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The Music Memory Project is working to extend and build upon efforts to preserve the vast array of artifacts from American music’s twentieth-century golden age:

Music Memory is continuing the work started by the collectors and researchers in the 1950s and ’60s. We share their passion to keep the history of our musical heritage from being forgotten and are committed to preventing that from happening. As of October 2012, we have digitized more than 10,000 records on location at the homes of several prominent record collectors. Our goal is to build a database complete with audio, discographical information, artist and composer biographies, song lyrics and notation. Our hope for this database is that it will serve as a musical Rosetta Stone for future generations by showing the links and cross-influences of the many musical styles captured on phonograph records in the first half of the 20th century.

Follow the project’s progress here.

Over at First Things, the new Mumford and Sons new album, Babel, came in for some criticism recently:

Mumford and Sons are a kind of musical Pinterest. They “collect” without really linking together a variety of quaint, beautiful, and touching things. A little gospel here, a little Chesterton there, a little waistcoat here. Because of their penchant for gathering any and every sartorial, lyrical, and instrumental oddment, their coy references to the gospel and GKC become just the “pinning” of another striking and well-wrought thing. We don’t know if they’re Christians (or indeed if they have any existential commitment), or if they’re just aesthetic reactionaries of a limited type. Eclecticism precludes evangelism.

The whole problem is well represented by their name, “Mumford and Sons.” It suggests history, tradition, the passing down of something real—above all, the transmission of blood. But Marcus Mumford is not in a band with his sons; in fact, he has no sons at all.

It’s not news when Mumford and Sons music gets panned (though it usually comes from rock purists on the left rather than theologians on the right), and usually M&S wouldn’t be news here period.

But I’m making exception this time because 1) my blog, my rules, and 2) the reviewer’s critique participates in species of authenticity-mongering that I’ve always found rather baffling both within and beyond southern gospel.

Southern gospel fans know authenticity-mongering well, whether you know it or not. If you’ve ever delivered yourself of a rant about the preeminence of the classic quartet (or heard Uncle Flapjacks in line at the NQC Pork Fritter stand declaiming in this vein), you know whereof I speak with the phrase “authenticity mongering”: picking some preceding tradition, style, moment, or achievement and using it as the proof text for all the ways today sucks or gets it wrong. Authenticity mongering is a kissing cousin to good-ole-dayism, but goes a step farther: For the authenticity-mongerer, it was not only better before … whatever and whenever it is. The thing “before” must be also reified and transformed by memory or simply the act of conjuring the past as sanctified and pure - superior, at any rate, to whatever practice today that may make reference to or have been influenced by teh [sic] one true way in the past.

In the case of the Mumford and Sons critique, the problem with this perspective is that assumes those things to which M&S make reference in their pastiche style of music and performance betoken an earlier era of superior authenticity of soul or spirit or values. In this earlier moment, it is imagined, cultural productions mobilized Christian belief and religious thought into metaphysically engaged action in ways that present practices - namely, M&S - only imitate in a shallow and hollowly derivative fashion.

By mixing styles and aesthetic traditions in their songs and stage presence, M&S are not sufficiently “historical and committed,” we are told. It’s a curious indictment that relies on profound misperception of history. It would seem that to the reviewer here, musical performance is only authentic whenever it either recreates a particular historical moment or tradition with the commitment and dedication of a Civil War reenactment, or else … what? Creates an entirely a new thing untouched by the past (as if there’s anything new under the sun), or only one part of this vaunted past? Which part? It’s so hard to tell.

What really seems to grate here for the reviewer is that M&S music affiliates itself with religion - that is, their songs claim the right to religious ideas and feelings - while also refusing to claim an overt theology or elevate a specific doctrine or confessional tradition above else in matters of belief or values. So the music acknowledges the influence and operation of the sacred without preaching or dogmatizing (not to be confused with bombast, which - and the reviewer is right about this - M&S seems to partake in over much).

There are of course a good many people (like the reviewer in question here) for whom this kind of spiritual idiosyncrasy is anathema (calling M&S “nostalgic and subjective” is not a compliment). But that doesn’t make the underlying worldview morally specious in the way this review would suggest. In fact, increasing evidence suggests that the M&S worldview, if you will, is on the rise among the rank and file: the same day I first read this review a few weeks ago, I saw new research out from Pew that finds a continuing increase in the “Nones” - people who may claim the value of religious inclinations in their lives without choosing to align those inclinations and impulses with congregational traditions and beliefs. My own research into American religion suggests that the rise of the “nones” isn’t necessarily an increase in their prevalence. Rather, I’m more and more convinced the “nones” have always been around in pretty large numbers. What’s increasing is the willingness to come out, if you will, as a “none.”

It would make sense, then, that this shift would get registered in other parts of culture, like mainstream commercial music (and it’s not like this hasn’t been happening for a long time now … Amy Grant, call your office). Why can’t - why shouldn’t - religious belief and an impulse toward the spiritual and an orientation toward the divine or the unseen or unknown or the I’m-uncertain-it’s-there-but-still-exert-the-will-to-believe exist alongside and be inflected with more sublunary insights and impulses?

Big breath.

This whole authenticity rap reminds me of how some folks in southern gospel like to ding non-quartets for betraying the all-male quartet tradition, as if that era’s commercial success is evidence of a spiritual purity and artistic authenticity. But the “classic quartet” was itself just as much a derivative of a derivative as what came before or after. True, this style was successful enough to blot out the popular memory of most of what came before for the people who came after. So we fetishize that moment as more authentic in southern gospel. But there’s nothing intrinsically superior about it.

