For years, we’ve been hearing doom and gloom reports about how the industry is dying, how customers just want stuff for free, about analog dollars turning into digital dimes… and (all too frequently) about how new laws are needed to save these industries.

Yet, what we find when looking through the research — from a variety of sources to corroborate and back up any research we found — is that the overall entertainment ecosystem is in a real renaissance period. The sky truly is rising, not falling: the industry is growing both in terms of revenue and content. We split the report up into video & film, books, music and video games — and all four segments are showing significant growth (not shrinking) over the last decade. All of them are showing tremendous opportunity. The amount of content that they’re all producing is growing at an astounding rate (which again, is the most important thing). But revenue, too, is growing. Equally important is that rather than consumers just wanting to get stuff for free, they have continually spent a greater portion of their income on entertainment — with the percentage increasing by 15% from 2000 to 2008.

This all points to the fact that what is happening within the industry is not a challenge of a business getting smaller — quite the opposite. It’s about the challenge of an industry getting larger, but doing so in ways that route around the existing structures.

Full, multimedia report here. Another take here.

The takeaway, I think, is that we’re conditioned to assume “growth” in music, as in other industrial complexes of modern capitalism, aligns with profit-taking in certain easily identifiable ways (record companies, artists, retailers, promoters etc), and/but that’s all been scrambled and is and has been realigning in new forms that will probably eventually be readable in terms of a more traditional balance sheet of producers and consumers and supply and demand. But right now, things are still very much in flux.

But then again, when the Crabb Family is/was good, they are/were really good. In fact, I’d say that the Crabb Family in its heyday was responsible for one of my most memorable gospel music experiences ever:

Looking around me at the hair buns and make-up-less faces, the long skirts, the almost-missionary zeal in the eyes of the younger guys (not the typical sullenness and punkish bravado of most young, rural males these days), I realize that this is a perfect storm of an sg moment: here’s the one segment of evangelical Christianity - Pentecostalism - that’s growing, excited and enthusiastic about the future of the Christian enterprise, in contrast to the stagnant attendance in most denominations and the political toxicity contaminating so much of the rest of evangelicalism today. And these Christians are here for the most exciting gospel act around right now. I have a tingly moment of my own in which I gloat a little to myself (no chuckling though … that little girl is still hawk-eyeing me, unsure if I may be trusted even yet), because I feel like this auditorium, this evening is confirmation of my hypothesis a few weeks back about the direction of sg’s newest generation of fans. I said they tend to be Pentecostal (as opposed to previous generations of stalwart sg fans who were largely Baptists), and here was a room full of hundreds of Pentecostals, many of them teens, twentysomethings and young couples with kids trying to raise the roof when they weren’t out buying Crabb product all night long (it didn’t hurt the Crabbs were selling any three cd/dvd combination you want for $30). So under these wildfire conditions, “Dontcha Wanna Go” just set the place ablaze straight through to the end of the evening, two songs later. By that time, my ears are aching, literally, but I don’t much care and neither does anyone around me as far as I can tell (and this includes people my grandparents’ age as well as my little girl chaperone). I sneak out before the press of bodies at the doors becomes too much. As I leave, I see the Crabb caravan idling contentedly off in one corner of the lot (facing the highway, not coincidentally) … waiting patiently to carry these gospel itinerants to the next stand, the next night, to the next musical bonfire. Dontcha wanna go .. go .. yes I wanna go .. go .. go …

The full thing’s here.

Usually I’d say this kind of wistful hope about recapturing some grandeur fixed in the amber of memory sounds like so much wasteful go0d-old-daysism, but the fact of the matter is the Crabbs in all their many perpetually reuniting variations have been making music that is often not bad and not infrequently some of the most invigorating stuff out there (see here, for instance). The same reason the Crabb Family couldn’t stay together is the same reason they can’t manage to ever really break things off, which is another way of saying that good gospel music, like pretty much any other kind, requires a certain amount of dysfunction. I’m still ready to go … go …

I could honestly do without all the visual palavering of the video’s flimsy eco-pantheism, but who doesn’t like a song about singers and singing (and I had totally forgotten until I heard this song that Emmylou Harris sang with Gram Graham Parsons, so bonus score for sharpening my music trivia knowledge).

