The Good Wife, the mark was intentionally missed in this scene. That is, the point was probably, I’m guessing, to stage the scene in a way that both clearly says “black gospel choir in church on Sunday” (in order to advance the plot), but that also faithfully upholds the show’s rigorously enforced neo-midcentury-modern aesthetic, even if that means distorting things (stills here and here and here give you the idea of the show’s aesthetic; there’s an entire blog devoted to the show’s style here).

The trademark Good Wife scene is full of airily comfortable rooms of bespoke taste, bright natural light, warm earth tones, and expensively understated fashion, props, and set designs. The point to all this is … well, for one, this is tv. It’s supposed to make us ache with consumeristic desire. But more deeply, I suspect, the show’s carefully regulated and well-heeled aesthetic tastes are meant to reinforce a larger thematic interest in contrasting the beautiful surfaces of upper-middle class urban living in which the plot advances, with the socially ugly, existentially thwarting confinement of the urban bourgeois corporate and political life that hems the good wife in on almost every side.

The chances of getting gospel right in this sort of somewhat overambitious - but entertaining enough - show were probably marginal at best. A little light, indeed. But boy, it sure is purtty.

[updated]

Indulge me a moment in some housekeeping with respect to comments to blog posts here and the recent meta-commentary on this topic.

The question at core involves the degree to which I should manage readers’ comments to blog posts here to keep the conversation on point.

To those of you writing both publicly and privately to express your concern about what some readers see as the trend toward comments that, at best, drift off topic, and at worst hijack the conversation with what George Constanza called bawdy tawk, I hear you. I really do. And I’m not unsympathetic to the critique in some ways.

At the same time, I’m also reluctant at this late date in the life of the site to start unilaterally intervening more aggressively in comments threads, given how central this free and open space has been to the community that’s built up around averyfineline.

To be honest, I’m hardpressed, as I’ve written to several of you lately in personal emails, to see how such aggressively unilateral monitorial efforts on my part to shape or limit the conversation wouldn’t risk violating and vitiating the commitment I’ve made all these years to a wide open discussion.

Back in the day, those of you who were around will recall that I didn’t shut down the hard core joyful-noisers when they were the dominant voice(s) here. On what ethical or moral or intellectual grounds do I suddenly change the rules because the balance of rhetorical power has shifted over time? To some extent, I’m actually asking (and have asked several of you; thanks for your thoughtful replies).

Several you make the point – either explicitly or implicitly – that by letting the commenters fill the space that used to be occupied by more regular posts on the site, I’ve created the problem and could remedy it by either posting more frequently or shutting the site down. I’m not sure it’s as singularly my “fault” as all that, but no matter. It’s my site and my responsibility at a certain level.

And since a return to the hyper-frequent posts of the blog’s early years simply isn’t possible for me at this point in my life, and since I’m not ready to turn out the lights here just yet, I’m going to propose a third approach.

(more…)

Riveting stuff, eh?

Ok, so Ansel Adams it ain’t, but it was (for me) a strange experience: equal parts relief, satisfaction, queasiness, and vertigo. As a literary critic, I regularly teach and write from the knowledge that the work of art or music or literature or criticism becomes a separate entity from its author once it’s launched off into the great wide open. And of course, blogging or writing scholarly essays or publishing magazine articles is a variation on this experience writ small: relatively low-stakes but nevertheless very vividly felt experiences of sending words out in the world to be one’s ambassador. So standing on the threshold of my own book being inflicted upon the world is more a difference of emphasis than of kind from my life in publishing so far.

Still, this book represents not just a really big chunk of my intellectual, professional, and emotional existence over the past three or four years. It is (as books are wont to be) also deeply intertwined with my sense of myself intellectually, autobiographically, and psychospiritually.

One of the prefaces to the shape-note gospel songbooks I deal with in the book’s second chapter (Dortch’s Gospel Voices No. 1, published by C.H. Robinson and Co. in N.C. in 1895, to be exact) has a wonderful line in it by the book’s editor and chief songwriter. Toward the end of the preface, after describing the merits of his book, the author closes with a Chaucerian-style direct exhortation to the book itself:

Go thou, and do thy work! Strengthen the weak, comfort the sorrowing, bind up the broken-hearted, lift up the fallen, save the lost, and when thou returnest lay many precious sheaves at the Master’s feet.