Similarly, this knock on M&S here about the group’s alleged failure to be sufficiently “historical and committed” relies on a useful fiction - but a fiction all the same - that there is a transcendent signifier out there - The Thing From Which All Else Is Derived and on which everything else is built. I realize that’s probably not a bad working definition of God for a lot of folks, and that’s fine. But not for nothing has heaven been called the choir invisible. Among other things, the phrase ought to remind us that everybody’s soul in this vale of tears is singing in its own key, that that key fits a given time and place, and that no key is more or less authentic than another. That’s not to say we can’t like some sounds more or less, but taste isn’t a synonym for authenticity of commitment or purity of belief conveyed in song. If purity is the test of authenticity in music, then we’re all frauds and fakes recycling the same basic constellation of sounds of the Western major scale and concepts of North American popular music at some level.

Look, I don’t have a brief for M&S. A few friends whose tastes I usually trust have recommended it to me and I’ve downloaded the most recent album, but to be honest, I’ve only sampled a few things spottily and while I plan to hear them out in full at some point, nothing jumped out as immediately unmissable. But even if it turns out I hate the music, I’ll go down to my last blog defending their right to be mediocre in a way that meaningfully and authentically signifies for them.

I blog to you today from the sunny island of Sanibel, where the annual Sanibel Island Writers Conference is underway. I gave a reading from Then Sings My Soul yesterday afternoon and will be leading a set of workshops on blogging later this weekend.

To any newcomers trickling in from the conference: welcome. To the regular crowd, please carry on with your regular comment-thread insurrections, mutinies, and general mayhem in as Christ-like a manner as possible.

While we’re taking a gander at gospel groups dredging up 1970s tunes, here’s GVB covering “One Voice,” which is - oddly enough, given that it’s a Barry Manilow song - a casebook example of one of those stand-and-deliver performances of flatfooted virtuosity that gospel types love to rave on about (this “flatfooted” bidness is on my mind because I recently had to explain to a non-sg friend of mine that noting when a group comes out on stage and nails their set flatflooted is a compliment to talent unadorned - for the most part anyway - by gimmickry of various sorts). The rest of medley of old standards, which get the Full Gaither Treatment, ain’t bad either.

*Actually it’s kinda nice to hear them struggle with some of the note placements in the big staggered ending (though to be fair, it’s mostly English struggling and the rest of them trying to keep their vocal balance whilst he wobbles). Given the plastic-furniture quality of so much digitally canned gospel music out there these days, it’s getting to the point where the only way to know you’re hearing something even remotely resembling an honest-to-gawd live song - and not some stratospherically stacked work of illusory vocal architecture ginned up by the sound guy’s finger on the backing-track slider - is to encounter a few earnest flaws and honest flubs. Which isn’t to say there’s no track in the mix here, just that it’s not so overpoweringly present that the live experience gets tracked to death.

In today’s installment of our “Just Sing” series, an illustrative of example of what happens when singers don’t just sing (h/t, KC).  To wit, the Hoppers, reviving an old 70s tune, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.”

Never mind the fact that I liked the second verse better the first time the Hoppers sang about this idea when it was called “That’s Him.” It’s being touted as the Hoppers’ first ever concept video. Ok. But one does wonder: why is the concept of filming singers while they sing and splicing in staged vignettes that illustrate particular aspects of the lyrics’ narrative … why is this just now occurring to the Hoppers? Didn’t, among others, the Speers do this (though much more creatively, I’d add), like, three decades ago?

Well, no matter. I’m probably not the target audience here. And if you’ve got to put Connie (or Claude) solos on albums (and you do, of course), this ain’t a bad way to generate some traffic around a tune that probably would otherwise languish. Still, I think every youth lock-in from the 70s and 80s that showed those melodramatic and badly acted end-times movies attempting to scare kids into the arms of Jesus called, and they want their video back.

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 child, gleefully chased greased pigs in public and lived in a single-wide trailer with a lean-to addition and considered the wearing of shoes in summer a form of punishment - warms the cockles of my still-latently hillbilly heart. Money quote:

Harrison’s ultimate contribution is to take seriously the value systems and social identities of a powerful demographic often misunderstood in contemporary society. In doing so, the project resonates with special relevance in a culturally-fragmented election cycle that has seen the POTUS declare his vigorous support for gay marriage (to resounding applause and boos) and the religious right declare its vigorous support of Chick-fil-A (to resounding applause and boos).

The old hymn “Sweet By and By,” beloved in Southern Gospel circles, promises that “in the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.” During this crucial iteration of the culture wars, which never seem to be quite fully won nor yet fully lost, Harrison’s book complicates our sense of who “we” are and where that “beautiful shore” may be. He makes us believe that even within fundamentalist evangelicalism, these borders are not nearly so fixed as we might have supposed, and that they may yet be open to crossing.

Tipton has a few thoughts on y’all’s reaction to the book as well. Check it out. Full text here.

Ask and ye shall receive. I’ll be back after a brief commercial break (aka my day job).

So there’s this - a story about how Korea has transformed the creation and production of pop music into a cultural export. Reduced a three stop process, the transformation relied on three main factors:

1) Korea decided to produce pop music like it produces cars.

2) Korean record labels transformed the way music was released.

3) Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world. So early on in their development, record labels had to get good at YouTube.

It’s a lot more complicated than that, and I recommend listening to the audio of the full story, which is much more developed than the online excerpt. But in any case, on the one hand, I’m encouraged by the story of a music industry and culture that’s managed to comprehend, embrace, and maximize the potential of new media culture and commerce to invigorate the musical enterprise. It demonstrates what the American music world could have been/done if the technological nativism of the RIAA and that crowd hadn’t poisoned the well of good will between producers and consumers in the digital age.

