First off, I am a fan to the ‘nth degree. I just love to watch Libbi Stuffle. That said she was sick. They tried their best not to feature her on several tunes. Which is like running your car on bacon grease. Slippery at best. I was most surprised by the lack of material they did. In an hour’s time, 8 songs. Lib struggled through 4, ending with PKTC, before they took a break. Which from stem to stern lasted 27! minutes! I understood the goings on: Tracy talked and talked and talked and talked and fired up the ol’ chainsaw, and talked some more so that Lib could rest her voice for the next 4 songs. The big numbers, Did I Mention, Prior to A Prayer (one of the highlights of the evening for me), and ending with If I Knew Him.

Troy Peach, imo, faltered at times; his more country style doesn’t match the rich tones that come out of Haby, T and Lib. He is a beautiful harmony singer tho. JoJo was good, for the most part. He tried his best to fill the gaps that were left by Lib’s vocal struggles. She overcompensated on tunes in a lower register, sometimes hitting the big notes a little too big. Sick or not, though, her nuance and subtlety when she could muster the strength was perfect. D.I.M. is a great tune. I know you aren’t big on the lyrical construct, but they sell it.

The venue: full and rowdy. In all of the singings that I have been to in my life, a Baptist church in Springfield, MO, the rowdiest? People were whooping and jumping into the aisles during all of the faster songs. And, the place was packed. I showed up 5 min. late and had to wedge myself between a group of teens and a harem of blue hair’s in the balcony. I’d say 600.

Item No. 2: a Hoppers Live in Greenville album without all the talking.

One thing we’re focusing on is to find and hit (really good) songs. It’s a consistent theme. The problem is….good from who’s perspective. It’s like no one can seem to agree on what is a good song. Obviously, what we’re doing is not working in that regard. We have only had one number one song in [many] years. So…I will work on that.

It’s a fair point: Good songs are tough. You can’t throw a free “Jesus Got R Done” t-shirt through the Freedom Hall Expo Center without hitting an artist bugging a writer for great songs, man, we’re looking for your best stuff … I mean, the next “Champion of Love” or “The Lighthouse.” Well, yeah. Who isn’t.

I’m sure some important music has emerged from this kind of solicitation. But as much as anything else, artists need a gut check on this kinda thing. If an artist is struggling to find and record great songs, the problem isn’t going to get solved by relying on songwriters to give you their best stuff. Most songwriters have a catalog of songs ready to pitch to artists at any given time. They’re  holding back what they think is their best stuff for artists who have proven an ability to take ownership of the music they record.

For the downmarket groups, this means your energy would be better spent working on imprinting your own style on songs rather than harassing songwriters who aren’t going to give their best stuff to a b-list group anyway. But for the established groups of the sort my correspondent is a part of, the salient point here is that you not only need access to songwriters’ best stuff - is this a good song in general? - but also an instinct for song selection: is this song good for us, can my guys and I sell it, can we make it good, bring it to life, give people a reason to care about it and us? (Insert old chestnut here about George Younce adding that “step … in .. to … the water” bass lick to Talley’s original song and thereby illustrating the difference between finding good songs and making great music).

Or, if you don’t have that sense or don’t trust it, find someone who does.

Or (and this is increasingly the more common path for most groups), create the impression or the appearance in the fans’ eyes that you have someone whose instincts on “good” music you and they can trust. This is what Rodney Griffin has given Gerald Wolfe, especially now that Griffin’s well’s started running dry. The conspicuous drop-off in the quality of his output since, say, the Quartets project (their last really fine album with some good Griffin pieces on it) doesn’t matter that much. Why? Because it became settled law years ago that Rodney Griffin writes Great Songs and Gerald Wolfe and Greater Vision support Great Songs from a Great Writer.

The Perrys are trying something similar, I gather, with Joseph Habedank. His writing has promise but so far has been marked by creative indiscipline and conceptual underdevelopment, but the Perrys are going all over God’s green gospel earth telling folks that this boy can write as well as he sings … just listen here to our new song. And off they go. Expect to see Habedank’s name on the favorite songwriters ballot any year now.

