My focus on professional southern gospel music is distinct from the avocational or amateur tradition, known as convention singing. 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 peer reviewers for Southern Spaces provided generous feedback that sharpened my thinking and refined the essay's argument considerably. [5] Jonathan Martin (b. 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. Bill never comes out into the foyer but Gloria does. When Gaither says, "You can take them anywhere," he seems to mean that in his role as producer and impresario he can rely on The Martins to stand and deliver whatever the show demands. To Serve God and Wal-Mart. July 30, 2013. http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/culture/6221/the_gospel_ church_and_the_ruining_of_gay_lives__an_interview_with_anthony_heilbut/. "6Not that "southern gospel" never made an appearance before the 1970s and 1980s. 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. 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. From Arkansas With Love demonstrates southern gospel's influence. 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. Averyfineline.com, September 24, 2012, accessed October 1, 2013, http://averyfineline.com/2012/09/24/slouching-toward-pigeon-forge/. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_46', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_46').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The paradox of The Martins's Homecoming reputation as masters of classic gospel hymnody and their much wider stylistic reach and renown before and beyond the Homecoming stage suggests that there is more to their appeal to southern gospel audiences than can be accounted for by their music. Although southern gospel is undoubtedly white, not all white gospel is southern, and not all gospel of the US South is white.11Following 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. Joyce Martin Sanders lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband Paul, and she has two children. 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. Arkansas ranks forty-fifth in median income in the United States and, by official self-description since the 1970s, is culturally "the natural state." Man, Crosswalk.com. The Martins are a Christian music vocal trio composed of three siblings: Joyce Martin Sanders, Jonathan Martin, and Judy Martin Hess. Black gospel draws heavily on southern lifeways, many of its biggest stars have been from the South, and it has always found a good portion of its audience there. 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." 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. Judy Martin Hess (b. 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_26', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_26').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); From this traditionalist perspective, CCM's project of reclaiming the devil's music for the Lord amounts to little more than evangelical apologia set to music in "Jesus is my boyfriend" songs: notionally Christian tunes that overlay the stylistic trends and tastes of secular music with lyrics about a love beyond all measure, directed toward a pronominally vague beloved who could be divine, or more sublunary. 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." tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_58', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_58').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Blevins links the emergence of the Ozark image to the cultivation of cotton, which transformed the lowlands and delta of Arkansas's east, middle, and south into vast mechanized agricultural zones. Dionne Dismuke, Joyce Martin Sanders, Judy Martin Hess, TaRanda Greene - Official Video for 'I Stand Amazed (Live)', available now!Buy the full length DVD/CD. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_17', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_17').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Such an approach asks how southern gospel artists (most from beyond the state) use Arkansas's status as an imaginative resource to make sense of themselves and their music in late twentieth and early twenty-first century fundamentalist Protestantism.18I have in mind the period in American conservative and fundamentalist evangelicalism inaugurated by Richard Nixon's conjuring of the "silent majority" of cultural traditionalists who opposed the advance of liberal policies and social practices in the US. 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. Courtesy of Douglas Harrison. Bob Joyce died December 10, 1981, in San Francisco, CA, USA. The. Premillenialists espouse a literalist interpretation of scripture that foresees the imminent return of Christ to earth. From Arkansas With Love. Help; Joyce Martin-Sanders View source History tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_21', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_21').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The rise of CCM participated in the transformation of conservative and fundamentalist Christian culture in the United States beginning in the 1970s and intensifying in the 1980s and 1990s. November 13, 2001, accessed September 23, 2013, http://www.crosswalk.com/1108828/. With respect to The Martins, the same music on an album titled From Hyde Park With Love, or even From Hilton Head With Love, would likely not be considered southern gospel by most of its intended audiences. Marty Joyce's birth. Instead, CCM performers and fans came together around a common commitment to reclaim the devil's music for God. Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music. 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]. Copyright 2023 TBN - Trinity Broadcasting Network. He just finished getting a tech degree in musical engineering. EIN: 95-2844062. Researched in the 1990s and published in 2002. All Rights Reserved. Christ's return coincides with the rapture of living Christians and the raising of the righteous dead to heaven. Douglas Harrison is Associate Professor of English and Assistant Director of the Center for Faculty Innovation at James Madison University. 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. The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations. She has two children. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_1', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_1').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); In its modern, commercial form, southern gospel emerges "from a broad-based, post-Civil War recreational culture built around singing schools and community (or 'convention') singings popular among poor and working-class whites throughout the South and Midwest. Rather than denoting a style or sound of vernacular sacred musicmaking, "southern gospel" as a term and a set of at-best partially unexamined social practices and religious beliefs "indicate the music and culture of those people who choose to associate themselves with this tradition. In this way, CCM musicalized the desires of many conservative Christians to perceive themselves as culturally relevant.23David Stowe, No Sympathy For the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011) notes that the poly-generic style that defined the emergence of CCM in the 1980s was linked with the politicization of Christian music as part of the broader mobilization of evangelicals and social conservatives (246248). In this context, gospel music functions as a style of vernacular religious entertainment and a form of evangelical cultural experience transcending denominations or confessional traditions. But professional southern gospel has always been strongly grounded its history and identity in the male quartet. 