On the other hand, if Gangman Style is representative of the product here, that’s a pretty damning indication of the aesthetic impoverishment of the system (which maybe shouldn’t be a surprise given the approach here is akin to assembly-line automobile production). Whatever else it may be making (including loads of money for someone), any system for which Gangman Style is a hit ain’t making good music.

Today is the 30th anniversary of what is understood to be the birth of the mass-market cd. Given the very reliable transition to new technologies in the music industry just about every 30 years, nobody may care or even remember to mark the cd’s 40th, or maybe even its 35th. So dust off that old Billy Joel disc and enjoy!

Unless you’re a typical southern gospel fan, in which case, you probably think the cd is finally coming into its prime, thank you very much. At least, I have members of my family who only started regularly buying cds and NOT primarily listening to their gospel music on cassettes (pronounced CASS-sets) within the last ten years, which means … I don’t really know what, except that southern gospel has never been accused of rushing into new technology, and somewhere there’s probably still somebody enjoying their favorite Inspirations music on an 8-track player.

Now if y’all will excuse me I’ve got to go turn the crank on my Victrola a few times.

So the NQC post-mortems have rolled in, including reactions to the announcement of NQC’s 2014 move to Pigeon Forge, and the responses range from mixed to meh, it would seem.

As for this year’s convention, comments here reinforce what folks on the ground and near to the heart of the NQC mothership have indicated to me: that attendance was down again (perhaps as much as another 7% from last year, which must have been pretty demoralizing, since there were plenty of empty seats already) and the music was for the most part pretty uninspiring, despite an improvement in the sound system (hear the same canned music you’ve heard every other year … but even more clearly!).

So maybe a move makes sense. Shake things up etc.

But still … Perhaps it’s because I’ve never known NQC anywhere other than Louisville, but the relocation to Pigeon Forge deepens a sadness that’s laced my NQC experiences for a while now. Indeed, my first reaction to the move, after I gave it some thought, was that southern gospel is finally, belatedly and irrevocably acknowledging that the NQC is no longer a national event.

Sure, it’s probably not been one for a while now. And it’s not just NQC: southern gospel has been not-so-slowly falling apart under its own lassitude and being sold for regional scrap for lo these many years (an insight that I assume was uppermost in the minds of the Memphis Quartet show braintrust). But as long as NQC was anchored in a major southern city and housed in a space befitting the storied history of the event and the great tradition of the music itself (Freedom Hall is, like southern gospel, old and a little sprawled out, a bit frayed at the edges but able to contain multitudes all the same, even if these days it’s mostly empty seats and karaoke), it was still possible to suspend your disbelief for a few moments every year in September … close one eye, squint with the other and experience the great gettin’ up grandeur of gospel in its highest glory.

And now, in Pigeon Forge? I dunno. Of course I’m sure I’ll give things a shot at NQC’s new digs in Bird Crossing. That is, unless the convention center indeed turns out to be only floor seating, in which case, I refer to you the image below, which is not only a screen shot from the video recording of a major NQC showcase in one of the big wings at the Kentucky Fair and Expo Center - the Kingsmen Reunion back in the 90s - but also happens to capture pretty much the exact position and quality of view I had from my floor seat in row 800. This basically sums up my entire life experience with cavernous expo-hall concert venues. Pigeon Forge is not worth a floor seat.

But I digress: when I imagine telling my non-southern gospel friends that I’m going to the National Quartet Convention in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, I’m struck by a certain amount of self-discrediting implausibility that’s built into the very idea of anything truly national happening in place with such an obviously regional and culturally clannish name (not to mention the planes-trains-and-packmule ordeal it will be to get there for those of us who aren’t within driving distance). The NQC in Pigeon Forge sounds “national” in the way that breakfast is intercontinental at the International House of Pancakes. Why not just pack up and move everything to Possum Trot, Alabama, and complete the diminishment?

Ah well. Here among the shadows in a lonely land, we’re a band of pilgrims … slouching toward Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

This is probably only new to me - because I am hopelessly late to most mainstream culture stuff like this - but tonight Avery HQ screened Bernie, a Jack Black/Shirley MacLaine/Matthew McConaughey flick about a swishy smalltown southern funeral director … but I repeat myself (seriously though, this really does seem like a movie at some level about the costs of repression for the southern gospel sissy). Anyway, near the beginning of the film, there’s a “Love Lifted Me” cameo - it’s the Florida Boys, if memory serves, though I’m sure the commentariat will correct me if I’m wrong - that charmingly captures the jaunty folksy surface - and  the undercurrent of endearingly warm souled feeling - that so often bespeaks  small-town southern sweet-tea gospel-and-gossip pietism. It immediately won me over, at any rate.

Rollicking fun, idn’t it. More soon on NQC post-mortems. In the meantime, if you want to enjoy the song above without Jack Black’s character’s instrusions and you can’t find the box in your basement that contains the LP on which the song originally appeared, you can indulge yourself with a digital copy on iTunes.

NQC ‘12 kicked off today with the announcement that this is the next to last year for the festivities in Louisville. In 2014*, NQC will be moving to Pigeon Forge. Goodbye to all that, indeed.

More on this later, but my initial reaction is A)getting to Pigeon Forge is going to be a lot more difficult than flying into Louisville and B)too bad they didn’t move it to Dollywood, since, like Dolly, the NQC takes a lot of money to look that cheap.

