Southern Gospel Research Articles

Anthony Johnson Showalter: A Pioneer in Southern Gospel Music Education

Anthony Johnson Showalter (c. 1853–1924) was a music educator, gospel composer, publisher, and considered a pioneer in gospel music and education in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Showalter is notably mentioned in numerous texts and studies related to gospel music; however, little data has been collected regarding the tools he used in singing schools—namely, the rudiment books he wrote and the schools where he used the curriculum. The purpose of this study is to discover Showalter’s possible motivation to begin his career, his determination in writing music education curriculum, organizing singing schools, his reasonings for focusing on seven-shape note style, and his influence into the twenty-first century. Materials analyzed included Showalter’s rudiment books, extant copies of his periodical, “The Music Teacher and Home Magazine,” and interviews at present-day gospel singing schools. Extant research related to four-shape and seven-shape hymnody and education was also reviewed. Findings indicate that Showalter was a progressive student-centered educator who utilized alternate tools in helping many with literacy by organizing the Southern Normal Musical Institute. Showalter created materials and opportunities which were accessible to the advanced and the beginner, hence providing a future for gospel singing schools well into the twenty-first century.

Nativity Scene on the Courthouse Lawn

Nativity Scene on the Courthouse Lawn Ryan Harper (bio) So long sinceI have heardsaid the wordoxen;what mechanics the word insistsupon stable faces—what jaw, flexing caverns fleeting,what imperial posture the industrious tongueplotting the palate’s ancient pasture,steering and stopping a simplebreath into the landscape that isoxen:once the name givenfor a gathering of a kindof grazing mammal.Was it King James amplifiedon some Christmas Eveby a minister, his annual deliveryon that load-bearing night, hisstacking dusty stockon wintry palates for shipment? for there was no room for them in storageThe city turns them on at nightonly, those thin acrylic bodies,each in its breast a light bulb, their private shinetogether a rotating agricultureof the public sphere. I say the wordoxen and hear [End Page 94] it said. Joseph bowsin time, automatically, the babykicks and reaches for his acrylic mother, the onlysound the low moan of oxen. The scene is setto a hidden metronome,I gather—thirty beats per minute—rum pa pum pum—for you see,I am the marker of time—the dark watcherwho warms her hands over nativitiesin motion, drawn to their faint heat,their geared cadence,the advent synchronized,the return of oxen. [End Page 95] Ryan Harper Ryan Harper is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Presbyterian College in South Carolina. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Adanna, Still, Berkeley Poetry Review, Killing the Buddha, and elsewhere. His poetry chapbook, Memphis Left at Cairo (2013) is available through Finishing Line Press, and his ethnography of southern gospel music will be available through the University Press of Mississippi in 2016. Copyright © 2015 Berea College

Where Everything New Is Old Again: Southern Gospel Singing Schools

Where Everything New Is Old AgainSouthern Gospel Singing Schools Brooks Blevins (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution On occasion, during those informal singings, Orgel Mason, the founder and director of the Brockwell Gospel Music School, would take the floor to promote the school, tout the beauty of shape notes, and lead the house in a gospel standard or two. Mason organized the first Brockwell Music School in the summer of 1947. Photo courtesy of Beverly Meinzer/Brockwell Gospel Music School, 2016. [End Page 135] He looks like he should be in pads and a helmet, protecting a quarterback on some manicured Southeastern Conference field. But his massive hands and fingers frolic along the keyboard with the dexterity and unpredictability of mice in a late winter hayloft. He sits grinning through a goatee at the main piano, romping away at a tune he had never seen before yesterday, a new melody branded with the echoes of jangling strokes on pine walls and sunburned voices in two-door meeting houses. Twenty feet away, perched formally atop the second piano’s bench like a downy owl peeking from his nest, a wisp of a boy accompanies his massive partner. The lad’s eyes burn a hole in the songbook. His petite hands move effortlessly across the keys—a waterbug on a summer eddy. No wasted movements, no change of expression on his face. Two masterful musicians, bound to be ignored. The voices in this auditorium are what matter most. That becomes clear when the singing starts. The silver-haired song leader peers over tiny spectacles, chops the air with her right arm, swings it to her left, to the right and back up to its starting point, and we are off. Six-year-old sopranos, eighty-year-old tenors, teenage wannabe basses hold their paperback songbooks as instructed—out from the body in one hand (the other is for “leading”)—and follow their respective parts. The tenors lead: mi, mi, do, mi. Half a beat into the second measure, everyone else joins in, each section following its own line. Shape notes the first time through, followed by three verses of a newly minted song called “A Godly Man.” It will likely never appear in another songbook; once the new books arrive for next year’s school, it may never be heard or sung again. But on this day, “A Godly Man” reverberates throughout the cinderblock auditorium, one hundred voices in four-part harmony—or something approximating it. This is, after all, only the second day of singing school.1 People have been doing this on North American soil for the better part of 300 years—and with shape notes for 200. The gospel singing school melds two American musical traditions—the singing school and shape notes. Designed to improve congregational singing by imparting the rudiments of musical education, singing schools date to early-eighteenth-century New England. Near the end of that century, William Little and William Smith published The Easy Instructor, which introduced the concept of replacing standard round notes with shapes that correspond with tones or pitches on the musical scale. Though denounced as “dunce notes” by traditionalists, Little and Smith’s four-note system gained widespread popularity among the untutored Christian masses, especially those stimulated by the revivalist fires of the Second Great Awakening. This four-note system, in which three of the shapes were re-used to complete the seven tones on the diatonic scale, reigned nearly half a century until the publication of Jesse Aikin’s The Christian Minstrel, which added three additional distinctive shapes and thereby created the seven-note system. Aggressively marketed by southern songbook publishers like Aldine S. Kieffer and A. J. Showalter, the seven-note system was adopted as the [End Page 136] common language of a pliable and adaptive sacred style that gradually emerged as “gospel” in the late 1800s.2 Click for larger view View full resolution In the summer of 2011, my daughter and I attended one of the oldest of the gospel singing schools. Only a seven-mile drive from the family farm in Arkansas, the Brockwell Gospel Music School has instructed generations of children (and adults...

