See Jones, Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands (UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 9. The Martins on growing up in gospel and how time apart changed their tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_37', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_37').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); On the surface, these indicators suggest the clear shift in tastes within Christian music entertainment away from southern gospel's preference for close harmony sung in the ensemble. Menu. Nominated in the "Gospel/Contemporary Christian Music" category, CCM soloist Natalie Grant attended the ceremony, only to leave before the show ended. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_54', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_54').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); connecting their identities, the group's history, and their Arkansas roots with the force of southern gospel music. In the early 1990s, two sisters and their brother, Judy, Joyce, and Jonathan, then in their late teens and performing as The Martins, began appearing with the Gaither Homecoming Friends. This period was followed by the mobilization of right-leaning Protestants (and many conservative Catholics) into a political base for the Republican Party in the Reagan Era and a power base for evangelical leaders (including Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Pat Robertson'sand later Ralph Reed'sChristian Coalition, and, more recently, Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, and Tony Perkins's Family Research Council); and the not-entirely unrelated realignments within conservative and fundamentalist Protestantism wrought by the rise of non-denominational evangelical mega-churches and the Tea Party. The peer reviewers for Southern Spaces provided generous feedback that sharpened my thinking and refined the essay's argument considerably. Joyce Martin Sanders biography | Last.fm The songs are structurally derivative and lyrically conventional, but this music is interesting for what it suggests about The Martins's cultural temperament and expressive style, best described in these early years as one of rustic post-teen southern evangelical angsty spiritual wonderment. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_53', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_53').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); If The Martins's Arkansas origins are not revealed in this story, their roots surface in a 2011 Gaither Homecoming video, The Best of The Martins, a collection of performances over the preceding nineteen years. The Martins - Personal Lives - LiquiSearch tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_25', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_25').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); conservatives primarily in denominationally unaffiliated megachurchessouthern gospel has come to voice the revanchist critique of non-denominational evangelicalism offered by old-line denominational fundamentalists (namely, Southern Baptists, General Baptists, Free Will Baptists, and Independent Baptists; Nazarenes; Church of God; Church of Christ; Assemblies of God; and the more fundamentalist strains of Methodism).26These denominations were most frequently represented in original ethnographic research I have conducted into the contemporary culture of southern gospel. No Sympathy For the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism. Not that "southern gospel" never made an appearance before the 1970s and 1980s. Family, friend, or fan, this family history biography is for you to remember Joyce E. (Sanders) Martin. Since at least the late 1970s, southern gospel's fortunes, measured by market standards, have trended downward, a decline attributed to broader trends within commercial Christian music entertainment and more broadly within fundamentalist and evangelical Protestantism.As the fortunes of southern gospel have declined, those of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) have risen. Interestingly, Willow Creek leaders published a study conducted by the church in 2008 that indicated the seeker-sensitive model did not reliably lead to consistently reported levels of spiritual development or maturity among those who were attracted to the church by its seeker sensitivity (Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson, Reveal: Where Are You? Judy Martin Hess lives in Columbus, Georgia with her husband Jake Hess Jr. and their four children. Everyone sits on risers around a piano and sings: old songs, new songs, gospel songs, hymns, inspirational ballads, spiritual anthems, praise and worship choruses, even a few secular tunes now and then (Bill Withers's "Lean on Me," or an arrangement of Barry Manilow's "One Voice"). She keeps it real and points the way out of despair with an admonishing heart. Joyce Martin Sanders Weight Loss In essence, we are an agricultural area. Alexandria, Ind. These two tropesinnocence and prodigious talentinteracting with the publically retold stories of their backcountry upbringing, suggest an authenticity that speaks across generations, professional accomplishment, and even the cynicizing forces of the entertainment business.53A notable elision in this storyand it points to more general (mis)understandings about the Gaithers's personaeis the role of Gloria Gaither. Structural Info Filmography Known for movies Saved! Nor is its cultural function exclusively or even primarily of scholarly interest for what it may tell us about southern whiteness in an ever more racially diverse and pluralistic world. Joyce Martin-Sanders | Shires Wiki | Fandom Just as I Am: 30 Favorite Old Time Hymns, was nominated for a 1998 Grammy in the same category. For an overview of southern gospel's history and development within the wider domain of American gospel music, see Shearon et al., "Gospel Music," and Don Cusic, The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel Music (Madison: Popular Press, 1990). tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_47', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_47').