Southern Gospel Music - Way of Life Literature

[Pages:44]Southern Gospel Music Copyright 1998 by David W. Cloud

This edition May 6, 2014 ISBN 978-1-58318-148-5 This book is sold in print format but it is available for free distribution in eBook format--in pdf, mobi (for Kindle, etc.), and ePub. See the Free Book tab - . We do not allow distribution of this book from other web sites.

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Table of Contents

Introduction..........................................................................1 History of Southern Gospel................................................3 Worldliness .........................................................................10 Southern Gospel in Recent Years.....................................19 Southern Gospel and CCM ..............................................24 When to Avoid Southern Gospel Music.........................25 About Way of Life's eBooks ..............................................30 Powerful Publications for These Times...........................31

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Introduction

Southern gospel is not a single style of music. It is a classification of a broad range of harmonizing, countrytinged Christian music that originated in the southeastern part of the United States.

Some Southern gospel is lovely and spiritual and seeks not to entertain the flesh but to edify the spirit. (There are also quartets that are not Southern gospel in style; an example is the Old Fashioned Revival Hour Quartet that was featured on Charles Fuller's radio program.) We praise the Lord for all Christian music, Southern or otherwise, which doesn't sound like the world, which has scriptural lyrics, which seeks solely to glorify Jesus Christ and edify the saints, and which is produced by faithful Christians. Sadly, though, much of the Southern gospel incorporates worldly pop, country, ragtime, jazz, boogie-woogie, and rock rhythms, and is oriented toward entertainment. It is the latter that is closely akin to Contemporary Christian Music. As a matter of fact, commercial Southern gospel today is one of the branches of the larger CCM world.

I grew up with Southern gospel. The Southern Baptist churches my mom and dad attended in Florida would have afternoon sings on some Sundays. Following the morning service, we would have a glorious "dinner on the ground," featuring tables piled high with the tastiest dishes the church ladies could concoct. The kids would romp around as the tables were prepared, then the pastor would pray and everyone would gorge himself on whichever foods suited their fancy. The variety was incredible. When the meal was finished and the tables cleared, everyone gathered back in the church auditorium for the sing. There would be some congregational singing and then the quartets would start up. Usually these were local groups, but sometimes a professional

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group would be available. I always liked the congregational singing best.

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History of Southern Gospel

As we will see, Southern gospel brought four significant changes to Christian music in North America in the 1920s, `30s, `40s and `50s. (1) They commercialized it. (2) They took it out of the churches and put it into hands of publishers and promoters. (3) They jazzed it up with worldly styles. (4) They turned it into entertainment. Gospel music publisher Harper and Associates advertised their Southern gospel music as "Family entertainment with a message, entertainment that a Fair or civic organization can sponsor and not feel like they're getting too churchy." This sounds exactly like the Contemporary Christian Music approach. The Stamps Quartet of the 1930s "not only sang the most popular gospel songs of the day, but gave an all-around entertainment program" (Bob Terrell, The Music Men, p. 39).

Professional Southern gospel quartets were born in the early part of this century as business enterprises. Prior to that quartets were mixed (men and women) and "sang in their churches simply for the spiritual edification of the congregation" (The Music Men, p. 54). The inventor of the professional male gospel quartet was a Nazarene, James Vaughan, who hired a quartet in 1910 to represent his music publishing company (which he had founded in 1902). The Vaughan Quartet performances at churches, revivals, and conventions were a means whereby Vaughan sold music. "In this way the groups promoted their sponsor and created a market for the songbooks" (David L. Taylor, Happy Rhythm, p. 7). By the late 1920s Vaughan had 16 full-time quartets on the road. In 1921 the pioneering Vaughan cut the first record for his new recording company, and in 1922 he built the first radio station in Tennessee, all with the goal of promoting his music. In 1924 the V.O. Stamps Music Company was founded by a Baptist, Virgil Stamps; and he, too, put quartets to work. In 1929 this company became the famous Stamps-Baxter

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Music Company. These companies established influential music training schools and created the hugely popular all-day and all-night gospel music sings.

The new "Southern gospel" style featured "tag lines in accompanying voices, chromatic lower-neighbor note and passing notes, and in the refrain a walking bass lead with several interjections. The harmony was simple and very rhythmic. A ragtime style was added later to the piano accompaniment (commonly called the `stomp beat'), which made the sacred and the secular indistinguishable" (H.T. Spence, Confronting Contemporary Christian Music, p. 120).

The pioneer of the ragtime gospel piano style was Dwight Brock, who played in one of the Stamps quartets.

"Brock played a rhythm piano style; some thought it sounded a little like Dixieland [jazz] or razzamatazz. ... Thousands of pianists would copy his style in the years to come. ... IT WAS REVOLUTIONARY BECAUSE IT JAZZED UP GOSPEL MUSIC JUST ENOUGH FOR THE SECULAR PUBLIC TO CATCH ON. Dwight's nephew, Brock Speer, who sings bass for the Speer Family today, said when his uncle was a boy in the early teens--he was born in 1905--he heard a circus drummer playing syncopated rhythms on snare drums, and said to himself, `I wonder if I could do that on the piano?'" (The Music Men, pp. 38, 39).

Though the seeds for these things were present in the 1920s and `30s, it was not until the 1940s that Southern gospel began to promote an entertainment-oriented, jazzed up approach to Christian music on a large scale. Before that the quartets were not very flashy. For example, W.B. Walbert, the manager of the Vaughan Quartet during the 1920s, "was a spiritual man who did not believe that a quartet should do anything showy to detract from the gospel messages in the songs" (The Music Men, p. 33). This attitude did not prevail, though, and even Walbert's own son, James, began playing the piano backwards, playing with his elbows, and otherwise putting on a show to entertain the crowds.

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