The floor is yours. Let us know how this almost last year in Louisville is going.

* corrected from before  

NQC 2012 kicks off this weekend and this will I think be only the second time in 20 years that I won’t be attending. This year, the externalities of real world obligations have come to encroach so mightily as to make a trip to Louisville  even impossibler than it normally is in the middle of a semester.

But it’s also true that the deep ambivalence that has marked my last few experiences at NQC suggests that it might worth my while to get some distance on the whole ordeal. I enjoy (or want to) live blogging the event and taking it in with all its musically outsized and spiritually bombastic style. And maybe a year or so off will give me the freshness of perspective the next time I find my way to Freedom Hall.

Fortunately we have an embarrassment of riches in the hivemind of Avery’s readers. Tomorrow I’ll post a NQC ‘12 open thread where I hope all y’all in Louisville or listening on live feeds share your experiences and thoughts and reactions. We’ll have our own virtual convention here.

My publishers at the University of the Illinois Press asked me for an interview about my southern gospel book recently, and the results of the conversation are now up. Among other things, we talked about some of my favorites discoveries in the research process:

Q:  What is the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book?

Harrison:  One of my favorite discoveries in this line was from an 1892 songbook preface in which the editor (and author of many songs) not only extols the virtues of gospel music in his book but also excoriates church choirs for their perfidious effects on church music and the progress of the soul more generally:

As a rule, church choirs are an abomination in the sight of the Lord. They are only efficient in the worship of God when they are used as leaders of the congregation. If those, and those only, are saved, who sing in the church choirs FOR THE GLORY OF GOD ALONE, the Lord will not have to build many additional mansions. They generally whisper, write notes, turn over the leaves in the song book, and play the fool generally. No extra charge for this discovery, for making it now.

I love this, both for its sassiness and for how it conveys the deep personal and spiritual investments that gospel has always inspired among its partisans and exponents, for whom the music has never been just a way to sing sacred songs, but is also for them a way of life with consequences here and in the hereafter.

The entire thing is here. The exchange also got an afterglow shout-out from the folks at the Columbia University Press. If you haven’t already bought six or eight copies, insert the old emcee’s joke about our limited supply of product being reinforced with another limited supply from the bus if this one runs out.

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 asked, depending on one’s spiritual perspective, does this song make you want to drown your sorrows in a beer or “take up your bed and walk”? Does it induce sadness and despair or glorify Jesus Christ?

Music reflects the song of our soul, but what condition are our souls really in? Do we really have faith in God, or is Heaven merely an escape route out of physical suffering and pain? Do we really want to see Jesus or get out of paying taxes? Is it more about the physical troubles and trials or more about the spiritual victory given to us as a gift on the cross of Calvary?

Normally at this point I’d say, for my full answer, go read the book. But then, this reader has already done that, so rather than repeat slightly paraphrased versions of what’s in the book and that you can read for yourself (if you’re interested in this line of questioning, I address it most directly in Chapters 2 and 3), let me offer a series of thoughts.

First, on the question of southern music and existential escapism, I’d recommend two books and one article: on country music as a means of articulating a theological worldview, see David Fillingim’s Redneck Liberation: Country Music as Theology, and Tex Sample: White Soul: Country Music, the Church, and Working Americans. For a more direct engagement with southern gospel’s use of the hereafter to address the woes of the here and now, see Fillingim’s contribution to More Than Precious Memories, “Oft Made to Wonder.” If you’ve read my book, you know I take strong exception to Fillingim’s argument in the Precious Memories essay that suffering doesn’t matter in the southern gospel worldview. In fact I think the opposite is true (a version of my argument can also be found here, ca. page 41-44).

But no matter: as to the direct question about what kind of impulses a gospel song like “Farther Along” activates – “does this song make you want to drown your sorrows in a beer or ‘take up your bed and walk’? Does it induce sadness and despair or glorify Jesus Christ?” – I guess I’d say, why can’t it be and do both?

Faith isn’t a graspable fact (no matter how much one may wish it to be) - at least not to the extent that we can easily say, she has faith, or he doesn’t. Or rather, we may hear people put these words in that order when they speak, but what is really meant is, he strives to be faithful, or she works to live out a certain vision of faith in life and so on. Faith is an existential orientation toward a set of aspirations for life here (and for most of the religiously faithful) hereafter.  Though orthodox theology and official religious culture as it’s preached from the pulpit tends to speak of faith as if it’s an objective thing that you either possess or don’t, I think most of us can admit to ourselves in the small hours of life that that’s not where most people live. The Apostle knew the score when he described faith as the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. In other words, faith is a term for what fills the space between the way things are and the way we want or need them to be – the way we believe they ought to be.

When you understand or approach lived religion as a perilous passage of negotiation between ought to be and is, then the creations and productions of religious culture – such as a southern gospel – matter not primarily because they show us what it means to be a “good” Christian or a “faithful” saint. Instead, the primary value of something like gospel is as a language of feeling to express and hold in productive tension two potentially conflicting positions: I have faith, but I often don’t feel like it. Or, as it’s been put in song: I believe, help thou my unbelief (“I long so much to feel the warmth that others seem to know … but should I never feel a thing, I claim him even so” … and Gaither songs are particularly eloquent at musically evoking faith as equally alluring and elusive.).

There are plenty of folks who can blink away this disparity, chalk up the persistent gap between orthodox doctrine and unorthodox experience as the work of sin in the world, and then head back in to Bible study almost merrily announcing that yea though he slay me, yet will I trust him. Or at least, there are plenty of folks who spend a lot of time insisting on these things.

