Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 5. See Goff, Close Harmony, 233236, 269274. The church's leadership believed the approach would attract people searching for answers, bring them into a relationship with Christ, and then capitalize on their contagious fervor to evangelize others" (Matt Branaugh, "Willow Creek's 'Huge Shift,'" ChristianityToday.com, May 15, 2008, accessed May 15, 2014, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/june/5.13.html). Nominated in the "Gospel/Contemporary Christian Music" category, CCM soloist Natalie Grant attended the ceremony, only to leave before the show ended. Morris Arnold, "The Significance of the Arkansas Colonial Experience,". Yes she is a gospel singer and her last name is now sanders Is Evangelist Joyce Rogers married? Home News Random Article Install Wikiwand Send a suggestion Uninstall Wikiwand Our magic isn't perfect Before then the music was simply known to its practitioners and fans as gospel. 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. The video cuts from the Hawaiian excerpt back to the homey interview setting. The southern gospel condemnation of CCM has long and deep roots.28Although CCM borrows heavily from mainstream secular music and performance styles, it does so to cultivate a canon of popular music that signifies Christianity's cultural relevance and the music's evangelistic savvy, while claiming a special status derived from CCM's pious commitments to conservative evangelical values and theological positions. Kevin Kehrberg generously included me on a panel he organized on shape-note gospel and its half lives in Arkansas and beyond, and Meredith Doster encouraged me to expand the paper into a submission for Southern Spaces. The cultural difference between the Ozark/Ouachita and Mississippi Delta regions of Arkansas is aptly captured by/in two recent films. Los Angeles, CA: Roadside Attractions, 2010. Gaither Gospel Series DVD cover. To see the King. Indeed, specific aspects of a performer's biography usually only come into play for southern gospel when an instance of individual characteristics, crisis, or great fortune serve to point audiences toward notionally transcendent truths of fundamentalist theology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. "Mom and Dad both instilled that in us that if you had a talent to sing, you should get up. Grove Music Online. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_18', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_18').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); I explore the Arkansas imaginary through the state's most famous southern gospel sibling trio, The Martins, their music, and their reception since approximately 1990.191990 coincides roughly with the emergence of what would become the Bill and Gloria Gaither Homecoming Friends video (later concert) series. See David Fillingim, "A Flight From Liminality: 'Home' in Country and Gospel Music," Studies in Popular Culture 20, no. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_54', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_54').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); connecting their identities, the group's history, and their Arkansas roots with the force of southern gospel music. At one point in the interview with The Martins, Gaither describes their music as "sophisticated," and Judy Martin Hess jokes that Gaither was not saying The Martins themselves are sophisticated, only their music. The values implied by customs and conditions are elemental in stereotypes of "Arkansas" as hillbilly territory. Joyce Martin Sanders Overview Tracks Albums Photos Similar Artists Events Biography More Biography We don't have a wiki for this artist. Many fans and most observers interpreted her actions and words as a rebuke of a mass wedding of gay and straight couples performed during the broadcast. Mae is her 18-year-old daughter. Fox's work on rusticity and identity suggests that any crisis of authenticity in popular music from the South will register across a range of cultural texts and products. "6Not that "southern gospel" never made an appearance before the 1970s and 1980s. Winter's Bone. Lord, is this my time. Actress. 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. 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, 175180. UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012. During the 1990s, The Martins rose to national and international success, showcasing their stunning and distinctive harmonies before a vast array of audiences . The Martins singand their fans enjoya fairly broad range of musical styles and an innovative pastiche of old and new that is often indistinguishable from some of the very CCM sounds southern gospel has long denounced as immoral and worldly. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_7', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_7').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); "southern gospel" brings with it additional layers of interpretive complication regarding race, class, and geography. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_56', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_56').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); A particular Arkansas primitivism merits attention here. Their mother, Wylma, who also is a gifted singer, served as booster and vocal coach for her three children. Clearly this story of The Martins's beginning as Homecoming Friends is important to them because they are depicted in the narrative as so natively talented that Bill Gaither purportedly allows them to perform without ever having himself auditioned them. Judy Martin is married to Jake Hess, Jr., the son of the legendary southern gospel lead singer Jake Hess. At face value, much of The Martins's stylistically hybridized and contemporary music would seem to commit many of the very musical sins that southern gospel culture has long cited as justification for disparaging most other major forms of Christian music entertainment (except, perhaps, bluegrass).47The history and role of bluegrass, old-time, and mountain musics, particularly songs with pietistic lyrics that have found a home in southern gospel, is understudied. As Stephen Shearon has noted, both white and black gospel have "liked aspects of what the other was doing" ever since blacks and whites began singing sacred music near one another in North America. Joyce Martin-Sanders. It is difficult to lend much credence to this account unless Gloria Gaither's opinion and judgment plays a much more determinative role in the Gaither image and Homecoming productions than is generally allowed or assumed. Start the wiki Similar Artists Charlotte Ritchie 703 listeners Bill & Gloria Gaither 10,674 listeners The Isaacs 11,665 listeners Show more tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_63', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_63').