averyfineline

I’ve got be away for a few more days, so just in case anybody has anything on their mind that doesn’t include deadend debates about why conservatives/liberals are always right and conservatives/liberals are always wrong, here’s your chance (CB, this is your cue).

Larknews.com has the scoop (h/t, Tom). The stage will be in the women’s clothing section and Bill Gaither promises a celebration of low prices and gospel favorites:

“For believers, coming to Wal-Mart is like coming home.”

Gloria Gaither may also read a poem over the store’s loudspeakers about cheap affordable grace.

I hadn’t heard of this novel before this commenter brought it up, and as so often happens in these kinds of things, I immediately started seeing references to it. Most recently: today’s New York Times includes a story about the way the novel bubbled up from obscurity to the bestseller list.

I haven’t read the book and honestly don’t plan to any time soon, so I don’t have anything meaningful to say about the novel itself. But I did find this image from the NYT story interesting. It’s a picture from a reading that the author did in suburban Indianapolis recently and isn’t that Gloria Gaither standing off to the right? The caption doesn’t say, but it sure looks like her.

It’s really not that big of a deal, but I’m always curious about these sorts of “as others see us” takes on insular cultures from the outside. Assuming that’s Gaither in the photo, here is arguably one of the most influential writers and artists in Christian entertainment involved in the rise of a bestselling/controversial Christian novel, and she doesn’t even rate a mention (and/or the reporter had no clue who Gloria Gaither is and so didn’t know that it might have been worth mentioning). I’m not surprised, mind you. Just bemused at being reminded in an unexpected place just how “sub” the sg subculture really is.

Speaking of politics, Chuck Peters reports that Rick Hendrix, the music promoter everyone loves to hate, is thinking about running for Congress in North Carolina. Judging by his comments to Peters, I think it’s safe to say Hendrix will be running in the great southern neo-Dixiecrat tradition:

As a Democrat, I have strong beliefs against abortion, I am an avid supporter of prayer in our schools, and I feel our borders need a fair, tough, enforceable and realistic plan.

And/but he’s currently a delegate to the Democratic National Convention for Hillary Clinton, and according to Hendrix, he was personally asked to run for Congress pledge a delegate vote for HRC by no less than Bill Clinton.

As I was reading all this earlier today, it occurred to me that there really aren’t many better ways to prepare for Congressional politics than southern gospel radio promotions.

Update: The full ShowPrep story is here.

From the New York Times this morning:

Although a majority of Americans say religion is very important to them, nearly three-quarters of them say they believe that many faiths besides their own can lead to salvation[.]

The full study is here. Apropos our discussion about the difference between southern gospel and other forms of Christian music, I’d wager that sg is home to a disproportionately large number of the 25% who don’t believe other faiths or belief traditions can lead to heaven.

Via our good friend SR, some clips of the magnificent Kitty Parham, then and nowish.

Then (watch her wonderful hand motions … talk about choreography):

Nowish: The embed code for this video has been disabled but I hope people will watch it, not least of all because I’m curious to hear what y’all think about how Gaitherized the setting and style is … there’s the Gaither-like figure pseudo-conducting, the collection of vaunted performers from the genre arrayed around the piano, and famous people who rise up from among the group to take some solo lines … heck, the studio even looks like the early Gaither Homecoming videos. This clip feels like it’s from the early 1990s (someone in the YouTube comments says 93-94), which makes me wonder if one trend might have influenced the other and if so, through what channels or paths? And while I’m blegging, any black gospel gurus out there who can name any of the faces in the crowd, you’d fill in some big gaps in my own knowledge.

