Then Sings My Soul —
My publisher just passed along news of this review of Then Sings My Soul, from Sojourners Magazine. Money quote:
In a musical culture he describes as being known equally for its gratuitous showmanship and bonhomie, Harrison finds a simple answer [to why southern gospel matters]. If what speaks to your soul happens to support your worldview, all the better. But […]
Until more regular blogging resumes for the new year, two links to semi-recent responses to The Book:
First, a long, thoughtful review from the good folks at Southern Spaces. This is the kind of review one hopes for - not because it’s universally complimentary but because the writer took the time to read, think about, understand the book […]
Over at ReligionDispatches, Carrie Allen Tipton has written a gracious and thoughtful review of my southern gospel book, Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music. It’s not only the first serious academic review of the book to appear. It also manages to work in a Honey Boo Boo reference, which - being someone who, as a […]
At the end of a long, thoughtful response to reading my book and reflecting on the spiritual and cultural labor performed by a variety of hymns and gospel songs in a southern cultural tradition of lamentation and world-weariness, a regular reader posts a link to “Farther Along” and then writes:
I guess the question could be […]
Listening to that “I’ve Just Seen Jesus” clip I posted yesterday, I was reminded of one of my pet theories about the shifting centers of southern gospel taste that surfaces from time to time.
(Not so) Succinctly stated, it’s this: that southern gospel’s alleged distaste/disdain for Contemporary Christian Music really only lasts as long as it takes […]
As you might have seen, David Bruce Murray has made the case for the other JD - JD Sumner, rather than James D. Vaughan - as the “one person [who] contributed the most to the Southern Gospel industry we have today”:
Every significant group in Southern Gospel today has been affected by some past act of J D […]
Of southern gospel, that is. That’s a question that both Daniel Mount and David Bruce Murray have both seized on in responding to Then Sings My Soul (DBM also goes another big step further here, but I’m going to stick to his more direct response to what he read of my book for the purposes of this post). Particularly, Mount and Murray have taken […]
The unfolding TBN scandal we were discussing a while back made the big time on the front page of The New York Times this weekend. The usual litany of excess in which the Crouches so conspicuously indulge is recited at length, but we’ve already covered that ground here.
So two things, in a slightly different direction.
First, reading the article’s discussion of the “chauffeured […]
Over at southerngospelblog, Daniel Mount reviews Then Sings My Soul. Kudos to Daniel for turning around what may be the first post-publication review of the book.
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 […]
Earlier this week the University of Illinois Press sent me an advance copy my southern gospel book. Here I am holding the thing itself in my hands for the first time.
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 […]
Since I posted information about my forthcoming southern gospel book, there’s been some chatter about the cover, and specifically some curiosity about the image. One reader wondered about the propriety of using the image of these four celebrities to grace the cover of this book, which seems to take for granted a far greater symmetry […]
Regular readers will know that the past year or so has seen a diminishing number of posts around here. Y’all have done an excellent job of running the asylum in my pseudo-absence, so I won’t apologize (not least of all because many of you probably don’t really miss the sound of my e-voice). But the […]