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); In considering The Martins's arrival "From Arkansas With Love," I have demonstrated how a network of religious, geographic, and cultural associations merge in the construction of imagined place. She is divorced and has been for some time, but the date of her divorce is not listed. While growing up poor in rural Arkansas, the three often practiced singing together, and released their self-titled debut album in 1994 on Chapel Records. But professional southern gospel has always been strongly grounded its history and identity in the male quartet. "Home" functions primarily in southern gospel as a meaning-making tool for experience in this life, not the next. Trey is 20 and lives and works in Nashville only a few miles from his mom. Joyce is married to Paul Sanders, a singer/songwriting musician, currently a member of the country band, Shenandoah where he plays bass and sings harmony. After Grant's divorce from Gary Chapman, her symbolic function in southern gospel expanded to include the corrupting effect of musical compromises on personal morality and the heternormative family.Southern gospel's disdain of CCM can come off as a kind of "Sister Bertha Better Than You" self-righteousness.27Here, I am borrowing an image first popularized by Ray Stevens in "Mississippi Squirrel Revival," on He Thinks He's Ray Stevens (Universal, 1987, MCAC-5517). "Northern urban" gospel is the historical forerunner of today's Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_50', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_50').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); southern gospel audiences have historically bonded with performers who come to fame through place-based narratives of discovery. 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/). New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. Joyce Martin-Sanders photos, including production stills, premiere photos and other event photos, publicity photos, behind-the-scenes, and more. They live in Columbus, Georgia, and have five children. But it also resonates with less militant but hardly less conservative evangelicalsmostly whitewho respond powerfully to its organizing themes: proud piety, traditionalist notions of family, and unapologetic sentimentality about evangelistic faith and religious community. Dochuk, Darren. Christ's return coincides with the rapture of living Christians and the raising of the righteous dead to heaven. Modern Social Imaginaries. During the last three decades of the twentieth century, these conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists ceased perceiving themselves in the Nixonian paradigm as a silent majority existing voicelessly and invisibly within mainstream US politics and culture. "Southern gospel" remains the preferred term in the study of white gospel music of the South. Claiming a home in southern gospel grounds The Martins in an imagined identity that they in turn hold out for fans seeking models of stability and reassurance in an extended moment of great cultural change and instability for white evangelical fundamentalist religious culture. The interplay of praxis and imagination is crucial. For an extended discussion of the psychodynamics of southern gospel, see ibid., 149. (2004) as Soundtrack Skip to My Lou (1941) New York: Knopf, 2012. Fortunately, new and forthcoming work in the study of southern gospel is beginning to scrutinize Gloria Gaither's role as a Christian entrepreneur, thinker, and writer much more closely. Mike Joyce was born February 12, 1941, in Detroit, MI, USA. : Gaither Music, 2011. Southern gospel's negotiation of them has often manifested in overt racism or a way of thinking, talking, and singing that renders whiteness falsely normative. Decade. The peer reviewers for Southern Spaces provided generous feedback that sharpened my thinking and refined the essay's argument considerably. November 13, 2001, accessed September 23, 2013, http://www.crosswalk.com/1108828/. She tells Bill, "you have to hear these kids sing." Such work is as welcome as it is needed. Biography Mini Bio (1) Joyce Martin-Sanders is known for Gaither's Pond (1997). 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. From Arkansas With Love demonstrates southern gospel's influence. The interviews are actually excerpts taken from long conversations filmed in a homey setting in which The Martins sit side-by-side on a large couch facing the camera and Bill Gaither sits in an overstuffed armchair to the right of the frame. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_23', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_23').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Within commercial Christian music, most white fundamentalist fans and professionals left cold by CCMand committed to traditional modes of evangelistic outreachcoalesced around "southern" gospel. Jennifer Lena has exhorted scholars of music culture to deemphasize sounds and instead examine "social structures and collective actions. Joyce Martin is married to Paul Michael Sanders, who has had periodic jobs as a southern gospel singer. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_35', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_35').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The National Quartet Convention, southern gospel's annual flagship event that at its height in the mid-1990s drew crowds approaching 25,000 for four or five nights in a row, no longer attracts audiences or interest to warrant multiyear leases with the Kentucky Fair and Expo Center in Louisville. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_47', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_47').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Yet The Martins remain beloved members of the Homecoming cast and reputational avatars of gospel traditionalism carried on in the music of a new generation of songbirds. He was very busy and was getting ready for the next day's video. For more on the rise and spread of southern gospel regionally and nationally, see James R. Goff Jr., Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel (Chapel HIll: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 50109; Don Cusic, The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel Music (Madison: Popular Press, 1990), 153162; 171176. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_6', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_6').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); 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). But I'll say this: I've never been more honored to sing about Jesus and for Jesus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2224388. "Home" functions primarily in southern gospel as a meaning-making tool for experience in this life, not the next. Is Joyce Martin. The music remains popular among white evangelicals and many African American Protestants, though its market sharelike that of most sectors of the music industryhas declined considerably.21Sales 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. Still, the cultivation and creation of twentieth-century commercial black gospel's golden age (19451960) was largely rooted in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other urban centers in the Midwest and Northeast where many black southerners moved during the Great Migration. The core of this essay began as a conference paper for the 2013 conference of the Society for American Music. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_41', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_41').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); This dearth conforms to a tendency in southern gospel to celebrate those performers who seem to embody orthodox cultural values, religious beliefs, and pietistic practices, as opposed to those who provide rich and particularized details about their personal lives. For a fuller discussion of "southern" as a racial signifier and readings of race and white gospel see Harrison, Following Harry Eskew's lead in the Grove Music entry for Gospel Music, Stephen Shearon uses "northern urban" gospel to designate commercial Christian music of and for primarily white Protestants that emerged in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century revivalism in urban areas outside the South. In the final decades of the twentieth century, these disagreements opened up a fault line between southern gospel and CCM, with each camp pursuing styles of music that implied divergent theories of musical evangelism. The precipitous decline in "Christian/Gospel" has devastated most sectors of the market. This pan-stylistic hybridity was apparent in the group's repertoire before their Gaither affiliation. Stowe, David. Gaither's questions establish Jonathan's lifelong love of "huntin'" as linked to his Arkansas adolescence. Bill Clinton's presidential campaign used the Traveler name and image as a way to strengthen his populist appeal running against a Washington insider. Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music. 'Cause it's worth every . Arkansas has long been defined by poverty and isolation born of the cashless frontier societies of the state's uplands and the agrarian barter economies that prevailed in the lowlands.55Morris Arnold, "The Significance of the Arkansas Colonial Experience," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 51 (Spring 1992): 7880. See Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 13. . tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_3', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_3').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The seven-shape notational system (and culture) of songwriting, singing, and music education that took root in the southern uplands in the late 1800s has heavily influenced the music of southern gospel and its values.4Here, following Loyal Jones, "Southern Uplands" designates the regions and people of trans-Appalachia and extends eastward into the Piedmont and westward to the Ozarks. Interestingly, Willow Creek leaders published a study conducted by the church in 2008 that indicated the seeker-sensitive model did not reliably lead to consistently reported levels of spiritual development or maturity among those who were attracted to the church by its seeker sensitivity (Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson, Reveal: Where Are You? Sharing her life with transparency is her passion. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_8', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_8').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); So it is tempting to assume that the emergence of "southern" to describe the music since the 1960s matters only as an unsubtle substitute for the more racially antagonistic "white." tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_24', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_24').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); If much of CCM musically enciphers the aspirations of evangelicalism's dominant demographicsuburban, white, seeker-centered25"Seeker" sensitive models of congregational development and worship emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as part of the so-called church-growth movement, an organized effort to expand church membership and participation beyond traditional populations. Religion Dispatches. Again: Continuing the Debate between Donald Dayton and George Marsden," in The Continued Relevance of Wesleyan Theology: Essays in Honor of Laurence Wood, ed. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_30', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_30').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Indeed, the style of four-part male harmony for which professional southern gospel is most well-known has been historically linked to the practice of piety and lived religious devotion in the premillennial dispensationalist tradition.31Premillennial dispensationalism has been the dominant theological paradigm for fundamentalist evangelicals in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. This dynamic was captured in the 2014 Grammys. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_25', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_25').