An interesting essay on the internet and its effects on the deep structures of writing style and imagination. Money quote, which follows a brief summary of the opening of a novel:

The internet is inhospitable to that kind of quietness. If your browser were to happen on such a page, your eyes would likely go blank with impatience. Who is this guy? Why aren’t there any links? And, more damningly, Is anyone else reading this? A text on the internet rarely takes for granted your decision to read it or to continue reading it. There is often, instead, a jazzy, hectoring tone. At home my boyfriend and I use a certain physical gesture as shorthand to describe it. To make it, extend your index fingers and your thumbs so that your hands resemble toy pistols. Then waggle them before you, like a dude in a cheesy Western, while you wink, dip your knees, and lopsidedly drawl, “Heyyy.” The internet is always saying, “Heyyy.” It is always welcoming you to the party; it is always patting you on the back to congratulate you for showing up. It says, You know me, in a collusive tone of voice, and Wanna hear something funny? and Didja see who else is here? This tone is not absent from print; in fact, no page of New York magazine is without it. Certain decorative effects in language may be compatible with it, but it seems to be toxic to imagination.

There certainly is a lot of YELLING and noisiness and hectoring online, and though I’m not so sure the internet is the sole or primary cause (aren’t Oprah and Jerry Springer and Rush Limbaugh and the museum-of-me talk culture part of the issue here, too?), the writer’s making an important point about a certain loss of thoughtful reflection and contemplation that has attended digitized, online discourse.

In my own case, I’ve noticed that four years of mostly steady blogging have shortened the focal distance of my mind and more or less permanently sped up the rhythms and patterns I think in. When I blog, the result is not always brevity but a certain tendency toward the punch-line, the zinger, and pseudo-cleverness … Heyyyy!.

My non-bloggerly writing has been effected as well: I have trouble imagining the shape and trajectory of essays or other forms of writing that exceed 500 or 1000 words, and I get much more restless, much faster at the writing desk than I once did. This summer I’ve started working on a long-term project that will no doubt take years to complete, and it has taken me most of the past two months just to re-acclimate myself to the habits of mind and body that it takes to think and write for the book-length horizon rather than the POST NOW immediacy of blogging.

I don’t know that this is all bad. For one thing, blogging keeps me alert and much more immersed in a wider range of interconnected issues than I ever was before. And that interconnectedness cross-fertilizes almost every other area of my life beyond blogging. Besides, complaining about the effects of the internet, which is here and here to stay, is rather like saying, “if things were different, they wouldn’t be the same.” But there probably is some value is keeping one eye on this stuff.

All you hear is hard luck stories, financially, with these sg ’superstars’. The late great Jake Hess bankrupt twice or three times. JD going round with a hat collecting for his lapsed insurance money coercing a post office official into back-dating the postage date. Vestal, almost with an empty check book prior to the first Gaither tape. So on and so on ad nauseam. […] My my, if the Good Stewardship parable had have been brought up at an after concert, you’d likely been trampled underfoot in a rush to the hot food bar, with a ‘Yeah yeah but we need to gorge ourselves and otherwise squander the Good Lord’s money but, hey, don’t forget to come back, we sure need the dough to keep that big ole bus on the road……’

Via DBM, I see last week’s SN poll asked what makes sg different than other forms of music. DBM thinks it’s the audience. Most people seem to think it’s lyrics and “music,” whatever that means. Who knows. Like all polls, this one oversimplifies a very complex question - in this case, one that I think quite literally will take a book to fully sort out. But stuff like this is pretty entertaining as cheap amateur anthropology.

Copies are on sale now through June 30. I think this is what most people assumed would be the eventual outcome when the funeral wasn’t streamed online, as is increasingly the practice with sg memorial services these days.

It’s all being handled through the church of Rambo’s daughter, Reba, and Reba’s husband, and unless I’m missing something, this offer seems to be made without any connection to the “official” Dottie Rambo website, run by Rambo Evangelistic Association, the entity under which Rambo toured and sold her product. The Association’s website shouldn’t be confused with this website, which is sort of a shadow or back-up website for the Association’s official website that was overwhelmed at the time of Rambo’s death. For a while, the shadow site appeared to be releasing statements from both Rambo’s family and her manager, but the video is for sale on neither the official website nor the shadow official website, which suggests … well, I dunno what it suggests … it’s all very confusing. But with all due respect to Dottie Rambo’s family and friends, selling the DVD of her funeral seems more than a little tacky.