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. "Gospel," as Heilbut has noted, is "the favored term for what working-class black congregations [do,] often to the exclusion to white traditions." tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_9', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_9').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); My own research has been the first to document at length how, throughout much of the twentieth century, the music's unsavory history of explicit racism, affiliation with supremacist ideas and politicians, and its largely unreconciled relationship to this past echo jarringly in any use of the term "southern gospel." Joyce Martin-Sanders. Shearon, Stephen, Harry Eskew, James C. Cowney, and Robert Darden. His interview enacts a modern gospel version of the venerable Arkansas Traveler colloquy in which a high-born southerner (the Traveler) engages an Arkansas Squatter in a dialogue about the differences of class and geography.60Bill Clinton's presidential campaign used the Traveler name and image as a way to strengthen his populist appeal running against a Washington insider. Southern Gospel's Decline and the Sister-Bertha-Better-Than-You Effect, The Cultural Consolations of the Hillbilly, Tradition, Progress, and Cultural Instability, Music Album Sales in the United States in 2012, by Genre, The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut, Natalie Grant Responds after Leaving Grammys Early, National Quartet Convention Ending Long Run in Louisville, Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music. Joyce Martin Sanders is listed in the credits for the following albums: Year Artist Album Role ; 2013: Jason Crabb: Love Is Stronger: Guest Vocals : Joyce Martin Sanders. Another person named Martin P. Joyce was a judge who passed away in October of 2013.. 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. Explored through the Martins, how do non-musical categories of knowledge, patterns of affiliation, and cultural valuessuch as sense of placehelp clarify, sustain, or revalue religious music traditions, identities, subject positions, and the ideological commitments those traditions encompass? The camera cuts back and forth between The Martins and Gaither, occasionally taking in the four of them in a wide shot. 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_43', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_43').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The Martins first appeared in 1993 on an early Gaither Homecoming video, Precious Memories. A journal about real and imagined spaces and places of the US South and their global connections. Their mix of rustic piety and sophisticated harmonizing (in The Best of video, much is made of their performance with the Homecoming Friends at Carnegie Hall) gives audiences powerful, palpable reassurance that despite shifts in taste, technology, and demographics of Christian entertainment during the past three decades, southern gospel music and values are thriving and persevering in the youthful artistry and rustic ethos of normatively white, middle class, evangelical traditionalism embodied in artists such as The Martins. Anthony Heilbut, "Black Urban Hymnody," on, Stephen Shearon, Harry Eskew, James C. Downey, and Robert Darden, "Gospel Music,". 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. I Love to the Tell the Story: 25 Timeless Hymns, won a 1996 Grammy for Best Southern Gospel, Country Gospel, or Bluegrass Gospel Album. 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. "Home" functions primarily in southern gospel as a meaning-making tool for experience in this life, not the next. The core of this essay began as a conference paper for the 2013 conference of the Society for American Music. 436 (1997): 169188. For more on the demographic profile of southern gospel see Harrison. 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. Mark Five, [no identifying number]. Joyce Martin Sanders Overview Tracks Albums Photos Similar Artists Events Biography More Biography We don't have a wiki for this artist. For more on links between country and gospel, see Douglas Harrison, "Grace to Catch a Falling Soul: Country, Gospel, and Evangelical Populism in the Music of Dottie Rambo," in Walking the Line: Country Music Lyricists and the American Culture, edited by Roxanne Harde and Thomas Alan Holmes (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 7796. In addition to these sources, my own use of social imaginary theory is indebted as well to Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_5', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_5').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Among these people, "the term southern gospel," as I have noted elsewhere, "was not used to describe the music [in its professional, commercialized form] until the 1970s and did not gain widespread use until the 1980s. 1 (1997): 7582; and Harrison, "Grace To Catch a Falling Soul." tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_49', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_49').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Even if The Andy Griffith Show had not made small, rural towns with earthy-sounding names synonymous with culturally unsophisticated, plainspoken provincialism,50Toward the end of his life, Andy Griffith recorded multiple southern gospel albums. Within southern gospel, perhaps the most polarizing figure thought to embody this accommodationist dynamic is Amy Grant, who began as a CCM ingnue ("Father's Eyes," "El Shaddai" and "Angels") and subsequently landed crossover hits in American pop during the 1980s (her debut outside of CCM came in a duet with Peter Cetera, "The Next Time I Fall In Love"). This dynamic was captured in the 2014 Grammys. 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. With the dissolution of the "Christian-cultural synthesis," fundamentalists, Noll concludes, "made a virtue of their alienation. Molly Worthen has mapped contemporary evangelicalism's uneasy relationship with post-modernity and religious self concept. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_55', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_55').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); That legacy of subsistence and pervasive poverty persists. 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. Martin P. Joyce might be a juvenile justice worker in Youngstown, Ohio. 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. The MartinsJoyce Martin McCullough, Judy Martin Hess, and Jonathan Martingrew up in Hamburg, Ark., (pop. . 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. (Jennifer Jones, "Natalie Grant Responds after Leaving Grammys Early," Christianitytoday.com, January 29, 2014, accessed January 31, 2014, http://www.christiantoday.com/article/mass.wedding.at. Photograph by Judy Baxter. Heilbut, Anthony. Goff, Close Harmony, 264282, traces these and other important bluegrass groups in southern history.

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