Ernie Haase has taken a slightly different route, surrounding himself with superb writers in Joel Lindsey and Wayne Haun, and – as far as I can tell from reading liner notes and song credits – appending his name on the co-write line in several instances. How much he does or doesn’t contribute to the creation of the song is immaterial (and I have no reason to think he doesn’t contribute something, however out of proportion it may be to what Lindsey and Haun are bringing to the writer’s table). He’s got bankable writers helping him create bankable songs that he can stage around the idea and image of his own ongoing quest for the divine musical light, both as a singer and a writer, as gospel artist and faithful scribe to movings of the spirit in southern gospel.

All these examples make me think that No. 1 songs aren’t really the best metric for good music. The SN chart measures plenty of things (primarily how much you pay your radio promoter) but not really great songs. There’s no accounting for taste and all that, but I’d say less than a quarter of the songs that go No. 1 are really “good” songs, if good is taken to mean performatively engaging, creatively influential, and historically lasting both in their appeal and performance.

People don’t remember a song because it went No. 1; they remember it because it makes an abiding impression in some original yet recognizable or familiar way (here we might note that the definition of a good song also overlaps with the definition of style: easy to recognize, difficult to define, and impossible to imitate). What that “way” means for any given artist … well, there’s your $64K question, and usually the answer has less to do with the formal features of the song itself and more with the atmospherics, optics, and style unique to the artist or group.

If I were a more enterprising blogger, I might suggest an interesting experiment in blogsourcing: like, say, having everyone email their favorite SN-Fan-Award nominated artist(s) and ask them if they’re going to the show or not and then report back on the results in comments. The answer probably depends on whether record labels or the SN/SGMA are comping or partially underwriting/discounting nominated artists’ tickets, I guess.

Incidentally, anybody know about how many seats are available in the Dollywood space where the awards show will be held?

For all the excitement about blogs and the media coverage of them, blogs have not yet become recognized by a majority of internet users. Only 38% of all internet users know what a blog is. The rest are not sure what the term “blog” means.

Full report is here (pdf).

“Mother Willa Mae” worked with Thomas Dorsey in the early days of her career and was either instrumental in or stylistically influential on (or both) the careers of many mid-century black gospel stars: The Barrett Sisters, Zella Price Jackson (she also makes a vocal cameo here), and of course Mahalia Jackson, who like Smith possessed a rich, booming, powerful and profound voice and who, also like Smith, relied heavily note-bending and phrase slurring. Though Mahalia Jackson turned funeral gigs into a record deal with Decca and went on to international fame, Smith remained firmly affiliated with the more paraprofessional and evangelistically focused National Association of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, Dorsey’s brainchild, analogous to the singing convention movement in white gospel.

As a result, Smith recorded very little (there is at least one live performance that was released on Savoy Records, but I’ve yet to be able to locate a copy) and remains far less well known outside the world of black gospel music than her commercially successful contemporaries like Jackson and Rosetta Tharpe. Which is too bad, because she’s a force of nature, able to generate an astonishing presence and musical immediacy. Fortunately, her life and some fine recordings of her singing late in life are preserved on the fantastic 1982 documentary, Say Amen Somebody, recorded in St. Louis, where Smith lived, and organized around a tribute concert for her at the Antioch Baptist Church in near north city.

At this point, she’s in her 80s and her voice is less controlled than in her younger years, but she’s lost none of her ability to convey the irrepressible spiritual urgency of gospel music when it’s really good. Here she is singing, “I’m Bound for Canaanland,” a fantastic example of black gospel’s special brand of artful artlessness:

Smith sang this song all of her career, but it achieves a special poignancy here in the context of her age and the wistful nostalgia with which she approaches reflection on her life in the documentary. That first chorus - “I’ll be so glad … to meet … the prophets … and the others … gone on [the way she ornaments this phrase alone is worth the price of admission] .. before!” - the way she manages to convey the song’s emergence from the depths of her being - “between the bone and marrow,” as she says - and her sense of where the center of the melody is even when she has trouble placing the vocal ornaments so essential to her style, and the manner in which she bodily eases herself down off the stage, into the crowd, as if a big lovely angel arriving in heaven … it’s a breathtaking achievement … of talent trumping the effects of time, of someone’s very own inner light brought to life in song, of an artist holding the inexpressible barely but beautifully in expressive equipoise.