So instead let’s talk about the Dolly Parton/Queen Latifah film by that title soon to be released. Via DBM, here’s a clip of Karen Peck in the film.

I’ll reserve fuller judgment for a fuller viewing, but going by this clip alone, the “Joyful Noise” may end up being a “good” example of big-screen focus-grouped “gospel” that’s beyond experiential resuscitation even by a singer of Peck’s considerable ability.

At any rate, I saw a trailer for the movie in the theater last week and the acting looks to be dreadful and leaden (an inference that Peck’s over-amped stamping about the stage in this clip does nothing to rebut). And of course I’m sure I’ll go see it.

Another reader expressed a more general interest in the origins of the book’s cover:

The cover intrigues me; in that these are all current singers, and there are none of the “olt-timers.” Doug, could you gives us your thoughts on how you chose the cover?

Sure! I assume the reader’s calling out the relatively recent vintage of the image compared to “olt-timers” implies that he expected a more “classic” photo from one of the legendary quartets. And that’s a fair point. Why not seek out a renown group from the golden age of the 40s, 50s, and 60s?

There are basically two answers: action shot and permissions.

The best cover photos for most books are non-posed shots, which in this case means groups singing live on stage. There may or may not be a lot of high quality action shots of midcentury southern gospel acts in live performance out there, but they are hard to come by in my experience. And even if you can find them, you have to get permission to use them, and this can prove even more difficult for any numbers of reasons. Descendants of bygone stars or other custodians of historic, proprietary content such as midcentury southern gospel photographs guard celebrity legacies carefully. Some are skeptical of academic work. Just as often, some are, again in my experience, simply impossible to reach (literally, as in, they don’t respond to phone calls, emails, faxes, registered mail, and the carrier pigeons never come back … and my hunch is these are a lot of the same folks who don’t pay - and sometimes don’t even collect on - their royalties).

In a perferct(er) world, I would have used this image, or, perhaps, this one. But the obstacles to securing the rights in this particular case were just too difficult to surmount for an image that would have been used with such prominence.

In these contexts, it’s much more pragmatic and manageable to seek out what amounts to a free agent — someone who holds the sole rights to a good image (both in terms of composition and content, as well as resolution and reproducibility … that is, 300 dpi at 5×7 or or higher, ideally) and deal directly with him or her, without all the interference of industry politics and professional self-interest. At this historical moment, under these circumstances, that typically means more recent images of current groups or events shot with digital cameras by regular fans who have a knack for new media. Thus the post from several months back when I asked the hive mind of Avery readers to see what you could come up with. Which led to the generous Jeremy Bell and the image you see used above.

Jeremy has dozens of images up at his site, and I liked a few of the Hoppers, but no image more urgently captured as many related aspects of southern gospel as a distinct set of musical practices and experiences as this one: a quartet, singing (if my memory of the event serves) the staggered ending of a song, flamboyantly emotional, a clear connection among the group (note Fowler’s Youncesque gesture, lightly holding onto his neighbor’s arm, with a seemingly unself-conscious ease), a well-lit stage, and (rarer than rare), an actual face in the crowd, so subtlety lit in the reflection of the stage lights.

In short, one learns to be a pragmatist in these matters. A friend of mine was writing a textbook recently and thought, how clever it would be to place lyrics of content-specific songs from American pop and rock-n-roll above the title of each chapter in her book. Until her publisher came back and said, if you want to use all these lyrics, it will cost you just shy of a million dollars to secure the rights. Let us know when your check’s in the mail. Suddenly, my friend didn’t think those lyrics were nearly so clever, or at least not nearly as necessary.

And so it goes. Let not the perfect be the enemy of the possible etc.

But I don’t think I’m settling. It’s a gorgeous image that deserves an iconographic status separate from my book. But boy howdy am I happy to have access to it.

