2007

SG History 101 - Shaping Gospel Music

To begin this new year, I thought I’d depart from the usual artist-based format here and examine an issue in gospel music analysis that is by no means new.

A lot of today’s “southern” gospel music is influenced by sounds and styles from other genres of music, particularly pop and country music. We’ll look back to examine the historical precedents in this development.

The earliest gospel music in the southern tradition came out of the music of the churches. It was influenced only partly by the folk musics of the time, but generally there was very little relationship between the music of the southeastern churches and that of the secular traditions around them.

Naturally, this would change with the increasing population, industrial growth, and educational attainment in the region. But in the early 20th century, the four-part singing that was becoming the vogue in the churches became the focal style of the groups organized by the music publishing companies to promote their songbooks and other products.

As the gospel music industry started to grow, the emphasis shifted away from church singing from songbooks to concerts from the professional groups that arose from those early days.

And as the gospel music industry grew more professional, it stood to reason that it would intermingle more with the other genres of music that were also available to more and more Americans due to the growing national affluence.

We have already discussed in past articles how the white and black churches intermingled musically. With the close relationships that always existed between whites and blacks in the South even prior to the civil rights movements that began in the 1950s, it follows that white and black gospel music styles would also cross back and forth.

This was dramatically illustrated in the late 1940s and early 1950s when the Golden Gate Quartet, one of the premier black quartets, known for their “jubilee” style of singing, were often booked for concerts with such leading white quartets as the Blackwood Brothers and the Statesmen. Those bookings abruptly stopped after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court verdict, but by then, a great deal of mutual musical influence had already occurred.

The Statesmen, in fact, went a bit farther in that direction in the 1950s, making a number of recordings with the Wade Creager Dance Orchestra, and using that group on their syndicated TV show (sponsored by Nabisco) as well. On that show, the Statesmen even sang the commercial jingles featured on the program. Like so many other things associated with that renowned quartet, the Statesmen were among the first gospel artists to incorporate popular music stylings in their work.

And since the Statesmen were a trendsetting gospel group, based on their influence and overall popularity, it only followed that other gospel groups eager to duplicate their reputation and success would follow in their footsteps. One such group was the Oak Ridge Quartet, led by their creative and innovative manager and lead singer, “Smitty” Gatlin. In 1962, the Oak Ridge Quartet signed a recording contract with Warner Bros. Records, and released one of the most noteworthy albums in gospel music history, “The Oak Ridge Boys Sing the Sounds of Nashville”, recorded not only with some of the finest Nashville-based sidemen, but three cuts on that album were recorded with a string section, taking the sound of gospel quartet music to a different plane.

That album caught the attention of one Don Baldwin, the manager and baritone singer for one of the more dynamic up and coming young gospel quartets, the Couriers Quartet, who were trying to make their mark in the gospel music world. Baldwin decided to make an album with his quartet that would do the Oaks one better, with not only three songs with a string section, but a whole side with a full orchestra. That 1963 album, “Nothing But... the Gospel Truth” (also issued on Warner Bros. Records), attracted a lot of attention in the gospel world when it appeared, with its striking orange jacket and pop-styled orchestral and vocal asrrangements. Some fans of the Couriers were initially disturbed over the album, claiming that their favorite quartet had “…sold out to a movie company.”

Of course, such was not the case. The Couriers went on to become one of the most distinctive and universally admired and respected groups in the gospel field. But the initial reaction to that now-classic album was a portend of sorts for things to come in the very near future.

As the 1960s wound down, it occurred to several of the leading gospel artists that if their genre of music was going to have a meaningful future, it had to develop younger fans. But how to do that in the age of the widening “generation gap”, brought about in large part because of the popularity of pop groups like the Beatles, whose style was quite a bit different from the style of music during previous generations.

On one side, a style of music was emerging that incorporated the style of music that the youth preferred with lyrics that told the Christian gospel message. This style would eventually be lumped into a somewhat misleading catch-all title of “Contemporary Christian Music.”

On the side of traditional quartet gospel music, the artists there were not oblivious to the developing trends. Some intrepid quartets began to incorporate some of the milder features of the newer music into their sound, risking the alienation of their established fan base, but hoping to compensate for that by developing a brand new group of fans that help sustain their popularity for years to come.