From Arkansas with Love: Evangelical Crisis Management and Southern (White) Gospel Music

From Arkansas with Love: Evangelical Crisis Management and Southern (White) Gospel Music

THEN SINGS MY SOUL: The Culture of Southern Gospel Singing by Douglas Harrison (review)

Reviewed by: THEN SINGS MY SOUL: The Culture of Southern Gospel Singing by Douglas Harrison Jared Griffin THEN SINGS MY SOUL: The Culture of Southern Gospel Singing. By Douglas Harrison. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2012. In the interdisciplinary study Then Sings My Soul, Douglas Harrison opens cultural studies scholarship to southern gospel music culture (SGM). Seeing SGM as a network of “cultural practices” (24), Harrison understands SGM as a Janus-faced [End Page 101] commitment to consecrate ecumenical beliefs within individualized conversion experiences, and to fuse nostalgia with eschatology. Through this flexibility, American evangelicals have discovered a medium where they paradoxically become relativists with “antimodern religious traditions that notionally believe in timeless, unchanging absolutes” (3). Such paradox reveals theological and psychological contradictions, creating much room to appropriate SGM religiously, politically, existentially, and sexually. Harrison begins by establishing the psychodynamics of SGM identity. Harrison argues that SGM allows evangelicals to employ a “modern method of identity formation” to “reinforce (their) antimodern worldview” (29). Though Harrison does not explain “antimodern worldview,” he does articulate the core of this evangelical identity, primarily their attitudes toward theodicy: how do Christians cope with suffering and remain faithful? SGM allows evangelicals to address such anxiety phenomenologically through music. Harrison then turns to SGM’s historical roots, critiquing SGM’s “cultural kinship” (90). Though SGM recognizes James D. Vaughan, a successful SGM publisher in the early 1900s, as its founder, Harrison argues for Aldine S. Kieffer, a Confederate soldier–turned-publisher, as SGM’s “father.” Recuperating from the angst of losing the war, Kieffer turned to writing nostalgic (antebellum) lyrics and teaching the shape-note method of music literacy (the basis for SGM quartets) around the South. This history, though, has been lost to a modernized SGM that prefers Vaughan’s symbolic piety as SGM became increasingly ribbed by scandals in the 1960s and 1970s. Next, Harrison synthesizes the tension between SGM piety and popularity in his chapter on the “Gaitherization” of SGM. Harrison observes that Bill Gaither’s “patriarchal religious emotionalism” signals the culminating point of SGM because through Gaither (SGM’s “pope”) SGM’s “cultural adhesive” becomes a heaven-as-pastoral nostalgia (118). As evangelicals are increasingly “fractious,” Gaither “binds them to an idealized vision of the past” where Christians “indemnify” each other, conveyed through musical dramas of Christian virtue (115). But even if Gaither culminates SGM history, he does not resolve SGM’s paradoxes. Harrison analyzes these paradoxes by arguing that SGM is “indebted to a fundamentally queer aesthetic” (140). Identifying the diva and drag motifs (e.g., Vestal Goodman), negotiation of “misfits” (e.g., the Mylon LeFevre scandal), and aesthetically similar theatrics, Harrison observes the likeness of “coming out” experiences and soteriological epiphanies. While Harrison’s historicizing is captivating, his earlier chapters are sprinkled with tangential examples, and as a whole bears minor gaps, the greatest of which is that “modern” is never clarified: in some cases, meaning relativism; or nineteenth-century industrial/technological revolutions; or urbanization and demographic diversity; or political and cultural liberalism. Other notable gaps are commentaries of SGM instrumentation, SGM in American music culture at-large, humor and parody, and other non-WASP audiences. Harrison does speak to SGM’s audience-specific rhetoric, which is the study’s most valuable contribution. Writing with a smooth, light, and self-aware style, Harrison builds a rich history and provides nuanced insight to an [End Page 102] overlooked component of modern culture, giving critical music studies and southern studies several new avenues of inquiry. Jared Griffin Kodiak College, University of Alaska Anchorage Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music. By Douglas Harrison. Music in American Life series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. xi + 228 pp. $80.00 cloth; $28.00 paper.