First, even when I’m not actively posting, the blog is never far away from me and my thoughts. I put my eyes on every comment that’s posted (and especially those few that aren’t), at all hours of the day and night. And then there is the small book’s worth of scrap paper laying about my home and work offices, scrawled on with ideas for potential-laden threads, as well as a growing list of voice notes on my phone in which I’ve dictated (usually in the car) snatches of thoughts that will, I swear, become a post one of these days (there’s the one about an old Greater Vision album that I think of as capturing two Gerald Wolfes on one record, and another about why backwoods virtuosi can’t seem to leave the world of southern gospel, and another that involves a wonderful old photo of the Klaudt Indian family from way, way, WAY back … and so on … you get the idea).

Second, and more ironically, what must look from your perspective like a withdrawal on my part of interest in, or a disengagement of attention with, the subject matter at hand has actually measured for me in inverse proportion my immersion in the music as I’ve worked on an academic book about southern gospel. Unlike “regular” books, scholarly works take a long time to gestate (conceptualizing, researching, writing, rewriting, reviewing, revising, re-revising, indexing, and so on) before their final appearance, and so I’ve tried to play down the enormous undertaking it is, and has been and continues to be, lest it all become one big anticlimax, or the bloggerly equivalent of hearing over and over again about one’s dog and its fondness for consuming one’s homework.

But no matter: here we are. The book is nearly done. It’s all over, as we’d say back home, but the shoutin’ (a final proofing, to be exact, of the galleys that sit on my desk here as I write, and, you know … actually producing the thing itself, which is accomplished by far more talented people than I).

And so begins the self-promotion.

The University of Illinois Press’s spring 2012 catalog is out, and my forthcoming book is part of it. Since the readers of this site have played an indispensable role in my understanding of southern gospel in general and the writing of this book in particular, I wanted you to be among the first to see the cover and catalog copy. Many thanks to Jeremy Bell and the generosity with which he volunteered access to his trove of southern gospel images. This image in particular says southern gospel with exquisite clarity … says it splendidly and immediately.

The catalog description of the book is here (the full spring catalog is here).

I’m not sure when “regular” posting will resume, but at least now you know a bit more about what stands behind my increased silence (and how/where to buy the book, which of course I hope you’ll do in droves, pre-order or post-release). I guess you could say that the silence around here has been and is, in its own way, the sound of my soul singing just offstage.

See you in 2012.

PS: For those of you who haven’t gotten enough talk about (mediocre) Christmas music, here’s a reflection on the cockroach-like indestructibility of the Christmas carol. And for those of you who’d rather skip the pendanticism and go straight to a youtube mashup video of dogs and cats singing Christmas music, here ya go:

We live thoroughly in the post-melisma period of popular music, in which the overwhelming majority of singers and audiences alike assume good singing always must involve highly ornamented vocal styles that have, at their worst, about the same the relationship to the melody as a gnat to the ear: buzzing all around it and occasionally making contact but mostly just being annoying, as singers over-extend what I long ago dubbed their inner angry girl. Not all singers who self-indulgently rely overmuch on these sorts of highly filigreed lines are incapable of the kind of exquisitely well-placed and unornamented tones that Smith lays down here, but it’s rare enough to be captivating in retrospect.

And one more thing: I don’t see a date associated with the youtube clip. Anybody wanna take a stab at suggesting an approximate year on this recording?

If this development of commercial radio switching to all-Christmas formats only weeks after Halloween is not entirely new, it is all the same horrifically new to me, and you may chalk it up to denial that I have taken this long to scoop my yearly spoonful of sand back into the ocean of unlistenably craptastic auditory pollution called Christmas music.

