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. 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." Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 5. 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. May 3, 1971) lives in Columbus, Georgia with her husband Jake Hess Jr. and their four children. Los Angeles, CA: Roadside Attractions, 2010. Copyright 2023 TBN - Trinity Broadcasting Network. Nathaniel Crawford (Eugene: Wifp and Stock, 2011), 84. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_22', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_22').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Southern gospel is overwhelmingly a product of evangelical fundamentalism. Joyce Martin is married to Paul Michael Sanders, who has had periodic jobs as a southern gospel singer. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_15', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_15').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); 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. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_16', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_16').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); To speak of an "Arkansas imaginary" in this essay is to conceptualize Arkansas as a siteparticularly among poor and working-class white evangelicals and fundamentalistsfor the practice of religious life, or "lived religion. Media releases promoting The Martins tout this diversity and eclecticism. Bill Clinton's presidential campaign used the Traveler name and image as a way to strengthen his populist appeal running against a Washington insider. "Gospel Music." When and where did baseball player Bob Joyce die? 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. Its primitive construction and the faded color photo intensify the contrast between rustic lifeways and the warmly lit, generously appointed, and contemporarily decorated set in which The Martins appear comfortable, coiffed, and professionally poised. The core of this essay began as a conference paper for the 2013 conference of the Society for American Music. 5 [September, 1996]: 386405). What is the birth name of Marty Joyce? 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. "Home" functions primarily in southern gospel as a meaning-making tool for experience in this life, not the next. Nominated in the "Gospel/Contemporary Christian Music" category, CCM soloist Natalie Grant attended the ceremony, only to leave before the show ended. Compact Disc. Absence of biographical detail about The Martins clears space for the Arkansas imaginary to operate. These congregations structured worship, congregational culture, and church outreach to target "those who had never established a relationship with Christ and the Church, and those trying to reconnect" (Lester Ruth, "Lex Agendi, Lex Orandi: Toward an Understanding of Seeker Services as a New Kind of Liturgy," Worship 70, no. 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). Audiocassette. 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]. "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. But so too are there imaginaries rooted in the history, mores, and culture of more particular geographies requiring study to understand their cultural formations and uses. 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. 1 (1997): 7582; and Harrison, "Grace To Catch a Falling Soul." Home News Random Article Install Wikiwand Send a suggestion Uninstall Wikiwand Our magic isn't perfect 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. Judy Martin Hess lives in Columbus, Georgia with her husband Jake Hess Jr. and their four children. To Serve God and Wal-Mart. The Martins's music signals that what makes this trio a southern gospel group is its commitment to a worldview and way of life that is place-based, class-bound, and consistent with values and assumptions that prevail in white, fundamentalist evangelicalism. The interplay of praxis and imagination is crucial. 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. 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. Help; Joyce Martin-Sanders View source History 1 (2008): 2758. Joyce Martin Sanders is one third of the award-winning gospel trio, The Martins. Do you know any background info about this artist? She keeps it real and points the way out of despair with an admonishing heart. Joyce Martin Sanders Weight Loss In essence, we are an agricultural area. 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. 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. 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. It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). 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. For an overview of southern gospel's history and development within the wider domain of American gospel music, see Shearon et al., "Gospel Music," and Don Cusic, The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel Music (Madison: Popular Press, 1990). 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. Though the publication of "He Leadeth Me" predates the popularization of the term of "gospel hymns" (which is most commonly sourced to Philip P. Bliss's, While 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. "45Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 3. 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. "Mom and Dad both instilled that in us that if you had a talent to sing, you should get up. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2224388. Shearon, Stephen, Harry Eskew, James C. Cowney, and Robert Darden. CCM emerged as the musical avatar of those conservative evangelicals who believed it was a mistake for Christians to concede entire swaths of popular culture to secular tastes and values in the name of resisting worldliness and impiety. . Martin P. Joyce might be a juvenile justice worker in Youngstown, Ohio. Instead, CCM performers and fans came together around a common commitment to reclaim the devil's music for God. Although the male quartet continued to dominate southern gospel's self-image, the genre as a commercial enterprise became home for strains of more traditional white evangelical vernacular sacred musics, including explicitly pietistic bluegrass and country gospel. 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. See Robert K. Whalen, "Premillennialism,". [5] Jonathan Martin (b. 