And for a bonus: here she is keeping alive her lifelong rivalry with Sallie Martin, another of Dorsey’s discoveries.

Touche.

It’s a strange experience, blogging. I’ve been at it - albeit on an idiosyncratic schedule - for over five years and at some point, the fact of needing/wanting to blog even when I’m not able to became an abiding part of my daily life and mind and experiential DNA. I’ve always got a running list of things to blog, always hearing things - musical or otherwise - and wishing I could blog and drive at the same time, or teach and blog, or write a book and blog, or sleep and blog simultaneously. And of course moderating comments keeps averyfineline ever before me. It doesn’t do readers much good that I’m thinking about the blog almost constantly even when I’m not actually blogging, but I mention it at least as a way to say these hiatuses aren’t just benign neglect. Rather, they’re like Clark Kent unable to find a phone booth, or Popeye without spinach, or Peg McKamey with shoes that fit too tightly.

Faith I am maintaining
I go on, uncomplaining,
But, before this time, another year.
My life may all forsake me,
And death may overtake me,
If I’m with Thee,
I’ve no need to fear.

Make my pathway brighter,
Make my burden lighter,
Help me to do good whenever I can.
Let Thy presence thrill me,
Thy Holy Spirit fill me
And hold me in the hollow
Of Thy hand.

Part of me thinks I’ve heard the song before, but then again that could just because it relies on a fairly common set of stock images from gospel songs (or maybe I just really really like that first couplet so much I WISH I had encountered it before). I don’t know that it’s exclusively a black gospel tune but certainly the fact of its being in a novel about a black gospel singer would suggest it mostly likely comes from this tradition. Of course, this all assumes Baldwin didn’t just make the song up for the purposes of his novel. It’s possible, naturally, but I don’t think this is likely, since I’ve been able to identify and find recordings for pretty much every other song he references in the text.

At any rate, and assuming the song is real, I’ve searched high and low on the internet, or at least as high and as low as I can go, with no luck. I also find no references to the song in the secondary scholarship on the book and Baldwin that I’ve looked at so far. Obviously I’m a little far afield from my expertise with white gospel here. So I’m turning to your collective knowledge. Any chance any of you know of the song and/or where I can find a recording?

Hi its [xxxx]. I know you spoke to [xxxx] in my office at one time. I kept your song on my IPOD….. I  am going crazy over your song!!!!!!! UNBELIEVABLE!!!! I played it for President Obama, and he cried!!! He said it was his heart song….He said it painted his path so clearly of what God wished for his presidency. I just wanted to share this with you. If your in the DC area sometime, Id love to have you come by the White House. Not sure when we can plan this…But, it would be AMAZING….

WOW!! Great moment…the Lord fell…..

If I had smarter interns, they’d probably have come up with an audacity joke or something. But I don’t, so you’re gonna hafta talk amongst yourselves on this one.

Some random thoughts:

1. That’s a really fine song.

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

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

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

 Band members Gary LeVox, Joe Don Rooney and Jay DeMarcus wanted to recognize the 80 or so songwriters who have contributed work to the group’s six studio albums. So the guys booked the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum and threw a big party with food, plaques and singing.

“We just wanted to say thank you,” LeVox said. “We don’t just have professional relationships with these cats, we have personal relationships with them, too. We are always touring and they are always writing, and they are always traveling and we are always traveling, and after 10 years of being able to do what we love to do it’s a big, huge milestone. We just wanted to get them all in here to say thanks for a wonderful 10 years.”

But the trio did more than that: They asked the writers to each bring along two songs to pitch for the band’s next studio CD.

Until Taylor “Maybe She’s Not the Best Technical Singer” Swift at the Grammys, I would have said that Rascal Flatts is probably the most pitch-challenged act in country music today, but they get major props for treating their songwriters so well.