In any case, forthwith my customary admonishment to, as I originally put it, gird yourself for bad Christmas music:

It’s only November 29 and I’m already sick to death of “Jingle Bell Rock” and Burle Ives and “White Christmas” and the Ray Conniff Singers (”let’s all sing in unison everybody!”). Hasn’t anyone realized that there are only so many ways to rearrange “Silent Night” and “We Three Kings” before the songs collapse under their own threadbare weight? The state of Christmas music - Christian and secular - is atrocious. There’s a lot contributing to the dismal repetition of the same handful of exhausted melodies, which passes for Christmas music. First and foremost, the limited shelf life of Christmas projects disincentivizes artists and labels from investing heavily in good, original holiday music. Second, the hyper-commercialization of Christmas relies in large part on the sentimentality and faux nostalgia of traditional Christmas favorites softening the rapacious spending frenzy that’s at the root of most Christmas celebrations (”hey, we’re singing “Deck the Halls” while we elbow our way through Super Walmart, so this must mean Christmas isn’t an obscene orgy of getting and spending”). And since you’ve got only at most a couple of months of serious selling time and airplay for Christmas merchandise (in music), the best way to cash in on the Christmas cash-cow is to play to the saps who can’t get enough of “Rudolph” and “Little Drummer Boy” and Alvin & The Chipmunks. This kind of pandering leaves no air and shelf space for original, unproven tunes (and in turn, of course, recycling the same tripe season after season only reinforces the tendency to repeat “old favorites” next year, which is why, I assume, my local soft rock radio station has been taken over by schlocky Christmas crap … and speaking of radio, kudos to Chuck Peters for resisting the Christmas blinders most programmers put on when the tinsel and mistletoe come out). There are fine Christmas projects out there (B.B. King’s, Michael Buble’s [Avery in 2011: not the most recent one, alas], Linda Eder’s and, ridicule me though you may, Mariah Carey’s), but the profit-imperative behind the Bing-Crosby cliché Christmas (a complete fantasy, mind you) keeps these projects at the back of the rack. And there is original Christmas music being written out there, but it doesn’t get much airplay and little promotion because either it can’t compete with “Holly Jolly Christmas” or it’s a religious tune that’s too explicitly sectarian for pop Christmas radio.The situation in sg is not much better. Though original Christmas music fairs slightly better in Christian markets than others, that’s mainly because churches drive the creation of new Christmas musicals and other church music. Look at your average sg Christmas project and you’ll see the same forces at work here that thwart good Christmas music in secular markets: dashed off recordings geared toward holiday sales more than musical excellence. The few original tunes that may be included on these are often hastily assembled, kitchy affairs that are difficult to take seriously (for instance, EHSSQ’s “A Quartet Christmas”).

It kinda surprises me that this trend has persisted so long, since pretty clearly good holiday music - both Christian and secular - is in high demand when it manages to break through the Christmas-music barricade. Linda Eder’s recording of “Bells of St. Paul” became an instant classic when it came out a few years back, as is Kenny Loggin’s fine “Celebrate Me Home” (and Mariah Carey’s recording of “Miss You Most” is outstanding, though it doesn’t get as much play as Eder and Loggins). And it took only a matter of years for the wonderful “Mary Did You Know” to become sickeningly overdone - evidence, I think, that there is a demand for good, original Christmas music even if labels and vendors prefer to peddle holiday pap for easy profits. Aside from labels and artists investing in solidly built and performed Christmas music (which I don’t expect to see happen any time soon), perhaps part the problem is that the relatively small number of good, original Christmas tunes are too dispersed across and buried in a host of otherwise forgettable individual projects

The full thing is here.  Feel free to spread a little cheer with recommendations of actually good Christmas music in the comments.

And with that, a very southern gospel welcome to any visitors coming our way from AAR.

And here he is covering “I Must Tell Jesus” in something very close to a tent revival setting.

Cain has some ways to go yet to best Gantry in terms of womanizing, but this week’s events suggests all the facts may not yet be in evidence on this front.

As for the singing, I been batting this question around with a colleague of mine the past few days as to what on earth to make of all this. There may be some truth to this take, which basically pegs Cain as Uncle Ruckus running for president. Still … it seems it might also more complicated (and yet maybe more obviously simple) than that too. I have a few theories (one of which keys off the title of this post) but since y’all are probably more the target audience for Cain than I, maybe it’d be better for me to listen a bit first to your thoughts.