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. 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). Judy Martin Hess (b. 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. "6Not that "southern gospel" never made an appearance before the 1970s and 1980s. "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 Best of the Martins, 2011. 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. 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. Family, friend, or fan, this family history biography is for you to remember Joyce E. (Sanders) 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. Siblings, Joyce, Jonathan and Judy, collectively known as The Martins, have enjoyed count- less radio hits and performances at concert halls, arenas, auditoriums and churches worldwide. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_44', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_44').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); This performance is important not just because the group's knack for reimagining southern gospel harmonies in dazzling vocal arabesques led in short order to celebrity. He just finished getting a tech degree in musical engineering. NQC's leadership recently announced that the event will take up residence in a regional conference center at Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.36Sheldon Shafer, "National Quartet Convention Ending Long Run in Louisville," Louisville Courier-Journal.com, September 3, 2013, accessed October 1, 2013, http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20130903/SCENE04/309030069/. 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. 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. 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. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_36', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_36').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); This retreat from metropolis to outpost acknowledges that southern gospel is no longer a national phenomenon.37 Douglas Harrison, "Slouching Toward Pigeon Forge." 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. Researched in the 1990s and published in 2002. Judy Martin Hess lives in Columbus, Georgia with her husband Jake Hess Jr, and their four children. 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. Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music. For faster navigation, this Iframe is preloading the Wikiwand page for The Martins. 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). See Goff, Close Harmony, 233236, 269274. 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. (Jennifer Jones, ", For a cogent analysis of how shape-note gospel from the South mediated cultural conflicts and status instabilities of white, southern farmers, see Gavin James Campbell, "'Old Can Be Used Instead of New': Shape Note Singing and the Crisis of Modernity in the South, 18801920,", Premillennial dispensationalism has been the dominant theological paradigm for fundamentalist evangelicals in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. Any Arkansas setting becomes synonymous with the Ozark hillbilly. See David Fillingim, "A Flight From Liminality: 'Home' in Country and Gospel Music," Studies in Popular Culture 20, no. Recording companies experienced similar contractions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. And that was actually the first time Bill heard us sing. 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. Menu. Moreton, Bethany. 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. Gaither's questions establish Jonathan's lifelong love of "huntin'" as linked to his Arkansas adolescence. 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. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012. For a fuller discussion of "southern" as a racial signifier and readings of race and white gospel see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 96103. This movement was popular among (though not exclusive to) non-denominational evangelical megachurches. The Martins Wiki: Salary, Married, Wedding, Spouse, Family For the film starring Lee Evans, see The Martins (film)The Martins are a Christian music vocal trio composed of three siblings: Joyce Martin Sanders, Jonathan Martin, and Judy Martin Hess. 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. 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. Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ole Boys Defined a State. They live in Columbus, Georgia, and have five children. Jonathan Martin lives in West Des Moines, Iowa with his wife, and their six children, including twin boys, one of which has cerebral palsy. 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. 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. Directed by Debra Granik. . Joyce Martin is a well known gospel singer. Blevins, Brooks. The collective effect forms the social imaginary, a way to understand self- and group-concepts in postmodern life.15Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 3. With the dissolution of the "Christian-cultural synthesis," fundamentalists, Noll concludes, "made a virtue of their alienation. Here the Arkansas imaginary is in operation. The Martins. More conventional black gospel singers (such as Angie Primm and the late Jessy Dixon, both of whom have appeared on Gaither Homecoming videos) and black gospel choirs are generally held in high regard in southern gospel. Biography Mini Bio (1) Joyce Martin-Sanders is known for Gaither's Pond (1997). tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_53', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_53').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); If The Martins's Arkansas origins are not revealed in this story, their roots surface in a 2011 Gaither Homecoming video, The Best of The Martins, a collection of performances over the preceding nineteen years. The. Examples 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. 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 Gospel Music Association (GMA), Christian music's umbrella professional organization that administers the Dove Awards (Christian Music's Grammys), classifies this type of black Christian music as "traditional gospel," as distinct from "contemporary gospel," which encompasses black gospel in the style of mainstream R&B.