Before all you Rambo loyalists unload both barrels, hear me out. For people whose family lives have been an openly traded commodity in the entertainment marketplace for decades, it’s doubtless difficult to find ways of mourning that meet the private needs of those closest to the departed, but also provide some way for loyal fans to express their genuine feelings of loss and sadness and appreciation for what an entertainer’s life meant to them.

I also know it’s common place in evangelicalism to call funerals “home-going celebrations.” And though to me the term diminishes the reality of grief and undercuts the importance of formal memorials and other rites of death in the grieving process by implying that we should really be happy instead of sad, that’s just my feeling about it, and people are entitled to grieve however they like. As a child, I remember members of my family would take Polaroids of different ones standing at the head of a dead family member’s open casket at the visitation, and when I tell many of my friends who grew up on coasts or in the north how this was perfectly normal, they are positively mortified. So there are clearly different cultural norms surrounding mourning practices, and what strikes one person as strange or macabre may be to another a customary way to bury the dead.

But when you film a funeral, package it and put a retail price on it, “home-going celebration” sort of starts to sound less like local custom and more like a marketing campaign (a friend with a better memory than mine reminded me that there are echoes in all this of the Kim Greene/Dean Hopper wedding that was recorded and sold … another quasi-public event turned into a marketable product by a family of entertainers).

Proceeds go to a memorial fund in Rambo’s name, and I have no idea who are what is the beneficiary, though it’ s not unreasonable to infer in this DVD offer an appeal to defray funeral costs (Update: see eletter below). There is a raft of emails in my inbox from different people making very different claims about the status of Rambo’s estate at the time of her death. And though I do think once you start commodifying a funeral service the way this DVD does and then offer it for sale in a way that at least implies the money is to offset the expense of the memorial, you do to some extent make an issue of financial information and other details that would normally be not for public consumption, my point is not to suggest anything untoward is going on here.

In fact, I suppose one could argue that there’s no better way to celebrate the open-book life of a singer/songwriter who spent her career turning private experience into salable commodity than to turn her last appearance in this world into a product for public consumption. As I say, one could make that argument, and plenty of people would (and probably do) find it persuasive. I just won’t be one of them.

Update: Here are a few excerpts from an e-letter from Rambo’s family on May 30.

While literally thousands of you have expressed your love and support, a few have said some very critical and hurtful things to us concerning the way we have shared with you what we’re walking through. Many still believe that because Momma looked like and sounded like a million dollars every time she stepped on a stage or in front of a TV camera, she must have had millions in the bank so that a moment like this would come and go with little or no need for assistance… And the truth is… Mom was, and is, one of the wealthiest people this planet has ever known. But her wealth was not in dollars… Her wealth was, and is, in the millions of people in the world whom she called “Dottie’s Dearest” and they loved her as family.
That’s true wealth!

Though hard for some to believe, Momma Dottie lived a very simple life. Because of the physical challenges she endured the past two decades, the medical bills basically drained her of her life savings and resources. Those physical challenges caused her to be dropped from her medical coverage years ago, and ever since, she has had the distinction of being tagged “uninsurable”… Needless to say, in a moment like this, that increases the challenges. But we, collectively as a family, are meeting the challenges head on and not running from them.

For those who have questioned why we would make her Home-Going service available by creating a DVD or allow it to be aired on Christian TV, please allow me to respond… In no way are we attempting to capitalize on Mom’s home-going by making a commercial piece of product that will be stocked on the shelves of stores across our nation for years to come. It will only be available through our office until June 30, 2008. What we were, and are, attempting to do, is share the moment with thousands of precious people who couldn’t make the journey to honor and celebrate her life the way we were blessed to do.

So, yes, there will be a DVD in a few days… a full 2 hours and 22 minutes of anointed music and ministry. Perhaps not the best quality video you’ll ever view, but it’s put together in a very simple and elegant way that reflects the classiness of the lady we call, “Mom.” Because so many have requested copies of the program from her Home-Going service which includes her obituary, we have included it in the beautiful artwork for the DVD. It will hopefully fulfill our desire to get you as close to this great celebration as you possibly could be without being there.