Perhaps needless to say, this contrasts mightily with sg. My gospel songwriting correspondent,  who writes for top-tier groups, had this to say:

If, like we all are fond of saying, it all begins with song - then wouldn’t it behoove artists to treat songwriters like Rascal Flatts does?  I can’t tell you how often artists contact me - desperate for “hit songs” - and then, after I send them a stack of my latest/greatest, I hear nothing…(crickets)…not a “thank you” - not a “I got them and will give them a listen” - nothing.  Total silence.

I do understand that it can be awkward to respond, specifically, to a writer about his songs - especially if you don’t love them all.  But I’ve had scores of artists who’ve gone on to record my songs - even singled them - and I wasn’t extended the courtesy of a single note of thanks or even a copy of the product itself.  I’ve joked that I’ve actually spent more money purchasing CD’s of my songs than I’ve made from royalties off those songs - assuming that I was even paid royalties!

I don’t know if artist in SG are ignorant, rude, over-extended, or a combination of all three.  But I do know that what Rascal Flatts has done should serve as an indictment to all artists who take for granted the hands that feed them.

Anyway, I’ve been so deeply and abidingly impressed with Ellis’s subtly and gracefulness at the keyboard that I think I kinda made that silly fanboy mistake of not remembering that artists don’t always make professional decisions that I like as much as their music.  In any event, good luck, Justin.

Fowler gets a lot wrong politically – mostly recently Ollie North (!) and Mike Huckabee – and one could wish that prominent evangelicals in southern gospel were half as courageous in denouncing the fringers amongst them as they are positioning themselves as victims of pervasive anti-Christian bias from the stage. But it’s good to see someone of some recognition push back against the likes of Robertson.

If I had my druthers, I’d say just give money directly to the Red Cross or other relief organizations that have a more encompassing mission and presence than Fowler’s recommendation of Compassion International, which - in addition to being slathered over with Sally Struthers-style hucksterism - focuses (rather narrowly in this particular crisis) only on children. And too, I guess it’s grading on a pretty steep curve to give credit as if it’s some accomplishment when an evangelical celebrity simply comes out in favor of, you know … helping people in need and stuff. But such is the state of allegedly Christian discourse in America today (see here for some cogent reflection on the penchant amongst prominent evangelical preachers toward outrageous nonsense). Let’s take sanity - and small-c compassion - where we find it.

Some people find this state of affairs disrespectful and appalling, others think the HOF is effectively money changing in the temple of southern gospel memory, and others think the inductees and/or their heirs or estates need to pony up in recognition of the honor bestowed upon them.

All caught up, now? Good, because now things get interesting (or not … I’m working with the material I got here folks).

Comes then Melvin Klaudt, of the Klaudt Indian Family, who doesn’t really seem to have wanted his mother honored by the HOF in the first place, resented a $2000 invoice for her HOF plaque  showing up in the mail, and wants her plaque to come down. Now.

My mother, Lillian Little Soldier Klaudt was inducted in 2004. She had a picture on a plaque for a couple of years. Unknowing to us, this was changed to a bust that cost $2,000. Our foundation, Klaudt Indian Memorial Foundation, was billed $2,000. for the bust after the fact. There is an ethical question besides a financial obligation attached to this. We, according to our 501 c 3 public charity IRS ruling couldn’t take the funds out of the foundation to pay it in the first place.

[snip]

Finally, my mother has other more important spiritual things to lay at the feet of Jesus than a SGM hall of fame plaque.

Full disclosure of the $2,000. must be disclosed to the public who are excited to nominate somone deserving of this award. I seems like everything else, lets just buy us an award. SGM is eat up with awards. Every year there is a new one.

I beg the Hall to remove my mother from this honor and remove her name from the deadbeat list. She evidently does not deserve it.

Full comment here.

