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. Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ole Boys Defined a State. They live in Columbus, Georgia, and have five children. 1 (2008): 2758. In this case, we can buy coal protein shakes for weight loss from Russia in keto diet Joyce Martin Sanders: "My Childhood Christmas Miracle" Joyce Martin Sanders: "My Childhood Christmas Miracle"https://www.youtube.com watchhttps://www.youtube.com watch Man, Crosswalk.com. 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. Goff's remains the most extensive and influential account of southern gospel's market decline. Researched in the 1990s and published in 2002, Close Harmony traces the music's development from the nineteenth century. John F. Mooney, review of The Best of The Martins, directed by Bill Gaither, Amazon.com, July 29, 2013, accessed October 15, 2013, http://www.amazon.com/review/R399G8O3TFUQHH/. It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_20', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_20').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); In its early decades, CCM's creative and cultural home was Nashville and many performers and professionals still work there. 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. 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. The most prominent, From Arkansas With Love, is full of original material, almost all written by Joyce Martin. 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." 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_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. 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. "Andy Griffith Dies." Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. "Gospel," as Heilbut has noted, is "the favored term for what working-class black congregations [do,] often to the exclusion to white traditions." 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. He just finished getting a tech degree in musical engineering. Judy Martin Hess (b. Fox, Pamela. Evoking Arkansas as a state encompassed by the southern gospel tradition signals my interest in exploring ways that large-scale changes in conceptions of religion, geographical identity, and social status play out and are revoiced in subcultural and local registers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Joyce: We went to Indianapolis [in 1992] with Michael English and Mark Lowry [of the Gaither Vocal Band and the Gaithers' inner circle]. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. See Jones, Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands (UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 9. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_6', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_6').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); If, as Anthony Heilbut has noted, "gospel" is a vexingly "vague and inadequate" term for a wide and shifting range of sacred music within Anglo-European and African American Protestantism,7Anthony Heilbut, "Black Urban Hymnody," on Brighten the Corner Where You Are: Black and White Urban Hymnody (New World, 1978, NW-224). tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_47', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_47').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Yet The Martins remain beloved members of the Homecoming cast and reputational avatars of gospel traditionalism carried on in the music of a new generation of songbirds. 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. 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. 579 11K views 2 years ago #christmas #bettertogether This week on Better Together, Joyce Martin Sanders shares her favorite childhood memory which was a Christmas miracle. 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. Spring Hill, 2005, CMD 1807. Jonathan Martin lives in West Des Moines, Iowa with his wife, and their six children, including twin boys, one of which has cerebral palsy. This dynamic was captured in the 2014 Grammys. Interestingly, Willow Creek leaders published a study conducted by the church in 2008 that indicated the seeker-sensitive model did not reliably lead to consistently reported levels of spiritual development or maturity among those who were attracted to the church by its seeker sensitivity (Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson, Reveal: Where Are You? 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 camera cuts back and forth between The Martins and Gaither, occasionally taking in the four of them in a wide shot. . These denominations were most frequently represented in original ethnographic research I have conducted into the contemporary culture of southern gospel. "Southern gospel" remains the preferred term in the study of white gospel music of the South. Joyce Martin was married to Alton G. Martin on October 1, 1983 in Rockwall County, Texas. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_60', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_60').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); What emerges in The Martins's interview echoes Anthony Harkins's observations about constructed hillbilly rusticity: "Middle-class white Americans [can] see these people [hillbillies] as a fascinating and exotic 'other' akin to Native Americans or Blacks, while at the same time sympathize with them as poorer and less modern versions of themselves. DVD. 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/. "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 conflation of "southern" and "white" to describe this music circulates widely among scholars and non-specialists, but has only been tentatively stated in scholarship. For a recording of the set piece associated with Gerald Wolfe's time with the Dumplin' Valley Boys, see. Today southern gospel is found in areas of the United States and lower Canada with concentrated populations of white fundamentalist evangelicals.5For more on the demographic profile of southern gospel see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 175180. Her story of brokenness and restoration encourages thousands on social media and from the stage. 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). With the dissolution of the "Christian-cultural synthesis," fundamentalists, Noll concludes, "made a virtue of their alienation. 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. 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." 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. 