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Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music by Douglas Harrison (review)

Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music by Douglas Harrison (review)

Then sings my soul: the culture of southern gospel music

In this ambitious book on southern gospel music, Douglas Harrison reexamines the music's historical emergence and its function as a modern cultural phenomenon. Rather than a single rhetoric focusing on the afterlife as compensation for worldly sacrifice, Harrison presents southern gospel as a network of interconnected messages that evangelical Christians use to make individual sense of both Protestant theological doctrines and their own lived experiences. Harrison explores how listeners and consumers of southern gospel integrate its lyrics and music into their own religious experience, building up individual--and potentially subversive--meanings beneath a surface of evangelical consensus. Reassessing the contributions of such figures as Aldine Kieffer, James D. Vaughan, and Bill and Gloria Gaither, Then Sings My Soul traces an alternative history of southern gospel in the twentieth century, one that emphasizes the music's interaction with broader shifts in American life beyond the narrow confines of southern gospel's borders. His discussion includes the gay-gospel paradox--the experience of non-heterosexuals in gospel music--as a cipher for fundamentalism's conflict with the postmodern world.

Gospel Music in Japan: Transplantation and Localization of African American Religious Singing

Gospel music is a type of Protestant Christian music in both white and black American traditions. White gospel or European American gospel music dates back to the late-nineteenth-century revival movement and has developed within three identifiable traditions: northern urban gospel, southern gospel, and country and bluegrass gospel. Black gospel or African American gospel music emerged in the 1930s in northern industrial cities, drawing on spirituals, jubilee singing, the blues, and hymnody from various traditions, then developed and flourished throughout North America. Today the influence of gospel music, particularly from the African American and northern urban white traditions, extends across many cultures (Shearon et al. 2012). In Japan, African American gospel music has become very popular since the early 1990s, and its popularity continues to the present day. This paper examines the way that African American gospel music took root and was localized in Japan in its social, cultural, and historical contexts.

I'll Keep On Singing: The Southern Gospel Convention Tradition. Stephen Shearon, executive producer and music director. Mary Nichols, video producer and editor. Middle Tennessee State University, 2010.

<i>I'll Keep On Singing: The Southern Gospel Convention Tradition</i>. Stephen Shearon, executive producer and music director. Mary Nichols, video producer and editor. Middle Tennessee State University, 2010.

Why Southern Gospel Music Matters

AbstractLong overlooked by scholars of culture and religion, southern (white) gospel music occupies a special place within evangelicalism. The dynamic interaction of lyrics, music, and religious experience in southern gospel music comprises a cultural discourse evangelicals use, not to diminish experience in this world as is commonly argued in southern gospel studies, but to understand better Protestant theological doctrines in, and to make useable meaning out of, the vicissitudes of conservative Christian life. This approach treats southern gospel as a network of interconnected rhetorics and signifying practices that serve a multitude of public and private needs among its performers and fans—needs that are not otherwise met in evangelical culture. Particularly, southern gospel music allows those who participate in it to explore a broader and deeper range of psychospiritual feelings and experiences. The study of southern gospel reveals the importance of private conflicts and tensions in defining the contours of conservative Protestant religious living, individually and collectively. For the millions of evangelicals today who turn regularly and eagerly to southern gospel, their identity as a covenanted elect emerges from within the struggle to manage and resolve spiritual disquietude through the experience of white gospel music.

Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel

Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel

Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel

Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel. By James R. Goff, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xiv, 394. Preface, introduction, illustrations, conclusion, notes, index. $45.00, cloth; $24.95, paper.) As the author of Close Harmony says, and its predecessors, despite their enormous cultural influence in the United States, have received very little scholarly attention (treatments have mostly been by industry insiders and fans). It is Goff s contention that southern (which typically refers to white rather than black gospel) is a art form which deserves such attention for several reasons: its significant impact on conservative Protestantism in the United States; its uniquely powerful appeal to its followers (and the tension, unknown in other genres, that exists between moral/spiritual and entertainment value); and its great influence on American generally. He generally focuses on the latter two phenomena. The author's first chapter traces the roots of popular religious back to the eighteenth century and the first singing schools in America (which southern gospelers would adopt with great enthusiasm) through to the of the revivals and camp meetings of the nineteenth century. The chapter concludes with an account of the plethora of tunebooks and songwriters in the late nineteenth century, including the breakthrough shapenote teaching books and popular hymnists like Fanny Crosby. The developing genre of gospel music is also placed within its religious and historical context, with attention to the rise, for example, of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements, two religious groups that would welcome the new music. Goff's second chapter gives a more detailed account of the important development of shape notes in American musical history and practice, and their singular influence in the South. Leading entities such as the Ruebush-Kieffer Music Company of Virginia did seminal work in publishing and teaching, utilizing the popular religious that was the forerunner of gospel. The author chooses to showcase the enormous place of the early twentieth-century shape note songbook publishers in history with fairly detailed examinations of the two giants of the field, Vaughan Music Company of Tennessee and Stamps-Baxter of Texas. There is also a short account of the achievements of Arkansas's Hartford Music Company, clearly indicating the contributions of Arkansans to this distinct musical subgenre, most notably the nurturing of songwriting superstar Albert Brumley. …

Reviews of Books:Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel James R. Goff, Jr.

Reviews of Books:Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel James R. Goff, Jr.

Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel

Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel

Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel

Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel

Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel

Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel

The Rise of Southern Gospel Music

Hours before dark on a lazy summer afternoon in the mid-1990s, cars arrived in a long unbroken line that connected a rural two-lane highway to an unpaved parking lot. Seasonal thunderstorms and churning steel-belted radials combined to turn the meadow for overflow parking into a muddied mess. Still, some six thousand emerged from those vehicles and made their way toward a rustic fairgrounds stage. After displaying a ticket, they chose a spot, set up a few lawn chairs, and settled in for a long evening of entertainment and worship—making little to no distinction between the two. Each fan paid twelve dollars apiece to attend this gospel music event held just outside Boone, North Carolina, a small tourist community in the remote mountainous region of the state. All in all, few could complain about the price; the evening program featured five major groups, four with songs in Southern Gospel Music's Top 80 Hits monthly chart.

Subgenre radio formats: The case of music‐intensive religious stations

Some radio stations emulate mainstream formats in an effort to attract “niche” audiences, characterized by cultural determinants such as language or religion. This study analyzed stations that follow religious music subgenre formats. The most prominent religious music format. Southern Gospel, along with Country Religious and Black Gospel, was found almost exclusively in the Southern region of the U.S. The majority of stations that featured these formats were AM. In contrast, Worship, Soft Rock, and Rock format emulations were broadcast primarily on FM, with Soft Rock formats most evenly distributed around the country. Religious Rock formatted stations gave significantly greater emphasis to promotion and lowest emphasis to ministry. Findings suggest that niche formats' success in appealing to identifiable cultural groups may rest on the effectiveness of station promotion to the intended audiences.

‘Gospel Boogie’: white southern gospel music in transition, 1945–55

It has become a truism to say that most forms of traditional music in the American South were to some extent ‘commercialised’ by the end of the 1920s: certainly this is true of fiddle and instrumental traditions, country singing, the blues and jazz. By the middle of the Depression most of these musics had gained access to the mass media, either through phonograph records or radio. Throughout the Depression amateur musicians gave way to semi-professional, and then fully professional, musicians who spent most of their time playing music. While these changes meant erosion of regional styles and dilution of tradition, they also meant an improvement in the quality of musicianship, more creativity, more experimentation and an expansion of audience. However, some forms of traditional southern music did not follow this pattern. White gospel music is one. White southern gospel music - and the term here specifically excludes Sacred Harp music, church music, hymns - has for too long been linked to white country music and seen as a sub-category of that music. Yet in many ways, white gospel music had little in common with mainstream country, and when it emerged as a genre of its own in the days before the Second World War, it followed a development pattern that is very distinct from that of country or any of its sub-genres. This becomes even more obvious as we begin to make cautious, tentative inroads into the serious study of this brand of music which has attracted millions of Southerners and Midwesterners. The question that I want to explore is just what happened in the 1940s to cause white gospel suddenly to make serious inroads into American pop music in general.