Since at least the late 1970s, southern gospel's fortunes, measured by market standards, have trended downward, a decline attributed to broader trends within commercial Christian music entertainment and more broadly within fundamentalist and evangelical Protestantism.As the fortunes of southern gospel have declined, those of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) have risen. Joyce Martin Sanders (b. January 6, 1968) lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband Paul, and she has two children. n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_60").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_60", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "bottom center", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); What emerges in The Martins's interview echoes Anthony Harkins's observations about constructed hillbilly rusticity: "Middle-class white Americans [can] see these people [hillbillies] as a fascinating and exotic 'other' akin to Native Americans or Blacks, while at the same time sympathize with them as poorer and less modern versions of themselves. Heilbut, Anthony. A fan's review of The Best of The Martins video on Amazon.com captures this dynamic succinctly: "I wouldn't consider the Martins southern gospel," the reviewer writes, "as their sound is more contemporary but they have a love of the Lord and that comes across strong in their work and their lives. The sisters, Joyce and Judy teamed up with Paul Grammy.com, July 3, 2013, accessed October 1, 2013, http://www.grammy.com/blogs/andy-griffith-dies. The conversation encourages audiences to understand The Martins's music as a cultural practice connected to the Arkansas backcountry. the church almost from the time they learned to talk and, over the jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_56").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_56", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "bottom center", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); A particular Arkansas primitivism merits attention here. Unlike "northern urban" gospel (a phrase with no currency outside academe), it is the preferred way to self-identify within the culture and the most widely recognized way to describe the music to outsiders. Dayton offers an alternative account of "evangelicalism," emphasizing the rise of Pentecostalism and holiness traditions, which, as Jonathan Dodrill notes, "do not seem so bent to ward off liberalism." The trio is now touring in support of their latest release, See Shearon, email to H-Southern Music Network mailing list, March 27, 2009. Mud, set in the Arkansas Mississippi River Delta, powerfully evokes the fluidity of class, ethnicity, and geography as defining features of identity in a region where the flux of life is so heavily dependent on, shaped by, and intertwined with the flow of the river. But professional southern gospel has always been strongly grounded its history and identity in the male quartet. A notable elision in this story—and it points to more general (mis)understandings about the Gaithers's personae—is the role of Gloria Gaither. Judy Martin is married to Jake Hess, Jr., the son of the legendary southern gospel lead singer Jake Hess. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_54").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_54", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "bottom center", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); connecting their identities, the group's history, and their Arkansas roots with the force of southern gospel music. Today southern gospel is found in areas of the United States and lower Canada with concentrated populations of white fundamentalist evangelicals.5For more on the demographic profile of southern gospel see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 175–180. ", 750 W. Hampden Ave., Suite 225Englewood, CO 80110 "That doesn't happen often. Recording companies experienced similar contractions. God's hands.". jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_6").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_6", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "bottom center", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); If, as Anthony Heilbut has noted, "gospel" is a vexingly "vague and inadequate" term for a wide and shifting range of sacred music within Anglo-European and African American Protestantism,7Anthony Heilbut, "Black Urban Hymnody," on Brighten the Corner Where You Are: Black and White Urban Hymnody (New World, 1978, NW-224). jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_15").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_15", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "bottom center", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); Arkansas has undergone considerable stereotyping in the US imagination.16Brooks Blevins, Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ole Boys Defined a State (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2009), 4. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_16").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_16", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "bottom center", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); To speak of an "Arkansas imaginary" in this essay is to conceptualize Arkansas as a site—particularly among poor and working-class white evangelicals and fundamentalists—for the practice of religious life, or "lived religion. Examining the rise of the gospel singing trio The Martins and the deployment of their rural Arkansas roots to shape their popularity in Christian music entertainment, this essay reveals how an evocation of place functions in the practice of religious life within commercial southern (white) gospel music and fundamentalist Protestantism. "Place" signifies a physical location, a material culture, a set of affiliated social relations, and more nebulous meanings associated with place as a concept. peers. "I've many thoughts about the show tonight," she tweeted, "most of which are probably better left inside my head. where she could use the piano and then make us practice and The church is located at 3800 E. Hampden Ave. For information on