But for just as many or more people, there have to be meaningful ways to validate the real threat of quiescence and despair or even just the low-grade doubts and griefs that constantly trouble the surface of faithful living – but without surrendering the identity of a believer in good standing within the membership of the faithful.

Gospel music isn’t the only means of doing this – of letting people participate in a form of religious experience that can simultaneously unite them with the wider community of the saints and sanctified, while also taking seriously as a fact of life the fallibility and negative feelings of ordinary living. But gospel is above averagely good at accomplishing this psychospiritual balancing act. Which is to say, folks wouldn’t sing “Keep on the Sunny Side” at the top of their lungs if they didn’t know how easy it is to slip into the dark side of things.

The original comment on which this post is based mentions the Civil War and the legacy of grievance, mournfulness, and general social struggle it bequeathed to many poor and working class white southerners. Just as I argue in the book that the origins of modern southern gospel are inextricably bound up in the social and economic and political  fallout of the Civil War, it’s also true that gospel still bespeaks a way of life that is for most people who live it still very much is (or is perceived to be) a struggle – spiritually and materially - descended from the rural white southern life that was forged during Reconstruction and beyond. Gospel still puts that way of living and looking at life to music.

Compare this to the gestalt of the big suburban non-denominational megachurches. Is anyone really surprised that the emotionally univocal music of Praise and Worship has flourished in this part of the evangelical world, where religious authenticity is defined not by celebrating how you got over (as it long has been and still is in the gospel universe) but by the radiant ardor with which one expresses one’s unalloyed faith? If what is prized above all else is the blunt force piety of so much of today’s non-denominationalism, you really do need to sing that chorus six or seven or ten or eleven times to convey to yourself and others and God just how much you really mean it. It’s not so much “I believe, help thou my unbelief.” Rather, it’s “I believe … I believe I believe I believe, Oh Lord. I believe I believe I believe.”

I think gospel continues to resonant among people for whom life above-averagely keeps ever before them a host of enduring threats to belief and faithfulness as it is defined by their religious traditions, people who are on close terms with experience that balks and baffles and mystifies the soul’s progress - or at least have been taught to value narratives of spiritually struggle as character defining. At some point, it’s not enough to sing only about how wonderful it will be over there or about just how much one believes. One needs also to loudly and proudly declare the mystery that will only be solved farther along down the road - and do so with a little close harmony.

Which isn’t to say that devotees of Praise and Worship or any other genre of Christian music always suffer less or believe more, or more easily. Only, that suffering and believing happen in different proportions that are at least in part regulated by the material realities of where and how one lives and what one has been taught to value - just as the struggle between drowning one’s sorrows in a beer and taking up thy bed to walk takes a lot of different forms in lived religion. The extent to which southern gospel sounds different than Praise and Worship or black gospel or CCM or the Mormon Tabernacle choir is the extent to which folks sing about life in the key that comes naturally to their experience of struggling to balance the beer and the bed in their own way.

Across the transom this a.m. trundles this announcement from the southern gospel convention singing world (h/t, SS):

The first Singer’s Glen Music and Heritage Festival in five years will take place in the village outside Harrisonburg, Virginia, September 22-23.

According to Dale MacAllister, a Singer’s Glen resident, “The Festival is very much on. . . . Practice for the Singers Glen opera is going well, in fact is ahead of schedule. The opera, really the main focus of the Festival, will be held Saturday, Sept. 22, at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., and the third performance will occur on Sunday, Sept. 23, at 2 p.m. The Harmonia Sacra sing will be Saturday, Sept. 22, at 5 p.m.”

Singer’s Glen, you will recall, has deep historical and symbolic significance for southern gospel as the birthplace of the Ruebush-Kieffer music publishing and education bidness that had such a profound effect on A.J. Showalter, James Vaughan and other early twentieth century titans of gospel song in the South. The Harmonia Sacra is the landmark tunebook of shape-note hymns and other sacred songs published by Aldine Kieffer’s grandfather, Joseph Funk, in the mid-nineteenth century.

And an opera! … Well, glory.

I wish Dean Adkins or some such southern gospel collector with troves of great images from back in the day would do the equivalent of this for southern gospel.

Via the winds of Mount Listmore blows in a video of the Sisters Ruppe staging a vocal transfiguration of “It is Well” at Stephen Hill’s funeral.

With no disrespect intended to the departed, it’s really too bad that these days it seems like a funeral is often just about the only place you can reliably go for musically enlivening southern gospel.

The Daily Mail has a story about the J.D. Sumner du jour, Tim Storms, who holds the current world’s record for lowest human voice. Here he is gutting it out with Amazing Grace:

From the news report:

The man who holds the record for the world’s lowest voice can hit notes so low that only animals as massive as elephants are able to hear them.

U.S. singer Tim Storms can reach notes as low as G-7 (0.189Hz). That’s a remarkable 8 octaves below the lowest G on a piano. So low, in fact, that even Storms himself cannot hear it.

‘I can feel them though,’ he told CNN. ‘I kind of hear them in my head as far as the sound my vocal chords are making but, as far as the frequencies, it’s something more or less that I feel.’

Indeed, though some of us have far less of a feel for this sort of stuff than others.

Sure, there’s enough of a popcorn and circuses dimension to extreme singing that I clicked through to the video, but I stopped listening after a few seconds. For people who like this kinda thing, this is the kinda thing they like. I’m just not one of them. The ability to sing this low bears about as much relation to creating enjoyable vocal music as the ability to play scales at superhuman speeds has to do with good piano. Fortunately, when these kinds of feats are done really well, I can neither hear nor see them. Perfection.