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. Judy Martin is married to Jake Hess, Jr., the son of the legendary southern gospel lead singer Jake Hess. For the past forty years or so, "southern gospel" has named a professional musical style associated with white fundamentalists and evangelicals in the US South.1For an extended discussion of "southern gospel" see, Douglas Harrison, Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music (UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 25, 80109. For more on The Martins's biography, see the following section and note 41. Joyce: So we went into the bathroom. And I've never been more sure of the path I've chosen." Blevins, Brooks. 3,147) where they became a popular regional Christian music act. 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. "I've many thoughts about the show tonight," she tweeted, "most of which are probably better left inside my head. The videos still air regularly on many local-access religious television channels, but sales today are largely driven through merchandizing at concerts, the Gaither Homecoming Magazine, syndicated radio shows on terrestrial and satellite radio, and not least of all through the Gaither online store. All Rights Reserved. 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. Who is martin p joyce? The popularity of Homecoming derives from its emergence duringand its response tothe declension crisis in southern gospel. Lord, is this my heart. 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. 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. Teaching, learning, and singing gospel to fashion a meaningful identity shares in the reconstitutive ambitions of the New South movement more generally.29For 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," Journal of American Folklore 110, no. So we sang next day on the video [Precious Memories], "He Leadeth Me" . 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_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. 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. 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. Mark Five, [no identifying number]. There is an associationalas opposed to primarily musicallogic to this appeal that tracks with broader "patterns of cultural experience and affiliation." See Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 75180. 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. You can take them anywhere. 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. 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." 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. See Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford, 2013). Instead, CCM performers and fans came together around a common commitment to reclaim the devil's music for God. 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. (2004) as Soundtrack Skip to My Lou (1941) Between highlights, Bill Gaither interviews Joyce, Judy, and Jonathan,54The 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_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. Stowe, David. 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). . 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. Joyce Martin-Sanders photos, including production stills, premiere photos and other event photos, publicity photos, behind-the-scenes, and more. Gaither's questions establish Jonathan's lifelong love of "huntin'" as linked to his Arkansas adolescence. 'Cause I've waited my whole life. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_4', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_4').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); This musical culture subsequently spread across trans-Appalachia, and then later throughout the Midwest, Southwest, and, after the Great Migration of white southerners in the postWorld War II era, into other parts of the United States influenced by southern migration. 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. Consequently, much of conservative Christian culture challenged secular narratives and norms. . Joyce Martin is married to Paul Michael Sanders, who has had periodic jobs as a southern gospel singer. Unlike "northern urban" gospel (a phrase with no currency outside academe), it is the preferred way to self-identify within the culture and the most widely recognized way to describe the music to outsiders. New York: Knopf, 2012. "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. Courtesy of Douglas Harrison. 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. But I'll say this: I've never been more honored to sing about Jesus and for Jesus. 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. 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). This dynamic was captured in the 2014 Grammys. The Martins grew up in Northeast Louisiana, where their parents encouraged them to make a joyful noise. From Arkansas With Love. 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. 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. 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. His book Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2012. 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. For an extended discussion of the psychodynamics of southern gospel, see ibid., 149. [4] Judy Martin Hess (b. Just as significantly, while From Kentucky With Love, or From the Smoky Mountains With Love, would probably be received with the same warmth and enthusiasm that greeted The Martins's music, the precise structure of a Kentucky imaginary or a Smoky Mountain imaginary would be located in the meaning-making of those places. Updated: June 20, 2015 Biography ID: 102744141 "6Not that "southern gospel" never made an appearance before the 1970s and 1980s. 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. 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"). 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]. In addition to being the vehicle through which The Martins received fame, Homecoming marked an epochal shift in the reception and self-concept of southern gospel. Slanted Records and The Martins. The Martins appear to possess an unadorned, God-given popularity that abides in their embodiment of white tradition and progress. Arkansas ranks forty-fifth in median income in the United States and, by official self-description since the 1970s, is culturally "the natural state." 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. 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.