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Yet The Martins remain beloved members of the Homecoming cast and reputational avatars of gospel traditionalism carried on in the music of a new generation of songbirds. Similarly, Gerald Wolfe, also originally a pianist for the Cathedral Quartet and subsequently the owner and emcee of his own professional trio, Greater Vision, was famously plucked from obscurity (or so the story went onstage in his early years as a performer) while singing with the Dumplin' Valley Boys.49References to Bennett's birthplace in Strawberry, Arkansas, were staples of Cathedrals concerts, several of which I attended, in the 1980s and 1990s. But professional southern gospel has always been strongly grounded its history and identity in the male quartet. . The Martins Official Website His interview enacts a modern gospel version of the venerable Arkansas Traveler colloquy in which a high-born southerner (the Traveler) engages an Arkansas Squatter in a dialogue about the differences of class and geography.60Bill Clinton's presidential campaign used the Traveler name and image as a way to strengthen his populist appeal running against a Washington insider. The Arkansas imaginary explored here is not a totalizing way of understanding the vernacular music of white fundamentalists. This essay is interested primarily with professional southern gospel, which descends from convention singing but has been distinct from it since the 1930s and 1940s. The Arkansas imaginary has explanatory power for The Martins inasmuch as southern gospel music revoices and revalues the distortions and elisions of religious identity and cultural history central to the self-concept of many white fundamentalists and evangelicals. Gaither Gospel Series DVD cover. They live in Columbus, Georgia, and have five children. Joyce Martin Sanders lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband Paul, and she has two children. May 19, 1970) lives in Clive, Iowa with his wife Dara Makohoniuk-Martin and their youngest three of six children, including twin boys, one of which has cerebral palsy. Copyright 2023 TBN - Trinity Broadcasting Network. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_58', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_58').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Blevins links the emergence of the Ozark image to the cultivation of cotton, which transformed the lowlands and delta of Arkansas's east, middle, and south into vast mechanized agricultural zones. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_28', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_28').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Professional southern gospel emerged from a Reconstruction-era subculture of poor and working-class white southerners. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_60', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_60').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); What emerges in The Martins's interview echoes Anthony Harkins's observations about constructed hillbilly rusticity: "Middle-class white Americans [can] see these people [hillbillies] as a fascinating and exotic 'other' akin to Native Americans or Blacks, while at the same time sympathize with them as poorer and less modern versions of themselves. In this way, CCM musicalized the desires of many conservative Christians to perceive themselves as culturally relevant.23David Stowe, No Sympathy For the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011) notes that the poly-generic style that defined the emergence of CCM in the 1980s was linked with the politicization of Christian music as part of the broader mobilization of evangelicals and social conservatives (246248). My use of "evangelical" follows George Marsden's, denoting Protestant thought and action shaped by Reformed theology. Lord, is this my time. See David Fillingim, "A Flight From Liminality: 'Home' in Country and Gospel Music," Studies in Popular Culture 20, no. But I'll say this: I've never been more honored to sing about Jesus and for Jesus. Arkansas ranks forty-fifth in median income in the United States and, by official self-description since the 1970s, is culturally "the natural state." Lord, let it be so, not just a dream. Marquee ensemble singers who once would have driven a group's fame and success today leave ensemble work and go solo to cut costs and stay viable.35Examples of changes and shifts within professional southern gospel since 1990 include the disbanding of numerous groups as well as the retirements and deaths of many of the mid-twentieth century singers who anchored the genre's golden era.