Joyce Martin Sanders is one third of the award-winning gospel trio, The Martins. The. More conventional black gospel singers (such as Angie Primm and the late Jessy Dixon, both of whom have appeared on Gaither Homecoming videos) and black gospel choirs are generally held in high regard in southern gospel. More at IMDbPro Contact Info: View agent, publicist, legal on IMDbPro. Premillenialists espouse a literalist interpretation of scripture that foresees the imminent return of Christ to earth. For them, Gaither's interview effectively constructs and encourages audiences to see in The Martins representative, unifying figures of white, evangelical populism whose home is, as Bethany Moreton has shown in her study of Wal-Mart and evangelicalism, the Ozarks of northern Arkansas and south-central Missourithe literal geographic location in which Gaither's colloquy imaginatively relocates The Martins. "38Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 7. Blevins, Brooks. Its primitive construction and the faded color photo intensify the contrast between rustic lifeways and the warmly lit, generously appointed, and contemporarily decorated set in which The Martins appear comfortable, coiffed, and professionally poised. Music publishers of seven-shape notational gospel music and the convention singing tradition to which these publishers catered were familiar with the term for much of the twentieth century. Directed by Debra Granik. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_35', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_35').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The National Quartet Convention, southern gospel's annual flagship event that at its height in the mid-1990s drew crowds approaching 25,000 for four or five nights in a row, no longer attracts audiences or interest to warrant multiyear leases with the Kentucky Fair and Expo Center in Louisville. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_11', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_11').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The rise of "southern" gospel emerged in response to a network of cultural tensions, social conflicts, and religious instabilities.12These longstanding conflicts precede the twentieth century. The Martins singand their fans enjoya fairly broad range of musical styles and an innovative pastiche of old and new that is often indistinguishable from some of the very CCM sounds southern gospel has long denounced as immoral and worldly. Bill never comes out into the foyer but Gloria does. Start the wiki Similar Artists Charlotte Ritchie 703 listeners Bill & Gloria Gaither 10,674 listeners The Isaacs 11,665 listeners Show more And I've never been more sure of the path I've chosen." Still, the cultivation and creation of twentieth-century commercial black gospel's golden age (19451960) was largely rooted in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other urban centers in the Midwest and Northeast where many black southerners moved during the Great Migration. My reading sees race, racism, and a racialized concept of self and other in southern gospel as an important, not always dominant, factor in the emergence of "southern gospel" and the cultural function of the music. The Martins's arrival on the national gospel scene participates in a familiar narrative of the country kids from Nowheresville, USA, making it big. The noticeable absence of non-whites in these films, like the assumptions at work in Blevins's account and Gaither video, suggests to the degree to which whiteness remains largely unelucidated as a structuring category of identity, ideology, and religious belief in southern gospel. The Martins's music signals that what makes this trio a southern gospel group is its commitment to a worldview and way of life that is place-based, class-bound, and consistent with values and assumptions that prevail in white, fundamentalist evangelicalism. Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 5. Mark Noll has described this process as one focused on the formation of a parallel but separate evangelical culture meant to preserve pietistic thought and action perceived to be under attack and threat of extinction by secularization. This movement was popular among (though not exclusive to) non-denominational evangelical megachurches. 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. The siblings have been making music together since she was 10 and she has penned many of their hit songs through the years. In addition to being the vehicle through which The Martins received fame, Homecoming marked an epochal shift in the reception and self-concept of southern gospel. "Andy Griffith Dies." Joyce Martin is married to Paul Michael Sanders, who has had periodic jobs as a southern gospel singer. Gaither's remark associates a universality to The Martins, who are legitimated by the origins their music is purported to transcend. Researched in the 1990s and published in 2002. His book Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2012. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_17', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_17').