Discussing her recent piece of creative nonfiction, “FamilyFest,” for CALYX, Lynne Casteel Harper reflects on the hard-to-tell parts of family life that never get told in the always already beatified atmosphere of the Homecoming worldview, and how that beatific talk about the family permeates life on and offstage:

I actually have some affection for southern gospel music and the groups I’ve come to know over the past few years.  I enjoy, in moderation, the tight harmonies and the un-ironic happiness exuded from stage. But when I found myself immersed in this intensive environment for three days, I simply could not ignore the deeply troubling way the event had merged faith with a particular portrayal of family.  The fact that only certain versions of family were given the microphone—and only these “family stories” could enjoy public narration—got me thinking about all the audience members whose families did not fit the sanctioned narrative.  It got me thinking about my own stories.

The wedding of faith to one kind of family narrative haunted me, particularly as I began to consider my friends [whom I write about in the essay] (“Melody” and “Justin”) whose theology was similar to the theology represented on stage but for whom these idealized notions of family had shattered in the face of hard realities.  The sacralizing of a particular narration of family does not just happen on the gospel music stage.  My long weekend of immersion in this “Family Fest” family hit this fact home to me.

Harper’s essay is here; the complete interview is here.

(BTW it’s worth noting that Harper’s husband, Ryan, is doing perhaps the most extensive scholarly work to date on the Gaithers and Homecoming. While we’re all waiting expectantly for Ryan’s Gaither work to be published, check out his recent essay on Promise Keepers in Religion and Popular Culture).

Thanks to everyone for all the good wishes via Facebook on Avery’s 8th blogoversary yesterday. The magazine Religion Dispatches gave me a bloggy birthday present of interviewing me about my new southern gospel book this week. The interview is aptly titled “Still Captivated by Southern Gospel.” A taste:

Q: What inspired you to write Then Sings My Soul? What sparked your interest?

A: [Snip] I can’t narrow it down to any one person [or event]. But when I think about the earliest influences or memories that evoke the strongest feelings, two people and tableaux consistently come to mind. One is my paternal grandmother, Maude, singing gospel in church and at home in the rural Ozarks of Missouri where I grew up. As Maude would have said, she couldn’t read a lick of music, but she had an excellent ear for how to bend the curve of a melody line and for providing powerful yet subtle harmonies. Before she’d sing a solo at church, she’d write the lyrics to the song out in thick black marker on the blank backs of cardboard box tops and rehearse at home, accompanying herself with the guitar until I became old enough to provide the accompaniment on the piano.

And then there’s Maude’s friend Maxine, who had a smoker’s rich throaty alto but who made her biggest impression on me as a pianist. Maxine played in this capaciously graceful, wide-stride gospel church-lady style that was almost completely improvisational and entirely intuitive, and it mesmerized me from my earliest recollections.

I’m not sure what Maude or Maxine would make of the book, but both of these women, I now realize, were galvanizing examples for me of gospel’s open-hearted sensibility and the way it dispenses with the confinements of the notated score or the precisely placed arrangement and trusts the musical self to be guided by the soul’s intuitions as they unfold in vernacular sacred song.

Full thing is here.

And so begins Blog Year 9.

That’s how a new comic novel describes American Copyright law:

Reid does believe in the sanctity of intellectual property. But he thinks the penalties for copyright infringement in the U.S. are so extreme that they wind up being counterproductive.

“When the law gets stretched to such a cartoon extreme — $150,000 penalty for pirating a single 99 cent song — we cease to look like victims of property theft who deserve to be protected,” he says, “and we start looking more like a coddled interest group.”

I don’t have any experience with copyright infringement cases, beyond believing that there’s a big moral difference (and there should be a much clearer legal distinction) between me making a copy of my favorite Rambos’ CD to share with my mother or giving a copy of an .mp3 to a friend, on the one hand, and, on the other, full-blown black market operations. But this sense of galactically-proportioned entitlement of the media industrial complex that Reid pinpoints has certainly pervaded my limited experience with the big corporate music publishers.

When I’ve tried to secure copyright licenses to reprint lyrics in my scholarship, it really has often seemed to me that most corporate publishers rely on gold-plated aliens to set the fee schedule for licenses to reprint lyrics (in a non-profit educationally-focused academic books and journal articles no less!*). But it’s not only the money. I always tried to be proactive and cooperative and patient in my dealings with publishers, and I did my best to be thorough and responsible in complying with the often internecine layers of application processing required for a license request to even receive consideration. Yet it often seemed that no matter my effort to reach a reasonable deal that satisfied everyone’s needs and interests, the corporate attitude toward our interactions - and this isn’t just unique to one or two publishers - was (more times than not) impatience bordering on truculence, and not-very-latent hostility, as if I were trying to legally rob them (certainly felt like the other way ’round to me).

One notable exception was Brentwood Benson, whose personnel were unfailingly helpful and cooperative, and professionally respectful. Mind you, they still charged a license fee that strikes me as entirely out of proportion to the market value of the song and the academic use being requested,*  but after dealing with so much high-handedness from so many other places, I was almost happy to overpay Brentwood Benson just for their being nice when they held me up sold me the licenses.

And I had it easy comparatively. A colleague who just published a physiology textbook wanted to start each chapter with a thematically appropriate song lyric that might catch the attention of your average college student. Her publisher tallied up the price to secure all the lyrics she had proposed to use (no single lyric more than a line or two from the song): $1.3 million. Royght.