Just as I Am: 30 Favorite Old Time Hymns, was nominated for a 1998 Grammy in the same category. In truth, it usually isn't that organized. Douglas Harrison is Associate Professor of English and Assistant Director of the Center for Faculty Innovation at James Madison University. Joyce Martin is a well known gospel singer. Courtesy of Douglas Harrison. Following the rapture is Tribulation, a seven-year period during which Anti-Christ reigns on earth, Millennium (during which time Satan is bound), and ultimately the establishment and eternal reign of Christ's kingdom. It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). Key figures include Ira Sankey (the evangelist Dwight Moody's song leader), Homer Rodeheaver (Billy Sunday's music director), and George Beverly Shea (Billy Graham's most famous soloist). Stephen Marini has provided the most sustained interpretive examination of bluegrass families in southern gospel: Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture (Urbana–Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 296–320. In 2013, the Doves moved back to Nashville, not to the Grand Ole Opry House but to the auditorium of a small religious college in the suburbs (Dave Paulson, "Dove Awards Fly Back to Nashville," USAToday.com, October 14, 2013, accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2013/10/14/dove-awards-nashville/2984327/). Premillenialists espouse a literalist interpretation of scripture that foresees the imminent return of Christ to earth. In its resurgence, one hears from the gospel stage and in other acts of self-representation an intensification of emphasis on social resentment and cultural grievance. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_48").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_48", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "bottom center", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); What continues to distinguish The Martins is their acoustic style full of complex harmonies, modulations, and voicings that reflect influences of country, bluegrass, folk, old-time, choral, black gospel, and vocal jazz styles and arrangements. become a trademark of The Martins. This essay is interested in how the imagining of a place shapes and is shaped by understandings of vernacular sacred music and the shifting identities this music contains. The only subgenre of white Christian music that remains relatively strong is Praise and Worship music, whose fortunes have been buoyed by the demand for choruses in non-denominational evangelical churches. Bill never comes out into the foyer but Gloria does. 3,147) where they became a popular regional Christian music act. After that we did a few Gaither dates, then [we] were signed to Spring Hill Records [a recording company in which Gaither Music had substantial holdings at the time]. Audiocassette. Sometimes this includes, Sales of "Christian/Gospel" (which consists overwhelmingly of CCM and black gospel music, but also includes some southern gospel) reached a high point in 1998, totaling $836 million; in 2012, total sales in the same category were $24.2 million. Beyond the style it captures, this clip points to the structures of thought and feeling that underlie The Martins's appeal and southern gospel music more generally. North American gospel history and the cultural realities of contemporary southern gospel defy further generalization. The Martins's performance of pious authenticity plays out in public in ways that take common celebrity narratives (the underdog or, as in the story below, the innocent) and recodes them within the logic of the Arkansas imaginary. The Gaither interview invites viewers to imagine them as representing a set of hill-country values—a love of hunting, closeness to nature, self-sufficiency, and cultural isolation—that Blevins argues have over the course of two centuries come to stand in for all (white) Arkansans.58The cultural difference between the Ozark/Ouachita and Mississippi Delta regions of Arkansas is aptly captured by/in two recent films. These distortions and elisions are at work in the Gaither video biography of The Martins that points to aspects of the Arkansas imaginary distinct from generalized assumptions about white trash and hillbillies. At the end of the nineteenth century and into the first three decades of the twentieth century, southern white gospel was dominated by convention singings that relied on the regular release of small octavo shape-note songbooks such as Crowning Day. Nominated in the "Gospel/Contemporary Christian Music" category, CCM soloist Natalie Grant attended the ceremony, only to leave before the show ended. Richard A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2000). Pamela Fox has noted that "while academia has for the most part abandoned the authentic as any kind of meaningful analytic category," the vernacular music of southern, white, rustic life and experience has "tended to preserve it. We have those ideas on scraps of paper scattered Goff, On backwoods virtuosi, see Harrison, "Grace to Catch a Falling Soul. Winter's Bone, set in the rural Ozarks, vividly portrays the psychosocial costs of geographical isolation, lack of economic and educational opportunity, and sense of cultural confinement associated with life in the deep woods of Ozark hill country. I have in mind the period in American conservative and fundamentalist evangelicalism inaugurated by Richard Nixon's conjuring of the ", 1990 coincides roughly with the emergence of what would become the, Within southern gospel, "CCM" designates nearly all other forms of commercial Christian music deemed insufficiently pious or overly commercialized (marketed in ways different from southern gospel). All Rights Reserved. When did organ music become associated with baseball? There is an associational—as opposed to primarily musical—logic to this appeal that tracks with broader "patterns of cultural experience and affiliation."