Once again, the Oak Ridge Boys (which was the new official name for the Oak Ridge Quartet) were among the leaders in this movement. Their style became increasingly youth-oriented, not only in the sound of their music, but in their personal appearance. Such albums as “It’s Happening” (1969), “Thanks” (1970), and “Talk About The Good Times” (1971) were noteworthy not only for their success (the title song of “Talk About…” won a Grammy for the group in 1971), but also for the stylistic influence they had among the other quartets in the gospel field.

Another group that was a leader in this movement was the Imperials, a quartet formed by legendary Statesmen lead singer Jake Hess in late 1963. Hess was aware of the trends in music as well as the need for the genre to widen its audience appeal, so he left the Statesmen to form a new group that would go forward in the same way his Statesmen did a decade earlier. Along with the Oaks, the Imperials began to incorporate the newer sounds into their repertoire, continuing in that direction even after Hess left them in 1967 for medical reasons.

Albums like “To Sing Is The Thing” (1967), “New Dimensions” (1968), “Now” (1969), and “Gospel’s Alive And Well” (1970) duplicated the success of the Oak Ridge Boys’ above albums, but the Imperials went the Oaks one better in one respect. Because of the group’s work with such secular stars as Elvis Presley and Jimmy Dean, they even had some name recognition with secular audiences. And they were able to parlay that into TV appearances on well-known national programs of the day, such as the Mike Douglas and David Frost talk shows.

Both the Oaks and Imperials were bringing gospel music to audiences who’d not previously heard it, and their gospel quartet based sound was appealing to those new fans.

But as is often the case, other gospel groups who were either uncomfortable in adapting or unable to became increasingly resentful of the success of the Oaks and Imperials. Citing their fashionable wardrobes and their fashionable hair styles, these other quartets openly expressed their disdain for the direction those groups had taken the genre. A sort of “generation gap” developed between those two groups of artists, even though age wise, the Oaks and the Imperials were of the same era as those other artists.

Now, not every other group placed themselves in opposition to the successes of the Oaks and Imperials. Several other groups embraced the movement they sparked, such as the Stamps Quartet (led by legendary bass singer and gospel music pioneer JD Sumner, himself no stranger to controversy), the Downings, and even established older quartets such as the Rebels, the Speers, and the Blackwood Brothers, hired band members to produce and create the bigger, hipper sounds, and took the same career chances as did the Oaks and Imperials.

Eventually, like all cycles, this one died out as well. Part of the reason had to do with the resistance that much of the industry understandably had toward abandoning the traditions that had made it, part of it had to do with changing audience musical tastes (seemingly gospel fans are no more immune to taste trends than those fans of other genres), and part of it had to do with the changing career fortunes of the movement’s leaders as well.

In the case of the Oak Ridge Boys, they incurred such resentment from their gospel colleagues that they began to have difficulty obtaining concert bookings (this in spite of their award and record successes). Musically, the group always flirted with the country music field since the early 1970s anyway, so as their gospel bookings dwindled, their interest in crossing over increased. And since their final gospel recordings for Columbia in the mid-1970s didn’t sell particularly well, they almost reluctantly entered the country field in 1977, and within a year they became one of the leading country recording artists, ascending to superstar status by the 1980s after their smash pop single “Elvira” in 1981.

As for the Imperials, they went further and further into a contemporary Christian music direction, and by the mid 1970s were no longer considered “southern” gospel artists, even though they continued to have chart songs in that genre into 1975. No longer a gospel quartet, the group became a leader in the contemporary field in the 1980s, and maintained that status into the 1990s.

But the influence of contemporary music is still acute in the southern gospel field, with the success in recent years of artists like the Gaither Vocal Band (formed by Bill Gaither in the 1980s to fulfill his lifelong dream of singing in a gospel quartet, although the group’s music is far more eclectic), and the Crabb Family, a talented southern family group whose sound went far beyond the confines of traditional southern gospel. And the “generation gap” between fans of those groups and fans of the more traditionally based music rages on (even though there are many fans of both).

The jury remains out as to whether this broad range of musical styles under the “southern gospel” umbrella is a healthy or unhealthy thing, but there are probably a predominantly large group of fans of Christian music who are glad to have such a variety of music available for them to choose from.

Fans of the traditional quartet music will argue that their distinctive tradition is corrupted and undermined by all this musical interaction with other genres…while fans of the more contemporary sounding approach will maintain that the music has to evolve to maintain its’ relevance to future listeners.

Either way, it’s all continuing to shape the history of gospel music.