This kind of the nonsense is in the spirit of what Reid, the author quoted above, is lampooning in his much-viewed TED talk on the $8 billion iPod:

I should be clear here that I’m not condoning or supporting the kind of flagrant and actively malevolent piracy that leads to dozens of bootlegs of American blockbusters and chart-topping albums being peddled like knock-off Rolexes on the street. That’s wrong. Don’t do it. Etc.

But just as there are (according to an economist quoted lower down in the story) not only direct but indirect costs to piracy that we should be aware of and take seriously, there are also oft-overlooked costs to the overamped hyper-fixative fervor of the anti-piracy mindset in the music industry, among whose secondary (and I would hope unintended) consequences has been to make it more difficult for people who love or are otherwise interested in your music to write about it commercially* and in the process expose that music to people who might then … you know, go buy more music and stuff.

*Footnote: Before you start flying to your keyboards to point out that somebody’s getting rich off the subscriptions to academic journals of the sort I’ve published in or on a book like mine whose hardback edition is upwards of $80.00, I’d refer you to articles here and here about the cost model for peer-reviewed academic scholarly publications - short answer: nobody’s getting rich off academic monographs, which are very different from textbooks.

From the great American composer Marvin Hamlisch, who died today. Hamlisch wrote the music for “A Chorus Line” and “The Way We Were,” among many others:

“I’m not one of those people who says, ‘I never read reviews,’ because I don’t believe those people,” Mr. Hamlisch said. “I think they read ‘em. These songs are my babies. And I always say, it’s like having a baby in a hospital, taking a Polaroid and going up to someone and saying, ‘What do you think?’ And he goes, ‘I give you a 3.’ That’s what criticism is like. You’ve worked on this thing forever – ‘I give you a 3.’ And it’s part of you. That’s the bargain you’ve made.”

Hamlisch knew the score. May he rest in peace.

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 for that music to not to seem new/different/strange/just enough like AND unlike whatever it is that’s going on in southern gospel at the time - a process that usually takes about 15-30 years - at which point southern gospel “(re)discovers” it (whether a specific song or a general style) as if all good gospel music was so much fine (but non-alcoholic!) wine that had to age into its finest form quaffed from one of the increasingly empty seats at a Homecoming Friends show. Mind you, this is a fairly untested theory that’s driven mostly by anecdote and somewhat selective evidence. So your mileage may vary. Whatever. My blog. My crackpot bootstrapped theories.

To wit: “I’ve Just Seen Jesus.” Here’s a tune that came out in what? 1983-84? At the time it was solidly a CCM/inspo hit (and Larnelle Harris and Sandy Patti were solidly CCM/inspo personalities). Because it’s a Gaither tune, and “Gaither” is synonymous  with southern gospel Homecomings these days, it’s easy to forget that at the time of its first appearing, “I’ve Just Seen Jesus” was stylistically quite remote from the mainstream of sg.  In fact, when you strip away the Gaither penchant for symphonic bombast and orchestral overkill in ballad arrangements, “I’ve Just Seen Jesus” is conceptually indebted more than just about anything else to the residual influence of the Jesus-people/Christian folk tradition, or, at least, its effects on Christian entertainment.

The effects were somewhat time delayed (showing up in Christian music about the time the Jesus People movement and Christian folk traditions were in decline), but very real all the same: Witness all those histrionically meditative first-persony quasi-folk ballads that dominated the Dove Awards in the late 1970s and into the ’80s (Don Francisco, call your office): for instance, “Rise Again” (Dove Awards Song of the Year 1978), “He’s Alive” (SOTY 1980), “El Shaddai” (SOTY 1983), “Via Dolorosa” (SOTY 1986). (And depending on how affected/afflicted you think Dottie Rambo was by all the Kumbaya-ism that had general run of the place in some parts of Christian music leading up to this time, you might want to throw “We Shall Behold Him” [SOTY 1982] into the evidentiary mix as well …. My instinct would be to include it, because I think southern gospel is too quick to assume that Rambo’s sg roots make all her work an example of “our” music, which seems to be fairly disputable, but that’s another discussion for another day).

In roughly that same time period, southern gospel was showing lots of love to songs such as “Standing on the Solid Rock” (SN Fan Awards SOTY 1978), “Sweet Beulah Land” (SOTY 1981), “Step into the Water” (SOTY 1983), and “When He was on the Cross” (SOTY 1985 AND 1986).

The stylistic and conceptual differences between the sg and CCM songs from this time period are real and legitimate, but then as now, in the southern gospel world, those differences aren’t just cast as matters of taste or culture, but as matters of theology and, frankly, degrees of saintliness. It’s not just that your garden variety southern gospel crowds don’t like CCM; it’s that this new-fangled crap is theologically unsound, possibly subversive, and probably spiritually corrosive.

Of course like any feud, this one is not entirely one-sided. As I note in the book:

There was a “mutual distrust and wariness emerging between white gospel traditionalists and the more progressive musicians coming of age in the 1970s and 1980s. This dynamic is borne out in conversations I have had with industry leaders. One record label executive I interviewed told me a story about attending the Dove Awards in the 1980s with several prominent industry leaders from white gospel, including figures who had helped found the GMA and its awards show. Upon entering the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, where the awards were being held, two of the most prominent CCM artists of the day conspicuously refused to interact with the gospel businessmen. For their part, the white gospel executives did not stay long, walking out halfway through the show, disgusted by performances of notionally Christian music that were to them indistinguishable from the most profane pop and rock acts of the day.