Tonight, Harold Timmons, of the Chuck Wagon Gang, wrote in, begging to differ with Klaudt:

While I do respect Mr. Melvin’s Klaudt’s opnion, I do challenge his position on asking that his Mother be removed from the SGM HOF wall for any reason. The Chuck Wagon Gang worked with the Klaudt Indian Family many times during the ‘60’s and even into the ‘70s at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. The Klaudt Indian Family and The Chuck Wagon Gang were regular members of the highly syndicated TV series, “Bob Poole’s Gospel Favorites”. To me, the Klaudt Indian Family are unique unto themselves, as of Indian Heritage as well as involved in “Southern Gospel Music”. It was a board of directors who recognized Mrs. Klaudt and her contribution. It was the voters who agreed with the nominating committee, who in essence bestowed the honor of inducting Mom Klaudt into the SGM HOF. How on earth can anyone, even a family member, ask that Mrs. Klaudt removed for any reason?

Southern Gospel Music in some aspect works on a play “B” almost daily, and most certainly there could be a plan “B” in situations on the SGMA HOF list. This could be a family split of the dues due, or fans or friends, or even some businessmen.

Full comment here.

I really don’t have a dog in this fight. I’d much rather see the HOF focus more on bolstering its curatorial dimension in order to become a hub for the preservation and study of the music. But then again, that costs money and if selling HOF plaques is a way to raise money that supports a worthy, underlying cause, so be it.

In any event, though, one does have to wonder how hard the HOF is really trying to fund these plaques if, as Timmons says in his comment, da Gang was unaware “that no contributions had been received since [Anna Carter Gordon Davis’s] nomination” and only learned of the situation “by recently visiting this site.”

(For the record, and before Charlie Waller puts a check in the mail, I have decided to forgo my HOF Plaque Funding Broker’s commission.)

Amy’s face still graced the cover of CCM that month, but the story printed only loosely resembled the one I wrote. Gerald forced my editorial director to rewrite the story. The new story featured Amy miraculously apologizing. Her quotes were fabricated and molded into something that didn’t represent her story or my story, but rather a story that reflected the moral absolutes Gerald believed CCM hadn’t upheld until he was in charge.

The whole thing is here.

Update, also via NG: two links, one to a page that appears to link to the CCM article in question, another that appears to be the raw transcript from the interview on which the article was evidently based. Now what would really be interesting to see is Turner’s first draft … the one he said Gerald threw on the floor.

• Via Daniel Mount, Jason Crabb just won a Grammy for his solo album. I reviewed it here if you want to refresh your memory or catch up on things.

• The Mike LeFevre quartet  is no longer Priority and is now back to being the LeFevre quartet.

• KPNR has hired a replacement for Devin McGlamery and Mark Trammell quartet hired the Dixie Echoes’ bass singer away to round out the new MTQ.

• The Singing News Fan Awards are moving to Dollywood. I think the consensus opinion that has emerged is about right: it’s a dumb move from both ends. On the NQC side, we get more predictable high hat: in this case, it probably involved something like giving the SN a take-it-or-leave-it offer to turn the awards show into a ticketed showcase in the afternoon. For the SN’s part, they clearly seem to have felt they had no option but walk away, and Charlie Waller’s involvement in the new arrangement will probably mean he can deliver a few hundred GOGR folks to ensure the place isn’t empty on awards night. But in terms of industry profile and influence, Dollywood and the Hall of Fame are pretty much an axis of irrelevance (see here for Exhibit A).

• Welcome southerngospelworld to the sg blogosphere.

• I’m pretty fond of the Bowling Family’s new single off their Shine album, “I Still Glory in the Cross,” particularly the ascending chord progression in the chorus (make sure you catch the final chorus’ revoicing of the parts!) and the lines that make like they’re going to rhyme lost with cross but don’t … that kind of lyrical mutability helps keep music as reliant as gospel is on familiar tropes and images from going too stale (there is a so-called listening party for the album over at GospelMusicUpdate). Plus the title gave me a reason to go back and listen to Larnelle Harris’s rendition of “I Will Glory In the Cross,” which still knocks the top of your head off.

What else?

