The Rise of “Southern” Gospel Music and the Compensations of History

Abstract

This chapter takes issue with the widely held and uncritically accepted belief in the southern gospel imagination that James D. Vaughan, an early-twentieth-century disciple of Ruebush–Kieffer, is the “founder” of today's southern gospel. In challenging his status, this chapter traces an alternative history of southern gospel in the twentieth century that reinterprets the meaning of Vaughn as a cultural icon. This alternative account emphasizes the music's synchronous interaction with broader shifts in American life beyond the narrow confines of what are often thought to be southern gospel's insular borders, with the most visible evidence of these shifts being the emergence of the term “southern gospel” itself in the last half of the twentieth century.