This New Gospel Music Grows on Me

By Dale Short This is not something I say often, so please listen up: I was wrong, and I apologize to the folks I offended back then. Anybody got a peace pipe? Roughly 40 years ago, I heard there was a new gospel music station going on the air in Birmingham. I was overjoyed by this, because I've been a gospel music fanatic from the crib upward. My family sang in a gospel quartet, and their home LP collection was at least 99 percent gospel, with a handful of Jerry Clower and Elvis thrown in for variety. I cut my teeth on Tennessee Ernie Ford, the Kingsmen, Wally Fowler, the Happy Goodman Family, the Carter Family, Mahalia Jackson, Professor Alex Bradford, The Chuck Wagon Gang, Dorothy Love Coates and the Gospel Harmonettes, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Swan Silvertones, the Pilgrim Jubilees, and more. As I got older, I came to love the fusion of gospel and Bluegrass, and discovered the Stanley Brothers, Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver, the Bluegrass Cardinals, the Birmingham Sunlights, and (possibly my favorite living gospel group, especially their a cappella work) The Primitive Quartet from Candler, North Carolina. In those years, I drove all over creation with my son and my grandparents whenever I heard that one of these groups would be appearing at a church singing. So when I turned on that new Birmingham radio station in 1971 or so, excited to hear all these great sounds mixed together, I felt as if a cruel trick had been played on me. The station wasn't playing gospel music at all, but a sort of second-rate, rock-and-pop format from groups I'd never heard of, whose lyrics occasionally mentioned how much they loved Jesus and how great God is, in sort of a vague and general way. Well, I'm probably being unfair. It was more like FOURTH-rate rock and pop disguised as gospel. I called the station to find out what the, uh...heck was going on, and they informed me that this was the next big craze: Contemporary Christian music. At the time, I was editor of a community newspaper, and instead of turning the other cheek I started writing angry editorials about what an embarrassment and insult this development was for real gospel music and the people who loved it. As I recall, I alternately derided the new stuff as Elevator Gospel and Bubble Gum Gospel.

I argued that it missed the whole point of faith, the struggle of life, the burdens of doubt, and the high personal cost of trying to abandon one's entire human nature in an attempt to follow the difficult teachings of Jesus. I pointed out that 90 percent of the new music sounded like producers had come out of the woodwork to cash in on the craze and were resurrecting wimpy secular love songs that never got recorded, and just changing the lyrics a little. I challenged listeners to take the lyrics of any Contemporary Christian song at random, substitute the words my boyfriend or my girlfriend for God or Jesus and see if it made any real difference in the song's message. If not, then somebody was missing the whole point of what the gospel and spirituality meant. At that point in my youth I considered myself a musical purist, but I've realized since that one man's purist is another man's crank. (This was also when New Country was coming to the forefront, and one day my sister-in-law remarked to me that she loved the new country music she was hearing on the radio. When I asked her why, she said, Because it doesn't sound like country music! Ah. Well, then. This must be a societal trend, I thought.) Needless to say, my traditional-gospel-music crusading, in print, got me a ton of the Christian equivalent of hate mail. A notable exception was a church music director from Sumiton named Devin Stephenson, who wrote a courteous and well-reasoned reply to my points. Our opinions on the subject were at opposite ends of the spectrum (and probably still are), but I learned a lot from what he said and the civil conversations we had meant a lot to me. To cut to the chase, I was on the Internet a few years ago and heard a song by the gospel group Casting Crowns titled If We Are the Body. I thought it was powerful, beautiful, and heartbreaking in equal measure, and I still do. I even started checking out the Contemporary Christian station again, albeit grudgingly, and every month I found more and more gold nuggets among the dross. Mark Lowry's Mary, Did You Know? still gives me goosebumps every time I hear it, and when a lady named Francesca Battistelli (whom I gather is not a Southern Gospel gal, but still) sings Motion of Mercy it sets off a one-person prayer meeting in my Honda Civic and sorely tempts me to take piano lessons again and see if this time they stick. There's also amazing, world-class new gospel talent right here in Walker County. A guy named Michael Cannon, for instance, plays guitar that would make Michael Hedges jealous, and writes original Christian music that takes my breath away. (If you'd like to sample it, search YouTube for the name fusionartist202. You'll be glad you did. Trust me.) Has the new musical format then known as Contemporary Christian changed so dramatically since its onset, or have I changed? I'd guess a little of both, but I sure won't quibble.

I would only add Hallelujah and God bless. And thanks for accepting my apology. # # #

(Short is a native of Walker County. His columns, books, photos, and radio features can be found on his website, carrolldaleshort.com. His weekly radio program "Music from Home" airs every Sunday night at 6 pm on Oldies 101.5 FM, and is now carried live online at the station's website oldies1015fm.com. His email address is dale@carrolldaleshort.com)