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything’s going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records – and I have – and try to distil what they all have in common it’s a sense that somehow we can triumph. There could be many thousands of things. But the message… well , there are two messages… one is a kind of optimism for the future rather than a pessimism. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it’s never ‘oh my god, its all going down the tubes’, like the blues often is. Gospel music is always about the possibility of transcendence, of things getting better. It’s also about the loss of ego, that you will win through or get over things by losing yourself, becoming part of something better. Both those messages are completely universal and are nothing to do with religion or a particular religion. They’re to do with basic human attitudes and you can have that attitude and therefore sing gospel even if you are not religious.

The whole thing is worth a read, if for nothing else than the chance to stumble on the phrase “mutant gospel.”

Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been working a lot today with results from the survey I conducted (and many of you participated in) last year, but DBM’s results so far are very interesting, not so much b/c there any real shockers (Booth Brothers are No. 1, natch … and the Inspirations rate pretty low down, but then their fan base is probably less likely to be online too) but because it provides an empirical way to adjudicate all the competing claims out there about what fans want and don’t want etc.  No, Virginia, people really don’t enjoy the Pfeifers (relatively speaking, of course).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Reader Janet boils things down a bit:

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

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

Forget angel bands. I’ll take this sound any day.

• Looks like a former DMB singer may be on American Idol tonight.

• Via Daniel Mount, some more and better Gold City YouTubes are up. The sound quality is a lot better (as is the quality of singing), though the zoom was so far out, I found myself watching via the monitors just like a regular nosebleeder at the concert.

• Speaking of YouTube: suffering through all these crummy, unwatchable, often unlistenable youtube bootlegs that come across the interwebs, I wonder: why don’t groups find a groupie diehard fan with some tech savvy and christen that fan YouTube Videographer for the group, thus guaranteeing that there will always be at least a few quality clips out there in the mix? Because some of the tripe that fans post really just doesn’t do the artists or their appeal any favors.

• My old friend, and one of Avery’s very first readers, The Art Coach (who created this site’s logo), is creating a piece of artwork every day this year and offering it for sale on a first-come basis. Check it out.

• Finally, the Florida Boys (see, I didn’t call them “fake”) created some really bad King-sized crimes against fashion at Graceland recently.

“Wherever” makes us assume Seaton has no plans, because up until a few days before he probably thought he still had a job. “Sadness and regret” may mean he’ll be missed, or it may mean Ernie just hated going through the process of telling him he was no longer part of the group. On one hand, the fans don’t need to know every detail, but on the other hand, EH&SS has been after fans to relate to their collective personalities from day one.

Just so (the whole thing is worth a read; there’s even advice for struggling press-release writers).

This is part of a larger have-it-both ways mindset among artists that’s not unique to sg, but is more pervasive in the insular world of southern gospel, where until the arrival of the internet to Southern Gospelville, artists and insiders were accustomed to creating their own PR weather, telling fans, aren’t you grateful we’ve got these here custom umbrellas for sale at our booth for only $19.95? And then expecting everyone to line up, cash in hand (exact change, please).

Since I started averyfineline, I can expect at least once every year at NQC to get stopped by artists (or their over-involved mothers) who want to complain about this site’s criticism of their (or their child’s) performance. The attitude is always a variation on the same complaint: how dare you disrupt the useful fiction that everything done in the name of Christ is always already good! Oh, I understand why they’re upset, and I’ve always tried to take these complaints seriously and treat them respectfully. But it’s also a source of bemusement to me that artists seek an emotional, financial, even spiritual investment from the world, except when they don’t. Please … over here look at us, look at us! … Hey! What are you looking at!?

In the case of personnel management, it’s of course a group owner’s right to hire and fire personnel as he sees fit, and it’s his right to send out a press release lacquered over with euphemisms and evasions. But when you exercise those rights, please don’t complain when, in addition to those front-row fans who will reflexively approve of whatever decision comes from the top, there is a groan from the peanut gallery.

DBM runs down the particulars of the service and raises some good questions about who owns what publishing rights in this sort of arrangement. The ins and out of the publishing and rights management business are always things I consult friends or contacts in the bidness about, and when I ran this Allman thing by an established songwriter and publisher friend of mine, she replied:

Well, I think it’s interesting.  I’ve heard of similar things before but never at such bargain prices … makes me skeptical of the caliber of “professional” writer being offered for sale here.