With apologies to Greg Kihn and Co., they just don’t write ‘em like that anymore.

I’m not sure I’d want to make such lofty claims for my own book, but at a certain level I get where he’s coming from, I think, and understand the giddy sense of anticipation and possibility about one’s work in the world, laced with a thread of anxiety (maybe no one will like it; maybe no one will even read it), which in turn induces a slightly overextended set of claims about the potential significance of one’s own words (Dortch’s is a good songbook, but it’s not all that … I mean, whose work - at least among us mere mortals - could be, really?). And yet, and yet …

Anyway, if you pre-ordered a copy of Then Sings My Soul, or order a copy now, it should ship within the next few weeks.

There’s more from the same event here and here (h/t, Derek). Think a good thought for Eloise Phillips while you’re at it.

I’ll stipulate that as popular cinema goes, the movie isn’t half as good as Houston’s worst music. But like Houston’s career (she was booed at the 1989 Soul Train Awards by those who thought she’d sold out to white mainstream audiences, and perceptions of Houston as pop-music race-traitor persisted throughout her professional life), Joyful Noise is tangled up in a longstanding debate embedded in gospel music about race and cultural authenticity in American religion.

[snip]

[T]he gospel dimension of Joyful Noise is almost entirely rhetorical and gestural: we know this is a movie about gospel because it has lots of flashy robes and swaying (mostly but not all black) singers, because it takes place in a rural Southern church, and because its main characters deliver themselves of pious paeans to the sweet, sweet spirit summoned by soulful singing in the gospel tradition.

As for music that sounds recognizably like what most people would consider “gospel,” there is very little to be heard here. Which to say, Joyful Noise is not so much about gospel music as it is energized by what I’ll call a gospel sensibility.

The full thing is here. Thanks, as always, to the range of comments and responses around here that unfailingly help sharpen my own thinking as I write.

And for me, this is not just a southern gospel thing. For nearly three years in my twenties I attended a high Episcopal cathedral in Duluth MN not least of all because the dear old sainted dowager at the organ was unabashed in – quite literally, I think – pulling out the very best, or at least the very lowest, stops for the last rousing verses of all those grand old hymns of the Anglican brethren and sistern and in the process springing the lock on my musical soul and setting me as free as the clerestory windows were high and incense-encrusted.

But no matter: another confession I must make for this to make any sense is that I’m not really an audiophile. I like good sound and I complain bitterly at bad sound (cf any random half dozen of the last 10 years of NQCs) but I’m not the guy who shells out hundreds of dollars for gear with precious-metal-plated plugs or speakers whose cost rivals the GDP of some developing nations. I just like to be able to hear a well calibrated sound mix projected through some audio equipment of respectable quality.

Still, a more-than-decent pair of monitor quality headphones made their way into the Avery headquarters yesterevening, and I spent an hour or so moving my way through selections in my playlist of favorite southern gospel. And though I still don’t see any reason to bankrupt oneself on audiophilic toys, these monitor headphones do separate the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chafe, and the folks in southern gospel who know how to mix in the bass lines and those who … well, don’t. Worse than those that simply don’t bother with much of anything meaningful below a baritone’s range, are those mixes that power dump the lows into the track, swampifying everything, and producing the aural effect of Novocaine injected directly into one’s ears.

So let’s hear it for the Hoppers and Greater Vision and some Gaither and Goss and Haun stuff, among others, who seem to get the value of a deeply satisfying bed of shapely low notes that flow beneath the arrangement – without going flaccid or fouling the mix – and in the process creating a satisfying foundation on which to build upward and outward into a heaven of harmony.

At least, this is what’s possible when you’re accompanied by a musician of the caliber of Tracey Phillips, who is arguably southern gospel’s greatest living pianist. Leonard Bernstein once conducted an entire piece with his eyebrows, but I suspect even he wouldn’t have been able not to wave his hands at least a little if Phillips had been playing.