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Such an approach asks how southern gospel artists (most from beyond the state) use Arkansas's status as an imaginative resource to make sense of themselves and their music in late twentieth and early twenty-first century fundamentalist Protestantism.18I have in mind the period in American conservative and fundamentalist evangelicalism inaugurated by Richard Nixon's conjuring of the "silent majority" of cultural traditionalists who opposed the advance of liberal policies and social practices in the US. "Gospel Music." He just finished getting a tech degree in musical engineering. The Martins's performance of pious authenticity plays out in public in ways that take common celebrity narratives (the underdog or, as in the story below, the innocent) and recodes them within the logic of the Arkansas imaginary. The Martins are a Christian music vocal trio composed of three siblings: Joyce Martin Sanders, Jonathan Martin, and Judy Martin Hess. The cultural difference between the Ozark/Ouachita and Mississippi Delta regions of Arkansas is aptly captured by/in two recent films. Business as Mission . See also Other Works | Publicity Listings | Official Sites View agent, publicist, legal and company contact details on IMDbPro Getting Started | Contributor Zone Contribute to This Page Edit page Personal Details At face value, much of The Martins's stylistically hybridized and contemporary music would seem to commit many of the very musical sins that southern gospel culture has long cited as justification for disparaging most other major forms of Christian music entertainment (except, perhaps, bluegrass).47The history and role of bluegrass, old-time, and mountain musics, particularly songs with pietistic lyrics that have found a home in southern gospel, is understudied. No Sympathy For the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism. Examining the rise of the gospel singing trio The Martins and the deployment of their rural Arkansas roots to shape their popularity in Christian music entertainment, this essay reveals how an evocation of place functions in the practice of religious life within commercial southern (white) gospel music and fundamentalist Protestantism. "The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut," interview by Douglas Harrison. Bill Clinton's presidential campaign used the Traveler name and image as a way to strengthen his populist appeal running against a Washington insider. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_55', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_55').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); That legacy of subsistence and pervasive poverty persists. Join the. 5 [September, 1996]: 386405). Heilbut, Anthony. Comparatively little has been published about The Martins's biography beyond birth, marriages, and professional accomplishments.41The basic details provided here derive largely from The Martins's disclosures on stage, press coverage, conservations I have had with industry professionals, and my experience. . See Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford, 2013). Grove Music Online. Southern gospel has found itself in alliances with black gospel traditions and the black church. Lord, is this my time. Slanted Records and The Martins. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_6', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_6').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); If, as Anthony Heilbut has noted, "gospel" is a vexingly "vague and inadequate" term for a wide and shifting range of sacred music within Anglo-European and African American Protestantism,7Anthony Heilbut, "Black Urban Hymnody," on Brighten the Corner Where You Are: Black and White Urban Hymnody (New World, 1978, NW-224). For discussions of the Traveler trope see ". Spring Hill, 2005, CMD 1807. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_36', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_36').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); This retreat from metropolis to outpost acknowledges that southern gospel is no longer a national phenomenon.37 Douglas Harrison, "Slouching Toward Pigeon Forge." Winter's Bone. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. See Shearon et al., "Gospel Music." Christ's return coincides with the rapture of living Christians and the raising of the righteous dead to heaven. Arkansas has long been defined by poverty and isolation born of the cashless frontier societies of the state's uplands and the agrarian barter economies that prevailed in the lowlands.55Morris Arnold, "The Significance of the Arkansas Colonial Experience," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 51 (Spring 1992): 7880. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_9', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_9').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); My own research has been the first to document at length how, throughout much of the twentieth century, the music's unsavory history of explicit racism, affiliation with supremacist ideas and politicians, and its largely unreconciled relationship to this past echo jarringly in any use of the term "southern gospel." My reading sees race, racism, and a racialized concept of self and other in southern gospel as an important, not always dominant, factor in the emergence of "southern gospel" and the cultural function of the music. The Martins's success draws upon an Arkansas imaginary that features a racially unconflicted working-class identity as well as a constellation of musical associations, cultural affinities, and attitudes grounded in piety, rusticity, and close harmony. See full bio . For discussions of the Traveler trope see "The Arkansas Traveler" entries in the online resources of the Historic Arkansas Museum, accessed October 1, 2013, http://www.arkansas-traveler.org, and on Arkansas.com, Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism. She released her . At the same time, the group evinces no interest in stylistic purity or generic fealty to a specific tradition, even as the album titleincluding the florid and flowing cover typographyframes their music as a filiopietistic missive from the old home place that is a staple of the southern gospel imagination.46While David Fillingim argues that "home" as a concept in southern gospel allows its participants to imagine and explore a flight from material hardship and social marginalization in this world (in favor of an eternal home of magnificence in heaven), my research suggests that in southern gospel "home" serves to give concrete, graspable shape to abstract theological concepts and spiritual experiences for ordinary Christians in the here and now. Southern gospel's negotiation of them has often manifested in overt racism or a way