We are making this DVD available to everyone who has felt the weight of this moment and sent in a gift of $15 or more honoring Mom to the Dottie Rambo Memorial Fund.

We believe God will bless you for your giving, and He will also give us the ability to care for any area of financial responsibility that remains.

Apropos our meandering conversation of late about ministry/monestry, Kenny Bishop wonders about the hidden costs of putting a price on Christian music (h/t, CC):

Even back when our group was enjoying great success I’d ask myself from time to time if we were selling something that should be given away. Were the folks who managed our datebook really pimps?

[snip]

Maybe there was something underneath everything that I wasn’t aware of back then. Maybe our music, our performances and our presence was the product. Maybe it wasn’t the message we were selling after all. If that’s the case I feel relieved. Maybe everyone else understood it but me. Maybe I’m telling on myself for saying I really believed we were offering sacred, eternal things only to people who could afford it.

I hope people don’t fixate on the booking agents as pimps analogy because if you strip away all the meditative hem-hawing, Bishop is really offering a fairly interesting critique of commercial forms of Christian artistic expression and the side effects of a transactional gospel. The whole entry is here.

Reader JP passed along this clip of Ricky Skaggs singing “Somebody’s Praying for Me” on Gaither’s Billy Graham tribute video, noting that it’s linked to from the National Day of Prayer site as an “amateur video.” Heheh. I’ve never heard Skaggs without stringed instruments before this, and the quiet style of acoustical piano suits him well, brings the tones out of his head and gives space to deal more deeply with his musical ideas. Check it out:

On this father’s day, the song seemed fitting. I know father’s aren’t the only parents who pray for their children, but I also know that alot of fathers that readers of this blog may be familiar with struggle with the more demonstrative forms of love that often come more naturally to mothers. I’m not excusing the pain and dysfunction that distant, silent fathers can introduce into their children’s lives. But it seems undeniably true that prayers may be the most meaningful language of love many of these men have for their children.

My father and I see the world very differently, and for a long, long time I took umbrage at the idea of his praying for me to live a life or be someone I am not, and won’t ever be. It has taken me in my skepticism and disaffection a long time to understand his mention of my name in prayer as something else and perhaps more important than just an expression of what he hopes for me in life. Now I think I see his constant prayers on my behalf as an unspoken lifeline thrown out between us, tattered and hard to find at times, but there all the same, all those years when neither he nor I had words for each other to bridge the gap of differences that divided us. Thanks for the prayers, dad. And Happy Father’s Day.

I’m not sure I agree with the business plan referenced in the most recent dissent. I know it wasn’t the main point of his message, but I think it is the financial reality for many fledgling (and many not-so-fledgling) groups that they sacrifice everything, buy a bus and make mama worry how they’re going to pay the bills. Touring in a SG quartet or family group is not a sure-fire way to make your fortune, no doubt. But for the groups out there who get in over their heads in debt before they’ve even sold a single Thomas Kinkaid woven throw from their merch table - I don’t think they should necessarily be applauded for their sacrifice. I think they should be counseled for the poor business decisions they may be making.

I’ve Got an idea. If you want it done right and you are the only one that can do it right and you have all the right ideas quit being a back seat driver and sacrifice everything like many of my friends in this business have done and get your several friends on this board and start your quartet.Quit being bitter at what everyone else is doing and you go it better.Get in the game and join the team. Then we can have you as our model to do things right for this industry. You my friend are obviously the genius and the rest of us are just plain dumb! That will give us all a chance to write about you and the great deal you have sacrificed to make this industry better.Sell your home, mortgage your house, get your bus, forfeit your kids education, make Mama worry about if the paycheck will be there next week, sacrifice till you can’t sacrifice anymore, then only then can you tell us how to do it.

I hear a version of this argument pretty often, and I get how people can think like this. But what’s striking is how this kind of response makes no effort to explain why something that looks sloppy to someone like me actually isn’t. Instead it’s just blunt-force solipsism: it’s good if the people doing it say so. But how is this is not a defense of mediocrity? I’m actually asking.

