tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_18', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_18').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); I explore the Arkansas imaginary through the state's most famous southern gospel sibling trio, The Martins, their music, and their reception since approximately 1990.191990 coincides roughly with the emergence of what would become the Bill and Gloria Gaither Homecoming Friends video (later concert) series. From the start, the case of The Martins is linked to the state of their birth. Recording companies experienced similar contractions. 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. But I'll say this: I've never been more honored to sing about Jesus and for Jesus. Mae is her 18-year-old daughter. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_48', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_48').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); What continues to distinguish The Martins is their acoustic style full of complex harmonies, modulations, and voicings that reflect influences of country, bluegrass, folk, old-time, choral, black gospel, and vocal jazz styles and arrangements. 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. 'Cause it's worth every . The Martins's success draws upon an Arkansas imaginary that features a racially unconflicted working-class identity as well as a constellation of musical associations, cultural affinities, and attitudes grounded in piety, rusticity, and close harmony. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Joyce Rogers. 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. April 13, 2013, accessed October 15, 2013, http://bber.unm.edu/. 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. 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. 827-2340 or reach Martin R Mccullough at (253) 720-5263. Joyce Martin-Sanders is known for Gaither's Pond (1997). It was Mark, Mike, of course the three Martins, Gloria and two or three other people. The notion of The Martins's music as culturally transcendentnot despite but because of its particularized rusticityis reinforced in another clip from The Best of The Martins in which the trio sings on the 1998 Hawaiian Homecoming. Gaither's questions establish Jonathan's lifelong love of "huntin'" as linked to his Arkansas adolescence. A journal about real and imagined spaces and places of the US South and their global connections. Heilbut, Anthony. 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. 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. Its fans and participants aspire to transcend or dissolve regional expectations, theological boundaries, and denominational classifications. Researched in the 1990s and published in 2002. This movement was popular among (though not exclusive to) non-denominational evangelical megachurches. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_49', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_49').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Even if The Andy Griffith Show had not made small, rural towns with earthy-sounding names synonymous with culturally unsophisticated, plainspoken provincialism,50Toward the end of his life, Andy Griffith recorded multiple southern gospel albums. 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. Help; Joyce Martin-Sanders View source History 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. 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. 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). "Northern urban" gospel is the historical forerunner of today's Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). . The Martins appear to possess an unadorned, God-given popularity that abides in their embodiment of white tradition and progress. See Shearon, email to H-Southern Music Network mailing list, March 27, 2009. More deeply, southern gospel functioned as a figurative space of cultural retrenchment against the music's loss of reputational capital within white evangelical popular culture.24For more on southern gospel's shift within Christian entertainment from a "dominant" to a "residual" status, see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 103109. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2224388. 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. In its current, commercial form, this tradition "is most powerfully defined by common historical, economic, social, and cultural connections among professionals and fans to a constellation of corporate and professional organizations that anchor the creation, consumption, and commemoration of the music," Gaither Homecoming among them. Sunday services to reach the unchurched through polished music, multimedia, and sermons referencing popular culture and other familiar themes. 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. DVD. 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. Claiming a home in southern gospel grounds The Martins in an imagined identity that they in turn hold out for fans seeking models of stability and reassurance in an extended moment of great cultural change and instability for white evangelical fundamentalist religious culture. It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). When she came out, Mark grabbed her arm and said, "You have to hear these kids sing!" 32 Their success in the late 1980s and early 1990s coincided with the resurgence of cultural separatism that has come to dominate southern gospel discourse. There was no love lost between southern gospel and the "Queen of Christian Pop" to begin with, but after Grant's rise to fame, she became a galvanizing symbol for southern gospel of cultural accommodation run amok in doctrinally compromised music. 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. Fox, Pamela. 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. Premillenialists espouse a literalist interpretation of scripture that foresees the imminent return of Christ to earth. Dochuk, Darren. 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. 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. Southern gospel has found itself in alliances with black gospel traditions and the black church. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 2014.grammys.criticized.as.political.stunt.to.push.gay.marriage.agenda.natalie.grant.responds.after.early.exit/35586.htm). The interviews are actually excerpts taken from long conversations filmed in a homey setting in which The Martins sit side-by-side on a large couch facing the camera and Bill Gaither sits in an overstuffed armchair to the right of the frame. The overwhelming majority of fans and professionals in contemporary southern gospel are white Christians who are "culturally southern, socially conservative, and Anglo-American. 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. Business as Mission . Kevin Kehrberg generously included me on a panel he organized on shape-note gospel and its half lives in Arkansas and beyond, and Meredith Doster encouraged me to expand the paper into a submission for Southern Spaces. Arkansas ranks forty-fifth in median income in the United States and, by official self-description since the 1970s, is culturally "the natural state." Not that "southern gospel" never made an appearance before the 1970s and 1980s. "62 Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 5. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_62', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_62').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The gestalt of Arkansas rusticity associated with The Martins serves to understand their sophisticated harmonies. 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. 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. 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. 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. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. 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). For a recording of the set piece associated with Gerald Wolfe's time with the Dumplin' Valley Boys, see This is Your Life George Younce, directed by Charlie Waller (n.d., Louisville, KY: National Quartet Convention), DVD. This dynamic was captured in the 2014 Grammys. 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. The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For (2017) is a collection of McCulloughs speeches. For more on The Martins's biography, see the following section and note 41. Martin P. Joyce might be a juvenile justice worker in Youngstown, Ohio. . 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. Jennifer Lena has exhorted scholars of music culture to deemphasize sounds and instead examine "social structures and collective actions. ", References to Bennett's birthplace in Strawberry, Arkansas, were staples of Cathedrals concerts, several of which I attended, in the 1980s and 1990s. Such an assumption would not be wholly unjustified.9The conflation of "southern" and "white" to describe this music circulates widely among scholars and non-specialists, but has only been tentatively stated in scholarship. Is Joyce Martin gospel singer - The Martins a Sanders or a McCollough? Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Biography Mini Bio (1) Joyce Martin-Sanders is known for Gaither's Pond (1997). Sign up for updates about Better Together on TBN. Joyce Martin Sanders Overview Tracks Albums Photos Similar Artists Events Biography More Biography We don't have a wiki for this artist. The. Dionne Dismuke, Joyce Martin Sanders, Judy Martin Hess, TaRanda Greene - Official Video for 'I Stand Amazed (Live)', available now!Buy the full length DVD/CD. 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/. While growing up poor in rural Arkansas, the three often practiced singing together, and released their self-titled debut album in 1994 on Chapel Records. For faster navigation, this Iframe is preloading the Wikiwand page for The Martins. Blevins, Brooks. A notable elision in this storyand it points to more general (mis)understandings about the Gaithers's personaeis the role of Gloria Gaither. See Shearon et al., "Gospel Music," and Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News in Bad Times (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2001 [1979]) and Harrison, "Why Southern Gospel Music Matters," Religion and American Culture 18, no. See Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 75180. Their mix of rustic piety and sophisticated harmonizing (in The Best of video, much is made of their performance with the Homecoming Friends at Carnegie Hall) gives audiences powerful, palpable reassurance that despite shifts in taste, technology, and demographics of Christian entertainment during the past three decades, southern gospel music and values are thriving and persevering in the youthful artistry and rustic ethos of normatively white, middle class, evangelical traditionalism embodied in artists such as The Martins. Do you know any background info about this artist? 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 This model "avoided conventional church approaches, using . Joyce E Martin 1946 Born c. 1946 Last Known Residence Texas Summary Joyce E Martin of Texas was born c. 1946. So, we're in the little church in Anderson, Indiana, and they are rehearsing for the next day and we're in the foyer. 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. Joyce Martin Sanders lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband Paul, and she has two children. 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. 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. 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. His book Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2012. At the same time, the group evinces no interest in stylistic purity or generic fealty to a specific tradition, even as the album titleincluding the florid and flowing cover typographyframes their music as a filiopietistic missive from the old home place that is a staple of the southern gospel imagination.46While David Fillingim argues that "home" as a concept in southern gospel allows its participants to imagine and explore a flight from material hardship and social marginalization in this world (in favor of an eternal home of magnificence in heaven), my research suggests that in southern gospel "home" serves to give concrete, graspable shape to abstract theological concepts and spiritual experiences for ordinary Christians in the here and now. Created by: siremidor on 28-March-2013 - Last Edited by admin on 07-January-2016. I recommend this DVD highly. 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. These distortions and elisions are at work in the Gaither video biography of The Martins that points to aspects of the Arkansas imaginary distinct from generalized assumptions about white trash and hillbillies. 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. For discussions of the Traveler trope see "The Arkansas Traveler" entries in the online resources of the Historic Arkansas Museum, accessed October 1, 2013, http://www.arkansas-traveler.org, and on Arkansas.com, Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism. Structural Info Filmography Known for movies Saved! (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. Bob Joyce died December 10, 1981, in San Francisco, CA, USA. Heilbut notes that this vibrancy is driven by the rise of name-it-and-claim-it prosperity gospel in the black church, which is intensely homophobic and discourages its members from thinking in "broad sociological" categories in favor of a self-aggrandizing theology that links spiritual well-being with personal wealth (See "The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut," interview by Douglas Harrison, ReligionDispatches.com, July 30, 2013, accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/culture/6221/the_gospel_church_and_the_ruining_of_gay_lives%3 A_an_interview_with_anthony_heilbut/; and Heilbut, The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations [New York: Knopf, 2012]). See Jones, Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands (UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 9. But professional southern gospel has always been strongly grounded its history and identity in the male quartet. See Shearon, email to H-Southern Music Network mailing list, March 27, 2009. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_12', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_12').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Of course, race is never far from any discussion of southern cultures, but it is also true that, in southern gospel, "overmuch emphasis on black-white polarities diminishes our understanding of cultural dynamics submerged beneath the surface of the music.