Singing and songwriting is what Joyce does. 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. 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. Jonathan Martin and his wife, Dara, live in Des Moines with their six children (Craig Harris, ", In the 1990s and early 2000s, Gaither Homecoming was popular on the now-defunct TNN cable channel. 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. Evangelicals and fundamentalists have never agreed on how best to live out the scriptural directive that Christians be in the world, but not of it. North American gospel history and the cultural realities of contemporary southern gospel defy further generalization. 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. Similarly, Gerald Wolfe, also originally a pianist for the Cathedral Quartet and subsequently the owner and emcee of his own professional trio, Greater Vision, was famously plucked from obscurity (or so the story went onstage in his early years as a performer) while singing with the Dumplin' Valley Boys.49References to Bennett's birthplace in Strawberry, Arkansas, were staples of Cathedrals concerts, several of which I attended, in the 1980s and 1990s. Southern gospel has found itself in alliances with black gospel traditions and the black church. [South Barrington, IL: Willow Creek Association, 2007]). Who is martin p joyce? 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). "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. See Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 13. Consequently, much of conservative Christian culture challenged secular narratives and norms. 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. For a fuller discussion of "southern" as a racial signifier and readings of race and white gospel see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 96103. Martin P. Joyce might be a juvenile justice worker in Youngstown, Ohio. The MartinsJoyce Martin McCullough, Judy Martin Hess, and Jonathan Martingrew up in Hamburg, Ark., (pop. She has Angelman Syndrome and is the happiest girl you will ever meet. "The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut," interview by Douglas Harrison. The cultural difference between the Ozark/Ouachita and Mississippi Delta regions of Arkansas is aptly captured by/in two recent films. EIN: 95-2844062. Take, for instance, Joyce and Judy's 2001 telling of how The Martins scored the chance to sing "He Leadeth Me" on the Homecoming stage. Before then the music was simply known to its practitioners and fans as gospel. For branding of the natural state, see Arkansas.com, Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism, accessed October 15, 2013, http://www.arkansas.com. 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. . "38Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 7. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_37', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_37').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); On the surface, these indicators suggest the clear shift in tastes within Christian music entertainment away from southern gospel's preference for close harmony sung in the ensemble. Goff, On backwoods virtuosi, see Harrison, "Grace to Catch a Falling Soul. 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"). Business as Mission . It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). See "Music Album Sales in the United States in 2012, by Genre,"Statistica.com, 2012, accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.statista.com/statistics/188910/us-music-album-sales-by-genre-2010/; Natalie Gillespie, "Gospel Music Sees Record-Setting RIAA Numbers," CCM Update, March 29, 1999; and Lindy Warren, "Top 15 Impact-Makers in 1997," CCM Update, December 22, 1997. "2Ibid., 2. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_2', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_2').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); This tradition is distinctive for its cultivation of close harmony sung in ensemblestraditionally male quartets, a formation that dominated the commercial sector of southern gospel through roughly the first half of the twentieth century, and more recently, mixed-gender foursomes and trios, often comprising family members.3Today's professional southern gospel includes many family and mixed gender foursomes and trios, configurations that were and are common in the singing convention world that dominated southern gospel in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The videos still air regularly on many local-access religious television channels, but sales today are largely driven through merchandizing at concerts, the Gaither, "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." It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_38', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_38').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Certainly this is true of southern gospel. At first, this meant reclaiming (or sonically imitating) mainly rock 'n' roll, but ultimately it came to encompass almost any kind of popular mainstream American music heard on commercial radio, especially among teen and youth audiences. Recording companies experienced similar contractions. They live in Columbus, Georgia, and have five children. For more on the demographic profile of southern gospel see Harrison. 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. The most prominent, From Arkansas With Love, is full of original material, almost all written by Joyce Martin. They have won several Dove Awards (Christian music's Grammy) in the southern gospel, inspirational, and Christian country categories, and received a Grammy nomination in the Best Southern, Country, or Bluegrass Gospel Album category. Joyce Martin is a well known gospel singer. 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." From Arkansas With Love demonstrates southern gospel's influence. Trinity Broadcasting Network is the D.B.A. of Trinity Christian Center of Santa Ana Inc., a California religious non-profit corporation holding 501(C)(3) status with the Internal Revenue Service. Even though I do not have a better name for it, I remain deeply ambivalent about "northern urban gospel." 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. The Arkansas imaginary has explanatory power for The Martins inasmuch as southern gospel music revoices and revalues the distortions and elisions of religious identity and cultural history central to the self-concept of many white fundamentalists and evangelicals. Arkansas, writes Brooks Blevins, "has become in many ways indistinguishable from concurrent stereotypes of backwoods southerners or of southern mountaineers and hillbillies," despite the geographical, cultural, and social differences between the Ozark and Ouachita hill country to the north of the state, the Mississippi River alluvial region to the east, and the "primeval swampland" in the state's southern half. Directed by Bill Gaither. 827-2340 or reach Martin R Mccullough at (253) 720-5263. By leveraging anxieties about cultural authenticity and relevance roiling conservative evangelical and fundamentalist culture, Homecoming creates "a musical screen onto which people from a wide range of Christian cultural traditions within the American middle class can project their own religious concerns and spiritual aspirations. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_34', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_34').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); For the past fifteen years or so, professional southern gospel groups, including The Martins, regularly dissolved and re-formed, or disbanded outright under the constant pecuniary strain of small crowds and even smaller free-will love offerings, and the upheavals these instabilities introduce into private life. GMA has drastically shifted its outreach and marketing emphasis toward black gospel artists and groups, going so far in 2011 as to move the Dove Awards from Nashville's Grand Ole Opry to Atlanta, the unofficial capital of black gospel music. 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. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_29', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_29').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); But the development of professional gospel resonates most powerfully as part of white fundamentalist evangelical withdrawal from mainstream secular society over the long twentieth century. . Sign up for updates about Better Together on TBN. Representative scholarly studies include Nancy Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Politics and Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011); Mark Hulsether, Religion, Culture and Politics in the Twentieth Century United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 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. 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. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. "Home" functions primarily in southern gospel as a meaning-making tool for experience in this life, not the next. The Martins Biography by John Bush A brother-sisters trio of a cappella gospel harmonizers, the Martins consist of Joyce Martin McCollough, Jonathan Martin and Judy Martin Hess. Menu. Joyce Martin Sanders (b. January 6, 1968) lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband Paul, and she has two children. 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). Bill Gaither sighs contentedly, then adopts an avuncular, lightheartedly admonishing tone, commenting that The Martins had only sung the first verse and indicating, as if unplanned, that the trio should "finish it" on the couch at that moment. When and where did baseball player Bob Joyce die? Sharing her life with transparency is her passion. In the early 1990s, two sisters and their brother, Judy, Joyce, and Jonathan, then in their late teens and performing as The Martins, began appearing with the Gaither Homecoming Friends. "Gospel," as Heilbut has noted, is "the favored term for what working-class black congregations [do,] often to the exclusion to white traditions." She released her . They live in Columbus, Georgia, and have five children. There is also the sense that The Martins's appeal reaches across the spectrum of religious beliefs and musical tastes that form the conservative end of the white Christian music entertainment market. Join the. See Goff, Close Harmony, 233236, 269274. Several prominent bluegrass and old time families have been mainstays of southern gospel since family acts began to emerge in the 1930s and 1940s: most prominently, The Lewis Family and The Chuck Wagon Gang, and later the Primitive Quartet, The Easters, and The Isaacs. New York: Knopf, 2012. They live in Nashville and have two children (Martin Sanders was married previously to Harrie McCullough, with whom he had a child). 'Cause I've waited my whole life. No Sympathy For the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism. Slanted Records and The Martins. 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. UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Rather, I aim to map a specific hot spot within the psychosocial terrain of contemporary professional southern gospel as an instance of a broader phenomenon that could be explored in US southern and rural imaginaries. Stephen Marini has provided the most sustained interpretive examination of bluegrass families in southern gospel: Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture (UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 296320. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_45', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_45').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); In this light, and flowing from this initial performance of "He Leadeth Me," The Martins established a reputation as the pure-hearted "songbirds" of southern gospel, to borrow a description that Bill Gaither offers on a Homecoming video, The Best of the Martins. 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 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. The overwhelming majority of fans and professionals in contemporary southern gospel are white Christians who are "culturally southern, socially conservative, and Anglo-American. . 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. 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). This dynamic was captured in the 2014 Grammys. Through southern gospel, participants "develop the capacity to think and act as modern pluralists or situational relativists when necessary, while retaining their identification with antimodern religious traditions that notionally believe in timeless, unchanging absolutes. There is an associationalas opposed to primarily musicallogic to this appeal that tracks with broader "patterns of cultural experience and affiliation." Such work is as welcome as it is needed. 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. 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. 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. For more on cultural-geographic conceptualizations of place, see John Agnew, The United States in the World Economy: A Regional Geography (London: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Cresswell, Place. Martin Jarvis; Randy Edelman; David Jason; Michael Hordern; Oliver Williams; Community. 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. Anthony Heilbut, "Black Urban Hymnody," on, Stephen Shearon, Harry Eskew, James C. Downey, and Robert Darden, "Gospel Music,". This model "avoided conventional church approaches, using . 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. Alexandria, Ind. Start the wiki Similar Artists Charlotte Ritchie 703 listeners Bill & Gloria Gaither 10,674 listeners The Isaacs 11,665 listeners Show more 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. Lower 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. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_27', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_27').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true });And it is that, to a certain extent. 1 (2008): 2758. [5] Jonathan Martin (b. Sunday services to reach the unchurched through polished music, multimedia, and sermons referencing popular culture and other familiar themes. Moreton, Bethany. This element of cultural separatism has reemerged in the past generation within southern gospel.