My post about multimedia in gospel concerts has generated a discussion that might warrant a bit of elaboration: namely, innovation is one thing. Amateurism and shoddy gimmickry are entirely another.

Watching Sandi Patty’s use of visual imagery or seeing some country star’s multimedia show may have inspired many of the sg acts we’re discussing to incorporate visuals into their concerts. But splicing together scenes from a religious film that are out of sync with the song being sung is not innovative. It’s sloppy. Singing about God and country while showing video clips of purple mountain’s majesty and sentimental scenes of homespun bucolicry is not innovative. It’s just the multimedia equivalent of getting people on their feet by singing songs with “stand” in the hook. Using your handheld video camera to shakily capture some awkward scenes of your family and a songwriter during the recording of a song and then creating a pseudo-documentary actually is kind of innovative. But the idea was sabotaged by the amateurish videography and the fact that the song in question (”The Ride”) just doesn’t sound like the instantly legendary song the “documentary” made it out to be.

In each case, you get the feeling that, as so often in sg, genuinely innovative impulses degenerate into hackish imitations under the pressure of the omnipresent small-timerism that afflicts the industry. So much creative energy is spent trying to look like someone’s knock-off version of success that very little effort goes into actually contemplating how particular musical ideas may be most effectively communicated (and that may or may not include multimedia). If sg artists were really thinking seriously about professional, tasteful ways to sharpen particular concepts or create special moments in their shows, would so many uses of video clips involve singers on stage singing along with video recordings of themselves singing that same song somewhere more interesting?

This is technology as a solution that creates its own problem: extraneous concert bling. It reminds me of that old Saturday Night Live send up of the Blue Oyster Cult recording “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” with Christopher Walken as a self-important dimwit producer who keeps interrupting the session, with greater and greater degrees of exasperation, to tell the group how they just don’t get it … the song doesn’t have enough cowbell in it. “I need more cowbell!”

This is “slightly surprising” to Daniel Mount, who evidently was unaware denominational affiliation doesn’t usually require a blood oath to never affiliate with other denominations.

From a charter member of Avery’s Friends, the ever observant SR writes to vent:

have you been to a lot of shows where the groups have implemented multimedia (basically souped up powerpoint or video clips)? i went to the second one of these last night and confirmed that i absolutely hate it. when i pay to go to a concert i am paying to see the artists sing, not watch a powerpoint presentation or some clips from a previously released religious film. i find it INCREDIBLY distracting and last night, as during the last concert i attended with this little innovation, i left with a terrible headache. the most awful thing last night was that in one of the slideshows whomever had created the presentation neglected to look up the spelling of “Ezekiel” and thus it was there on a huge screen in bold letters as “Ezekial.”

i found this annoying at nqc, but there are screens up there with images of the artists flashing constantly anyway so that wasn’t nearly as bad as being in a church or an auditorium with less than 200 people and having to deal with it. and last night was worse because the standard auditorium house lighting was on the entire time and so there was a terrible glare on the screen throughout. also if one group is going to use it then so be it, but turn it off when the other groups aren’t using it. the group with the slideshow was third on the program and so i had to sit through two other groups who had no visuals but the projector was left on and through the first group there was a blue screen with an occasional error message popping up and on the second there was a stock Microsoft screen saver which really almost drove me into a fugue state. and what is worse, i was told that the non-visual groups had no control over whether or not this projector was left on.

i realize we can’t go to church now without looking up on the wall to sing our songs and hear our announcements and whatnot, but if the whole point of a southern gospel concert is to HEAR the singers perform, why do i want to look at a screen the whole night?