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); conservatives primarily in denominationally unaffiliated megachurchessouthern gospel has come to voice the revanchist critique of non-denominational evangelicalism offered by old-line denominational fundamentalists (namely, Southern Baptists, General Baptists, Free Will Baptists, and Independent Baptists; Nazarenes; Church of God; Church of Christ; Assemblies of God; and the more fundamentalist strains of Methodism).26These denominations were most frequently represented in original ethnographic research I have conducted into the contemporary culture of southern gospel. Blevins, Brooks. Toward the end of his life, Andy Griffith recorded multiple southern gospel albums. The camera cuts back and forth between The Martins and Gaither, occasionally taking in the four of them in a wide shot. "Southern" gospel has its own difficulties, not least the fact that not all gospel from, of, or appealing to people in the South is a white enterprise. The trio performed an a capella arrangement of the 1862 gospel hymn, "He Leadeth Me," a standby in the culture of Homecoming's fan base.44"Gospel hymns" refer to a repertoire of American sacred songs that "first appeared in religious revivals during the 1850s, but which flourished with the urban revivalism that arose in the English-speaking world in the last third of the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth century." A journal about real and imagined spaces and places of the US South and their global connections. For a fuller discussion of "southern" as a racial signifier and readings of race and white gospel see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 96103. They live in Nashville and have two children (Martin Sanders was married previously to Harrie McCullough, with whom he had a child). 436 (1997): 169188. 3,147) where they became a popular regional Christian music act. And that was actually the first time Bill heard us sing. Jonathan Martin and his wife, Dara, live in Des Moines with their six children (Craig Harris, "Martins Storm Back onto the Scene," sgnscoops.com, December 17, 2013 [accessed January 31, 2014)]. Joyce Martin Sanders is an American singer who, along with her siblings Jonathan Martin and Judy Martin Hess, is best known as a member of the Christian country trio The Martins. Nominated in the "Gospel/Contemporary Christian Music" category, CCM soloist Natalie Grant attended the ceremony, only to leave before the show ended. Absence of biographical detail about The Martins clears space for the Arkansas imaginary to operate. It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). Professional black gospel, which has a historically longstanding relationship with African American worship traditions to a much greater extent than commercial white Christian music has with white Protestant churches, has remained creatively vibrant. The conflation of "southern" and "white" to describe this music circulates widely among scholars and non-specialists, but has only been tentatively stated in scholarship. "Andy Griffith Dies." "62 Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 5. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_62', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_62').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The gestalt of Arkansas rusticity associated with The Martins serves to understand their sophisticated harmonies. Everyone sits on risers around a piano and sings: old songs, new songs, gospel songs, hymns, inspirational ballads, spiritual anthems, praise and worship choruses, even a few secular tunes now and then (Bill Withers's "Lean on Me," or an arrangement of Barry Manilow's "One Voice"). These bonds seem heavily predicated on shared assumptions that performers' professional legitimacy and artistic authenticity arise from a God-given prodigiousness untainted by the artifice of formal education or the contrivance of worldliness, which in southern gospel culture is associated with urban(e) or cosmopolitan ways of life. Joyce: So we went into the bathroom. However, in light of the subsequent collapse of most of the southern gospel industry not affiliated with the Homecoming Series, Close Harmony offers an overly optimistic view of southern gospel prospects in the twenty-first century (283287). "39Jennifer Lena, Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 2. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_39', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_39').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); My approach attends to southern gospel as a musical style,40Lower compositional sophistication, more uneven production quality, and rougher cuts by commercial standardsall defining features of the southern gospel sound of the past twenty yearscan function for many evangelicals and fundamentalists as indices of a more real music and catalysts for a more authentic experience of the religious self. Comparatively little has been published about The Martins's biography beyond birth, marriages, and professional accomplishments.41The basic details provided here derive largely from The Martins's disclosures on stage, press coverage, conservations I have had with industry professionals, and my experience. At the same time, the group evinces no interest in stylistic purity or generic fealty to a specific tradition, even as the album titleincluding the florid and flowing cover typographyframes their music as a filiopietistic missive from the old home place that is a staple of the southern gospel imagination.46While David Fillingim argues that "home" as a concept in southern gospel allows its participants to imagine and explore a flight from material hardship and social marginalization in this world (in favor of an eternal home of magnificence in heaven), my research suggests that in southern gospel "home" serves to give concrete, graspable shape to abstract theological concepts and spiritual experiences for ordinary Christians in the here and now. Just as significantly, while From Kentucky With Love, or From the Smoky Mountains With Love, would probably be received with the same warmth and enthusiasm that greeted The Martins's music, the precise structure of a Kentucky imaginary or a Smoky Mountain imaginary would be located in the meaning-making of those places. 5 [September, 1996]: 386405). Judy Martin Hess (b. Audiocassette. North American gospel history and the cultural realities of contemporary southern gospel defy further generalization. 2014.grammys.criticized.as.political.stunt.to.push.gay.marriage.agenda.natalie.grant.responds.after.early.exit/35586.htm). 1 (2008): 2758. The camera cuts back and forth between The Martins and Gaither, occasionally taking in the four of them in a wide shot. The songs are structurally derivative and lyrically conventional, but this music is interesting for what it suggests about The Martins's cultural temperament and expressive style, best described in these early years as one of rustic post-teen southern evangelical angsty spiritual wonderment.
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