of thinking, talking, and singing that renders whiteness falsely normative. However, a 1993 appearance on the Gaither Homecoming series helped transform The Martins from an avocational regional trio into a professional act with a national following in fundamentalist Christian entertainment. With the dissolution of the "Christian-cultural synthesis," fundamentalists, Noll concludes, "made a virtue of their alienation. . The Arkansas imaginary explored here is not a totalizing way of understanding the vernacular music of white fundamentalists. Finally, I'm grateful to The Martins and so many other southern gospel performers for making music that has held me in thrall and demanded to be taken seriously. Joyce: We went to Indianapolis [in 1992] with Michael English and Mark Lowry [of the Gaither Vocal Band and the Gaithers' inner circle]. Sunday services to reach the unchurched through polished music, multimedia, and sermons referencing popular culture and other familiar themes. The only subgenre of white Christian music that remains relatively strong is Praise and Worship music, whose fortunes have been buoyed by the demand for choruses in non-denominational evangelical churches. Joyce Rogers. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_8', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_8').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); So it is tempting to assume that the emergence of "southern" to describe the music since the 1960s matters only as an unsubtle substitute for the more racially antagonistic "white." The collective effect forms the social imaginary, a way to understand self- and group-concepts in postmodern life.15Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 3. "43Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 124. Black gospel draws heavily on southern lifeways, many of its biggest stars have been from the South, and it has always found a good portion of its audience there. Researched in the 1990s and published in 2002, Close Harmony traces the music's development from the nineteenth century. Joyce Martin is a well known gospel singer. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, The Martins performed mostly in the southern half of the Mississippi Delta region and recorded self-financed albums. See "Music Album Sales in the United States in 2012, by Genre,"Statistica.com, 2012, accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.statista.com/statistics/188910/us-music-album-sales-by-genre-2010/; Natalie Gillespie, "Gospel Music Sees Record-Setting RIAA Numbers," CCM Update, March 29, 1999; and Lindy Warren, "Top 15 Impact-Makers in 1997," CCM Update, December 22, 1997. 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. For a fuller discussion of "southern" as a racial signifier and readings of race and white gospel see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 96103. Jonathan Martin lives in West Des Moines, Iowa with his wife, and their six children, including twin boys, one of which has cerebral palsy. The Martins Wiki: Salary, Married, Wedding, Spouse, Family For the film starring Lee Evans, see The Martins (film)The Martins are a Christian music vocal trio composed of three siblings: Joyce Martin Sanders, Jonathan Martin, and Judy Martin Hess. 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. Southern gospel's cultural sustainability turns out to be an urgent matter of concern, even if southern gospel people themselves do not tend to speak about it that way. Key figures include. Any Arkansas setting becomes synonymous with the Ozark hillbilly. The Willow Creek megachurch, under the leadership of Bill Hybels, is the most prominent example of a seeker-sensitive church. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_20', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_20').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); In its early decades, CCM's creative and cultural home was Nashville and many performers and professionals still work there. In the process, The Martins's music and cultural valence become revalued and highly desirable within the network of associations and commitments merging at the intersection of white conservative Christianity, right-wing cultural politics, and a "global service economy. To see the King. For a recording of the set piece associated with Gerald Wolfe's time with the Dumplin' Valley Boys, see This is Your Life George Younce, directed by Charlie Waller (n.d., Louisville, KY: National Quartet Convention), DVD. Martin Jarvis; Randy Edelman; David Jason; Michael Hordern; Oliver Williams; Community. As Stephen Shearon has noted, both white and black gospel have "liked aspects of what the other was doing" ever since blacks and whites began singing sacred music near one another in North America. The conversation encourages audiences to understand The Martins's music as a cultural practice connected to the Arkansas backcountry. The Martins's singing by the sea resonates with the disjunction of three "kids" from a cold-water backwoods shack harmonizing in an exotic locale with an international gospel touring company. Instead, CCM performers and fans came together around a common commitment to reclaim the devil's music for God. What started in Hawaii more than a decade earlier ends in Studio A in Andersonville, Indiana, with Gaither presiding as witness to The Martins's musical authenticityby sea, in the studio, (notionally) on command, at home among southern gospel's Homecoming Friends or in faraway lands. Sometimes this includes black gospel, particularly the performers who take inspiration from the mainstream music industry (pop, rock, R&B, and hip-hop). Man, Crosswalk.com. The popularity of Homecoming derives from its emergence duringand its response tothe declension crisis in southern gospel. Geography and biography merge in the Arkansas imaginary to redefine and authenticate The Martins's musical personae and southern gospel as a mode of fundamentalist and conservative evangelical experience.