I don’t want to excuse the boorish behavior of the CCM artists (when they’re dead, I’ll tell you who they were), but the salient point here is that for CCM folks, they just don’t spend that much time thinking about southern gospel one way or another. Then or now. While the sg’ers response is still striking for unhesitatingly imputing - quite literally - bad faith to Christian music that was stylistically different. And this was precisely the era in which “I’ve Just Seen Jesus” was coming into popularity and a bunch of other songs pretty much like it were winning SOTY.

Fast forward three decades, and southern gospel audiences are throwing babies from the balcony for Phelps and Ranahan reviving a Sandy and Larnelle act that was part of a CCM universe assailed then and now by sg for its impiety and secularity. The main thing that’s changed is that the stylistic center of CCM has continued to follow trends in mainstream pop and rock, making CCM’s 1980s hits seem staid and conventional today - which it to say, just right for southern gospel.

A few years ago I ran the gist of this theory by a songwriter friend of mine who works in CCM and sg, and his basic response was: meh … perhaps. His counter-theory is that Gaither is the magic super-solvent in the conflict between CCM and sg. In this view, Gaither’s influence has been so vast in both worlds, and his intuition about how to stage and style songs from a range of Christian music genres for sg audiences so sharp, that, essentially, southern gospel crowds would wave glad hands and fall out in the aisles for just about anything from DC Talk to Barlow Girl as long as Gaither put some Lari Gossified string beds behind it and had David Phelps sing a double B-flat above middle C at the end.

And this may well be true, but I don’t think the two theories - my friend’s and mine - are mutually exclusive, not least of all because when I listen to a lot of the “new” music coming out of the average sg groups these days, it sounds like nothing so much as an uninspired imitation of the inspo-poppy side of CCM 15 and 20 years ago. Let Gaither be Gaither, but it sure seems like southern gospel has become a kind of shadow circus trundling into town behind CCM and catering to tastes of the villagers who are slower to accept or more reluctant to adjust to the newest fangdanglery in Christian entertainment.

If I’m right (and I spool out a more considered and well-supported version of this argument - with footnotes! - in the book), then this would be an ironic reversal within what used to be known as the “white gospel” world (that is, the continuum of music that we today classify as southern gospel, inspo, and PW): back in the day when the eminence grises of southern gospel were storming out of the Dove Awards and generally cutting ties with CCM, it was ultimately because CCM had taken the leading edge of southern gospel’s most contemporary sounds (think the Speers’ more conceptually innovative material with Harold Lane, or the early Singing Americans, or the Nelons’ edgier stuff) and extended it outward to its stylistically logical conclusions, gave it an aesthetic makeover that sold well with a younger generation of fans whose tastes were attuned to mainstream television celebrity (not the less aesthetically sophisticated convention singings, quartet conventions, or all night sings of southern gospel), and generally let themselves be led by their far less inhibited instincts. IOW, CCM was - commercially speaking at least - a more highly evolved southern gospel.

For a decade or so, CCM and sg evolved on more or less their own tracks (in fact, I think that list of sg SOTY winners from the 1980s holds up at least as well and probably better from a creative and stylistic perspective than the CCM SOTYs from the same time period). But by the early 1990s, the inevitability of demographics was hastening sg’s rapid decline into the ranks of a marginal religious music subculture. Yes, there was what appeared to be a rejuvenating surge in the 1990s: Greater Vision formed, Gold City had a second-wind revival, the Cathedrals ruled, the Ruppes went national, NQC moved to bigger digs in Louisville, and so on. But even these developments were riding waves that started in the 80s, and remind me more of that burst of energy the dying sometimes exhibit just before they take that final journey to join the choir invisible.

Gaither of course moved (back) in to sg around this time with Homecoming, and he did such a brilliant job of selling the golden age of southern gospel back to itself that everyone cruised along merrily into the new century with a (false) sense of security about the future. Only in southern gospel is a phenomenon built around the dead and the dying considered a lifeline.

But now even Homecoming is showing signs of nearing the end of its shelf life and the thing “everybody is talking about” (besides David Phelps’s hair!) is a cover of a 30-year-old hit from a part of the Christian music world that southern gospel at best tolerates, at worst, actively disdains. Whatever else may be the organizing force of southern gospel’s relationship with CCM, historically logical coherence is not a principle feature.

The most generous explanation I can come up with is that sg has had its back turned to mainstream Christian music so long that no one can realize or admit how heavily southern gospel has come to lean on CCM’s back catalog in order to stand upright.

My favorite Gaither Kool-Aid drinker, regular reader KC, sent me this official youtube release from the Gaither Mothership of the Larnelle Harris David Phelps and Sandi Patty Roseanne Roseannadanna Lana Ranahan covering “I’ve Just Seen Jesus.”

“Everyone is talking about” this clip, the mothership tells us in the youtube blurbage. Uh huh.

But certainly this is one of those big show-stopping warhorses that Gaitherland does so well. It speaks to the astonishing ease with which Phelps has been pulling off this stratospheric stuff for so long now that there’s really not much to say (other than that it’s astonishing how easily he pulls off this stratospheric stuff, but then that’s all been said before right?).

If I were going to quibble, it’d be with some of the oversung flourishes with which he seems to be ornamenting more and more of his line-endings. It reminds me of Loren Harris near the end of his days with the Perrys, when his renditions of “I Wish I Coulda Been There” sounded like they were being sung in the lost language of bored singers. Harris was no slouch in his prime, but of course Phelps inhabits another planetary system of musical talent entirely. And well … I guess I wouldn’t find it too hard to believe if Phelps were getting bored with this material. Then again, what is there left for him to do?

Oh … and speaking of doos … somebody needs to tell Phelps that his new doo is a big don’t.