I blame the Hoppers. They may not have started this nonsense, but they sure did flog it shamelessly, most recently at NQC last year with their self-congratulatory “making of The Ride” video montage. They’re certainly not the only ones though. The Talleys have done it. The Pfieffers too, if I recall rightly. Most recently in my experience, Karen Peck and New River munged up their set at the Harmony Honors in April with a poorly synced series of video clips from Mel Gibson’s crucifixion porn Passion of the Christ playing along while KPNR sang “Last Night.” (Aside: do you think these groups pay royalties on the use of copyrighted film footage?) Note to KPNR: when you’re singing about the resurrected Savior’s victory over death, try not to show pictures of him being nailed to the cross and writhing in bloody pain and gory agony. Sort of undercuts the song’s ultimate victorious conclusion.

My own sense is that these videos are just another way for increasingly automated southern gospel acts to distract from the fact that very little live music is happening on the stage in front of the audience.

David Bruce Murray wants your help preserving sghistory.com.

Classics
LordSong
Kimichael, 2007
ALI: 50%

Go to a gospel concert these days and chances are at some point the performers will turn off the digital music makers and make an elaborate show of encircling the piano (assuming someone can play) to sing some old song “out of the red book” with just the keyboard for accompaniment.

Before the song, a great deal will be made of this interlude, as if a folk-art form long thought extinct is being carefully kept alive by the last three or four people on the planet capable of singing acoustically. When the song is over, the singers will beam with the kind of self-satisfaction that George Bush exudes when he makes it to the end of a sentence. And then audiences are returned to their regularly scheduled program full of preprogrammed music and celestial choirs on back-up tracks.

The rise of this gather-‘round-the-old-redbookism in southern gospel has had the unfortunate effect of making piano-and-vocals “acoustical” work synonymous with “vintage,” as if to sing this way for more than a song or two at a time would be to engage in some kind of unthinkable artistic regression. Sure, and while we’re at it, why don’t we just start selling LPs in the lobby!

It’s a measure of how badly gospel music denies its own decline that an album like this one, full of good songs superbly sung and accompanied expertly (here, by the incomparable Stan Whitmire), must be dressed up as the kind of nostalgic novelty implied by the name, Classics.

But the title is misleading on two fronts. First, these songs may be familiar and in many cases fairly old, but their power is not their familiarity or age. Rather it’s that they are well written, thoughtfully imagined, carefully rearranged (for the most part), and exquisitely voiced. If this is somehow “classic,” let us all be doomed to eternal classicism.

Second, this is not a classic vocal formation. LordSong may be a mixed group in the tradition of the Lefevres and the Nelons, but the dominance of female voices – Heather Day and Kim Lord singing at or below Michael Lord’s register, and Valerie Ellenburg singing soprano – makes possible sounds unlike anything the Lefevres or the Nelons could ever have produced. It’s not a question of “better,” so much as “different” in a delightful way.

From her days with the Ruppes, we’ve known Kim Lord to be among the most gifted female vocalists in gospel music. And she’s in finest form here taking the lead on “Hold to My Hand” (and her harmony work in much of the rest of the “Hand Medley” is deeply satisfying as well).

But the poppier music that LordSong has made the mainstay of the group’s sound since its inception has underserved Michael Lord’s too-often overlooked voice. Here, he shows extraordinary range, which has less to do with how high he can sing than with the dexterity and flexibility of his voice to shade the harmonies to which he contributes and inflect the melodies he takes with the right coloration and feel. I wish more male vocalists in gospel music would strive for this sort of depth and nuance and stop wasting so much time trying to break glass, blow the subwoofer, or fleck the balcony with spittle.

It’s not just Michael Lord who seems to shine more brightly on this recording. Classics captures the qualities that make LordSong as a whole one of the most artistically sophisticated ensembles in gospel music, to a much greater extent than most of their music has suggested up until this point. Judging by earlier releases like Soul Food and Refuse to be Afraid, the group seems to have assumed that the way to establish themselves was to sing a stylistic mishmash of quasi-contemporary, quasi-traditional, pseudo-praise-and-worship music. Here’s hoping Classics disabuses them of this flawed assumption.

