From Arkansas With Love demonstrates southern gospel's influence. From these materials emerge patterns of description, allusive gestures, cultural maneuvers, and possibilities for self-concept through which southern gospel identities are constructed and reimagined. November 13, 2001, accessed September 23, 2013, http://www.crosswalk.com/1108828/. Evoking Arkansas as a state encompassed by the southern gospel tradition signals my interest in exploring ways that large-scale changes in conceptions of religion, geographical identity, and social status play out and are revoiced in subcultural and local registers. Southern gospel's cultural sustainability turns out to be an urgent matter of concern, even if southern gospel people themselves do not tend to speak about it that way. For more on the demographic profile of southern gospel see Harrison. 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. "I've many thoughts about the show tonight," she tweeted, "most of which are probably better left inside my head. This dynamic was captured in the 2014 Grammys. Joyce Martin is a well known gospel singer. 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. She released her . This movement was popular among (though not exclusive to) non-denominational evangelical megachurches. Jonathan Martin lives in West Des Moines, Iowa with his wife, and their six children, including twin boys, one of which has cerebral palsy. "Gospel Music." Except [we didn't] know where to go, all the rooms were locked, too much going on in the auditorium, so Mark suggests we go into the bathroom. 33 Southern gospel product sales To Serve God and Wal-Mart. Goff, Close Harmony, 264282, traces these and other important bluegrass groups in southern history. Kim Hopper, Joyce Martin Sanders, Shane McConnell - YouTube For an analysis of the cultural and religious tensions between southern gospel traditionalists, who founded the GMA, and the CCM fans and performers whose tastes have dominated the GMA for nearly forty years, see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 9196. . 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"). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2224388. Taylor's development of the social imaginary builds on (but also departs from) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006). "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. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_20', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_20').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); In its early decades, CCM's creative and cultural home was Nashville and many performers and professionals still work there. Marquee ensemble singers who once would have driven a group's fame and success today leave ensemble work and go solo to cut costs and stay viable.35Examples of changes and shifts within professional southern gospel since 1990 include the disbanding of numerous groups as well as the retirements and deaths of many of the mid-twentieth century singers who anchored the genre's golden era. The MartinsJoyce Martin McCullough, Judy Martin Hess, and Jonathan Martingrew up in Hamburg, Ark., (pop. Joyce Martin Sanders Lyrics, Songs, and Albums | Genius This essay is interested primarily with professional southern gospel, which descends from convention singing but has been distinct from it since the 1930s and 1940s. Their mother, Wylma, who also is a gifted singer, served as booster and vocal coach for her three children. Music publishers of seven-shape notational gospel music and the convention singing tradition to which these publishers catered were familiar with the term for much of the twentieth century. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_33', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_33').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Southern gospel product sales also experienced what now appears to be a last-gasp micro-surge of popularity, with market shares reaching an inflection point somewhere in the mid1990s, followed by a precipitous sales decline by as much as 90 percent in the decade between 2000 and 2010.34Goff's remains the most extensive and influential account of southern gospel's market decline. For them, Gaither's interview effectively constructs and encourages audiences to see in The Martins representative, unifying figures of white, evangelical populism whose home is, as Bethany Moreton has shown in her study of Wal-Mart and evangelicalism, the Ozarks of northern Arkansas and south-central Missourithe literal geographic location in which Gaither's colloquy imaginatively relocates The Martins. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Absence of biographical detail about The Martins clears space for the Arkansas imaginary to operate. Movies. This element of cultural separatism has reemerged in the past generation within southern gospel. In the process, The Martins's music and cultural valence become revalued and highly desirable within the network of associations and commitments merging at the intersection of white conservative Christianity, right-wing cultural politics, and a "global service economy. "13Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 103. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_13', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_13').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Consequently, in what follows, "southern gospel" stands as shorthand for professional, commercialized white gospel from, or culturally aligned with, the evangelical fundamentalist South. More at IMDbPro Contact Info: View agent, publicist, legal on IMDbPro. 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. See full bio . 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. The camera cuts back and forth between The Martins and Gaither, occasionally taking in the four of them in a wide shot. See Heilbut, "Black Urban Hymnody." Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music. Dochuk, Darren. My sources include celebrity interviews of performers, DVD bonus features, album covers, and online press coverage. Douglas Harrison is Associate Professor of English and Assistant Director of the Center for Faculty Innovation at James Madison University. 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). For faster navigation, this Iframe is preloading the Wikiwand page for The Martins. 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 reputation is curious, because most of the music the group has written, recorded, and performed outside Homecoming merrily mixes and merges stylistic features from adjacent genres and traditions: most notably, CCM, country, southern and urban gospel, choral music, inspirational, light rock, pop, and classic hymnody. Interested in submitting your work to Southern Spaces. Goff, On backwoods virtuosi, see Harrison, "Grace to Catch a Falling Soul. For a recording of the set piece associated with Gerald Wolfe's time with the Dumplin' Valley Boys, see. 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. "The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut," interview by Douglas Harrison. These longstanding conflicts precede the twentieth century. Not least of all, The Martins's success has relied on the popularity within southern gospel of what I have referred to as backwoods virtuosiup-from-nothing children of the white US South able to create and perform distinctive arrangements of gospel songs and hymns whose lyrics are, as most southern gospel is, suffused with first-person struggles of ordinary Christians, striving after, struggling for, and faithfully pressing on toward greater assurance of belief and affirmative experience of the divine in their lives.48On backwoods virtuosi, see Harrison, "Grace to Catch a Falling Soul." Audiocassette. . tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_19', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_19').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The emergence of The Martins as a national touring group relied strategically on their Arkansas roots. 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. It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). How did the singer Joyce Sanders of the Martins lose weight? Mark Five, [no identifying number]. The noticeable absence of non-whites in these films, like the assumptions at work in Blevins's account and Gaither video, suggests to the degree to which whiteness remains largely unelucidated as a structuring category of identity, ideology, and religious belief in southern gospel. The 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. The Martins hail from Hamburg near the Louisiana border in Ashley County, in the southeast quadrant of the state, where the west Gulf coastal plain meets the Mississippi Delta. DVD. From the start, the case of The Martins is linked to the state of their birth. The video cuts from the Hawaiian excerpt back to the homey interview setting. Trey is 20 and lives and works in Nashville only a few miles from his mom. 1 (2008): 2758. The Martins's family narrative emphasizes anti-modern, unsophisticated, and materially modest childhoods, reinforced with a washed-out photo of the family's ramshackle cabin. Yes she is a gospel singer and her last name is now sanders Is Evangelist Joyce Rogers married? They live in Columbus, Georgia, and have five children. (See Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 182183). Her reply offers quick-witted banter and comic reinforcement of the widespread assumptionabetted by the Gaither Music Companythat The Martins's southern gospel is an artistically and spiritually serious form of sacred song from people who are proud of their pietistic primitivism.