Dorothy Gilliam Obituary, Articles J

Recording companies experienced similar contractions. Gaither Gospel Series DVD cover. Roger Bennett played piano for the Cathedral Quartet for nearly twenty years, and throughout his career, he was introduced as a child prodigy at the keyboard from Strawberry, Arkansas. Directed by Debra Granik. These denominations were most frequently represented in original ethnographic research I have conducted into the contemporary culture of southern gospel. From Arkansas With Love. Their mother, Wylma, who also is a gifted singer, served as booster and vocal coach for her three children. 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. Shearon, Stephen, Harry Eskew, James C. Cowney, and Robert Darden. I recommend this DVD highly. Joyce Martin was married to Alton G. Martin on October 1, 1983 in Rockwall County, Texas. 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. This movement was popular among (though not exclusive to) non-denominational evangelical megachurches. Judy Martin is married to Jake Hess, Jr., the son of the legendary southern gospel lead singer Jake Hess. Compact Disc. Joyce Martin Sanders Weight Loss In essence, we are an agricultural area. "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. 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. 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. Christ's return coincides with the rapture of living Christians and the raising of the righteous dead to heaven. The Martins's singing by the sea resonates with the disjunction of three "kids" from a cold-water backwoods shack harmonizing in an exotic locale with an international gospel touring company. Many southern gospel performers and groups incorporate covers of traditional black gospel songs and spirituals into their repertoire. 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. 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. Spring Hill, 2005, CMD 1807. During the 1990s, The Martins rose to national and international success, showcasing their stunning and distinctive harmonies before a vast array of audiences . Michael actually took us there and Mark and Mike tried to figure out a way for Bill [Gaither] to hear us sing. 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. 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_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. 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. See ". 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). Mae is her 18-year-old daughter. Who is martin p joyce? "I've many thoughts about the show tonight," she tweeted, "most of which are probably better left inside my head. These were "places so divorced from the frenzied modernization of twentieth-century America" that they presented an easily caricatured type from which to generalize about the state as a whole.59Ibid., 516, 67. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_59', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_59').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The conflation of The Martins's southern Arkansas bayou background with upstate Ozark hillbillyism emerges through the rhetoric of Bill Gaither as host and interlocutor. Morris Arnold, "The Significance of the Arkansas Colonial Experience,". "63Emphasis added. "Mom and Dad both instilled that in us that if you had a talent to sing, you should get up. In short, whiteness remains strongly associated with southern gospel performance and fan culture.10Ibid., 203, especially note 53. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_10', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_10').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Front cover of Crowning Day (Dayton, VA: Ruebush-Kieffer, 1900). 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. Courtesy of Douglas Harrison. Slanted Records and The Martins. Absence of biographical detail about The Martins clears space for the Arkansas imaginary to operate. My reading sees race, racism, and a racialized concept of self and other in southern gospel as an important, not always dominant, factor in the emergence of "southern gospel" and the cultural function of the music. The Best of the Martins, 2011. Rooted in the professional identity crisis Bill Gaither experienced in the late 1980s and early 1990s as an minence grise in Christian entertainment who was struggling to figure out what to do next, Homecoming "has succeeded and thrived by using religious music entertainment to address a wider crisis of relevance afflicting" southern gospel and contemporary evangelicalism. Joyce: We went to Indianapolis [in 1992] with Michael English and Mark Lowry [of the Gaither Vocal Band and the Gaithers' inner circle]. 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. 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. October 14, 1928 in San. Mike Joyce was born February 12, 1941, in Detroit, MI, USA. My reading sees race, racism, and a racialized concept of self and other in southern gospel as an important, not always dominant, factor in the emergence of "southern gospel" and the cultural function of the music. 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. 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. 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). "The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut," interview by Douglas Harrison. Kim Hopper, Joyce Martin Sanders, Shane McConnell - Official Video for "Love At Home (Live)", available now!Buy the full length DVD/CD 'Give The World A Smil. It's a new day for Southern Gospel. See also Other Works | Publicity Listings | Official Sites View agent, publicist, legal and company contact details on IMDbPro Getting Started | Contributor Zone Contribute to This Page Edit page Personal Details New York: Knopf, 2012. EIN: 95-2844062. The Willow Creek megachurch, under the leadership of Bill Hybels, is the most prominent example of a seeker-sensitive church. Pamela Fox has noted that "while academia has for the most part abandoned the authentic as any kind of meaningful analytic category," the vernacular music of southern, white, rustic life and experience has "tended to preserve it. . Man, Crosswalk.com. However, a 1993 appearance on the Gaither Homecoming series helped transform The Martins from an avocational regional trio into a professional act with a national following in fundamentalist Christian entertainment. Nor is its cultural function exclusively or even primarily of scholarly interest for what it may tell us about southern whiteness in an ever more racially diverse and pluralistic world. Taylor's development of the social imaginary builds on (but also departs from) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006). Donations to Trinity Broadcasting Network are Tax Deductible to the extent permitted by law. Gaither's questions establish Jonathan's lifelong love of "huntin'" as linked to his Arkansas adolescence. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. 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. These two tropesinnocence and prodigious talentinteracting with the publically retold stories of their backcountry upbringing, suggest an authenticity that speaks across generations, professional accomplishment, and even the cynicizing forces of the entertainment business.53A notable elision in this storyand it points to more general (mis)understandings about the Gaithers's personaeis the role of Gloria Gaither. 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. 436 (1997): 169188. . Biography Mini Bio (1) Joyce Martin-Sanders is known for Gaither's Pond (1997). Recording companies experienced similar contractions. Their continuing appeal has involved a narrative about their Arkansas identity as proof of authenticity as individual performers and for the genre of southern gospel. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 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. Updated: June 20, 2015 Biography ID: 102744141 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. The Martins initially auditioned for Gaither in 1992; the video on which they appeared was not officially released until 1993. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_52', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_52').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The Martins's insistence upon their childlike wondermentthen and nowat the improbability of the audition's circumstances is overlaid with the immediately recognizable nature of The Martins's talent by music industry veterans. Premillenialists espouse a literalist interpretation of scripture that foresees the imminent return of Christ to earth. Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music. 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. 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. . 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. Bill Gaither, Tallahassee, Florida, 2006. 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. 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. "61Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_61', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_61').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Yet many of the white, conservative, and fundamentalist Christian consumers who are the target audience for this kind of Christian entertainment merchandise may well see something quite different. Nominated in the "Gospel/Contemporary Christian Music" category, CCM soloist Natalie Grant attended the ceremony, only to leave before the show ended. 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. 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. The peer reviewers for Southern Spaces provided generous feedback that sharpened my thinking and refined the essay's argument considerably. The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations. The siblings all lived most of their formative years in Arkansas, where they learned to sing and with which their comments in public indicate a strong identification. 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. Joyce Martin McCollough . Before then the music was simply known to its practitioners and fans as gospel. The MartinsJoyce Martin McCullough, Judy Martin Hess, and Jonathan Martingrew up in Hamburg, Ark., (pop. 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. 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. DVD. 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. 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. She has two children. 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. The Martins recorded five independent albums prior to their breakout. 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. See Shearon et al., "Gospel Music." The siblings have been making music together since she was 10 and she has penned many of their hit songs through the years. 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." Grove Music Online. Jonathan Martin lives in West Des Moines, Iowa with his wife, and their six children, including twin boys, one of which has cerebral palsy. Grammy.com, July 3, 2013, accessed October 1, 2013, http://www.grammy.com/blogs/andy-griffith-dies. "45Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 3. + Add or change photo on IMDbPro . And see Jos Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 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. Christian vocalists The Martins Joyce Martin Sanders, Jonathan Martin and Judy Martin Hess perform at the Missouri Theater at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 17. 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." Directed by Bill Gaither. He just finished getting a tech degree in musical engineering. . "Gospel Music." Broadcasting Since 1973. CCM is a broad category built around religious songs that, to the uninitiated, can sound virtually indistinguishable from a cross-section of mainstream American adult contemporary and Top 40.20Within 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). 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. She has two children. She is divorced and has been for some time, but the date of her divorce is not listed. Do you know any background info about this artist? Southern gospel has found itself in alliances with black gospel traditions and the black church. Decade. . So, we're in the little church in Anderson, Indiana, and they are rehearsing for the next day and we're in the foyer. (See Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 182183). 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. My sources include celebrity interviews of performers, DVD bonus features, album covers, and online press coverage. The most prominent, From Arkansas With Love, is full of original material, almost all written by Joyce Martin. : Gaither Music, 2011. See David Fillingim, "A Flight From Liminality: 'Home' in Country and Gospel Music," Studies in Popular Culture 20, no. 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. . 2014.grammys.criticized.as.political.stunt.to.push.gay.marriage.agenda.natalie.grant.responds.after.early.exit/35586.htm). From Arkansas With Love demonstrates southern gospel's influence. She is divorced and has been for some time, but the date of her divorce is not listed. See Harrison. This dynamic was captured in the 2014 Grammys. 5 [September, 1996]: 386405). Joyce Martin Sanders (b. January 6, 1968) lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband Paul, and she has two children. The popularity of Homecoming derives from its emergence duringand its response tothe declension crisis in southern gospel. 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. Mae is her 18-year-old daughter. "8Stephen Shearon, Harry Eskew, James C. Downey, and Robert Darden, "Gospel Music," Grove Music Online, July 10, 2012, accessed October 15, 2013,http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2224388. She has Angelman Syndrome and is the happiest girl you will ever meet. Even though I do not have a better name for it, I remain deeply ambivalent about "northern urban gospel." 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. 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. 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. 3,147) where they became a popular regional Christian music act. 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. Joyce Martin-Sanders. Certainly there are southern and rural imaginaries writ large and available for scholarly scrutiny. 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. 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. The values implied by customs and conditions are elemental in stereotypes of "Arkansas" as hillbilly territory. DVD. Actress. Gaither uses a repertoire of leading questions, strategic glosses of the singers' responses, folksy asides, and improvised amplifications to cultivate the image of The Martins as hill-country kids made good as gospel celebrities. I Love to the Tell the Story: 25 Timeless Hymns, won a 1996 Grammy for Best Southern Gospel, Country Gospel, or Bluegrass Gospel Album. 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 Gospel Songs [1874] and Bliss and Ira D. Sankey's Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs [1875]), the song's style anticipates the dominant features of the gospel hymn and is customarily treated by gospel singers and fans as part of the corpus of gospel hymns that remain popular in southern gospel. The Arkansas imaginary explored here is not a totalizing way of understanding the vernacular music of white fundamentalists. 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).