One key element of the album’s success is the song selection and arrangement, which would seem to owe a great deal to the influence of Mark Lowry on the group (if not his direct involvement). Emotionally, Classics gives off the same air of contemplation and larkishness that Lowry’s album of hymns relies so heavily on. Conceptually, Classics succeeds by taking traditional music and remaking it in the artist’s own image, just as Lowry’s post-Gaither success has mainly involved a willingness to see what fairly traditional gospel music and Christian entertainment would look like as presented through a fun-house mirror.

And finally, the album is, like Lowry’s musical tastes, eclectic but conventional. The majority of the songs here come from the world of gospel, but there are some praise and worship and inspo numbers that attempt to expand the generic horizons of the album.

Of these, the inspirational selections – most notably “Praise the Lord” and “Cornerstone” – work best because they include powerful passages of rich harmony and subtle passing tones that fit well with LordSong’s strength as a harmonic ensemble.

The stuff that tends toward the contemporary and praise-and-worshipy side, on the other hand, turns out to be the least successful selections. This shouldn’t be all that surprising. Songs such as “I’m Forgiven” and “Oh Happy Day” (as opposed to “O Happy Day, which is also here and works marvelously with the, uhm … classic convention piano style Whitmire provides) aren’t good vehicles for harmonic ensembles. They’re meant for soloists and unison ensembles, and the result is that the material feels beneath LordSong’s considerable harmonic sophistication. “I’m Forgiven” sounds like the soundtrack to a Doublemint commercial.

The other major weakness is the tendency of the arrangements to move in rhythmic fits and starts within songs. And I’m not just talking about the medleys, though the “O Happy Day/Oh Happy Day” medley, the album’s opening track, perfectly exemplifies what I mean. Like too many other songs, this one includes an abrupt and disruptive rhythmic change midway through the song.

It feels like a gimmick used to create the sense of a “bigger” sound, as if someone said, “this song needs something else” but no one knew what to do but jigger with the rhythm since there was only piano and voices to play with. This sort of thing is symptomatic of work from producers accustomed to thinking in terms of the larger instrumental arrangements that come with fully orchestrated albums, or else someone overly self-conscious of an acoustical album seeming anemic. But no one working with Whitmire should ever feel instrumentally insecure (including Whitmire himself, who is one of the arrangers). The guy is a one-man symphony.

Fortunately these are minor flaws that may mar the album’s surface, but don’t ultimately erode its achievement. Classics is an extended meditation on the lost art of close harmony, reminding us (and, one hopes, LordSong themselves) that the group’s strength all along has been, not as a flash and dazzle act working in the hinterlands of indistinctly hybrid song styles, but as artists unafraid to step out from behind the self-indulgent adornments of Christian music’s overproduced style, and just sing.

Ricky Atkinson, TK&McCrae, HisSong, Naomi & the Segos … what do these names have in common? Perhaps a lot of things I can’t think of, but for the purposes of today’s class discussion, two things.

First, they’re all at best second- (or third- or fourth- or shoe-) string presences in gospel music. And second, as topics of posts here, they generated by far the site’s most acrimonious discussion threads, full of invective and acrimony that burn with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns.

So what’s up with that? Why do marginal or “boutique” acts in southern gospel seem to have cult-of-personality followings that engender such partisan viciousness? Even the Joseph Habedank thread, which got pretty nasty, was a birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese compared to the comments that these downmarket groups and personalities give rise to.

Just to use the most recent example: commenters to the Segos thread, a cartoonish festival of idiocy that mainly attracts, as far as I can tell, drama queens and hysterics, have made threats of physical violence against one another and the principles involved (deleted), alleged Class A felonies (deleted), and imputed all kinds of other libelous things about whoever is deemed to be the enemy (delete, delete, delete). It’s not that these things are offensive to me, and anyway, I’m not easily offended. But it’s just that the general quality of these discussions is soooo childish and tedious.

Is there some law of the sg universe that says fanatic obsessions intensify in inverse proportion to the performer’s market share? If there isn’t, there should be. Call it Downmarket Derangement Syndrome or something like that.

All of which puts me in mind of Mark Noll’s comment about the level of discourse in evangelical culture: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”