I was once offered $500 a day plus travel expenses to write with a singer/songwriter looking to co-write great songs for his record. It was to work just like a regular co-write (I would keep my publishing, he would keep his). I thought it was an interesting offer and I would have done it if my schedule had permitted. A friend of mine who is an established CCM writer was once offered $750 a day to do the same thing; he did it and said he would do it again, if offered.

I will say that if the $50 a month deal includes a demo, that’s quite a deal just for the demo alone.  (IF the demo is half decent.)

This business about the quality of the demo is important. Demos aren’t just the way you get your songs heard; they send important signals about your seriousness and credibility as a writer. Southern gospel is infamous throughout Christian music as the genre in which people record themselves humming a tune in the shower and then send the recording off, as is, to record companies and publishers. Of course it’s possible for great songs to come from this process, but in general, if you’re a publisher looking for music and you hear hoof beats, why think zebras?

So while DBM has a point about rights and royalties, this presumes the songs will get picked up and cut and released. If I were a songwriter wanting experience and a foot in the door, I might try the Allman thing. But before I even started worrying about royalties and rights, I’d first want to know I was getting my money’s worth. Have these writers (not Allman necessarily, but the “other writers” that the site makes reference to) had cuts - if so, what were they? If they’re not pretty recognizable and verifiable successes, then it seems like the customer here would essentially be paying to write with equals more or less (as judged by cuts anyway).

As for Allman himself, he’s made a genuinely intriguing move. I do fear this may be the songwriting equivalent of custom recording companies that will have the effect of glutting an already saturated and creatively impoverished industry with more mediocre songs. Of course I could be – and hope I am – wrong. Better music is music, no matter what process it comes out.

But I confess, I wonder if Allman’s not squandering his own talents a bit by spending so much time and energy writing with people who probably aren’t going to bring much to the table.  (I mean, does he accept everyone with the cash to pay or is there a screening process?)

And this leads to another point: doesn’t it seem like there are an awful lot of mid-tier (and lower) writers out there who are making bank teaching others to do what they can’t even do themselves?  I mean, Chris Allman is a fine writer, but I don’t think anyone would consider him a real player in the industry as a songwriter. Same goes for someone like Jeff Ferguson, who has made a mint off of his “You Can Write A Song” seminars with Clint Brown. Brown, of course, is an established P&W guy, and Ferguson has his own ministry, plus a couple of solid Greenes cuts to boot. But still, it’s pretty amazing how many people flock to these guys’ events based a comparatively thin resume in the songwriting and publishing department.

The real doozy here may be Embassy Music’s Darwin Moody, who has by all appearances made a fine living for years now holding how-to seminars for would-be songwriters, yet his biggest claim to songwriting fame seems to be a co-write with Ann Ballard on the Cathedrals’ now long-ago “Scars and Stripes.”

If you scratch the surface, this sort of thing is everywhere. My songwriter friend told me she recently heard of seminar that promised a bunch of big name songwriting clinicians, only to have them show up, sing a couple of songs, and leave the teaching to the local church staff who had no real knowledge of anything beyond a layman’s comprehension of the music business.

I’ve wandered kind of far afield from Allman, and my point is not that Allman’s service is of this caliber necessarily (too soon to tell, of course). And even if it turns out to be a songwriting sweatshop, he and and all these other people have every right to be doing what they’re doing. But it does serve as a reminder how many people are  out there desperate for any foot in the door they can find, no matter how credible or not.

People who illegally download music from the internet also spend more money on music than anyone else, according to a new study. The survey, published today, found that those who admit illegally downloading music spent an average of £77 a year on music – £33 more than those who claim that they never download music dishonestly.

The findings suggest that plans by the Secretary of State for Business, Peter Mandelson, to crack down on illegal downloaders by threatening to cut their internet connections with a “three strikes and you’re out” rule could harm the music industry by punishing its core customers.

The whole thing is here. I wonder if Gerald Wolfe as seen this.