The. Its fans and participants aspire to transcend or dissolve regional expectations, theological boundaries, and denominational classifications. See Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford, 2013). Joyce Martin-Sanders is known for Gaither's Pond (1997). The Martins are a Christian music vocal trio composed of three siblings: Joyce Martin Sanders, Jonathan Martin, and Judy Martin Hess. See Goff, Close Harmony, 233236, 269274. During the 1990s, The Martins rose to national and international success, showcasing their stunning and distinctive harmonies before a vast array of audiences . Who is martin p joyce? 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. The Willow Creek megachurch, under the leadership of Bill Hybels, is the most prominent example of a seeker-sensitive church. 436 (1997): 169188. Rather than denoting a style or sound of vernacular sacred musicmaking, "southern gospel" as a term and a set of at-best partially unexamined social practices and religious beliefs "indicate the music and culture of those people who choose to associate themselves with this tradition. Kim Hopper, Joyce Martin Sanders, Shane McConnell - Official Video for "Love At Home (Live)", available now!Buy the full length DVD/CD 'Give The World A Smil. GMA has drastically shifted its outreach and marketing emphasis toward black gospel artists and groups, going so far in 2011 as to move the Dove Awards from Nashville's Grand Ole Opry to Atlanta, the unofficial capital of black gospel music. Rooted in the professional identity crisis Bill Gaither experienced in the late 1980s and early 1990s as an minence grise in Christian entertainment who was struggling to figure out what to do next, Homecoming "has succeeded and thrived by using religious music entertainment to address a wider crisis of relevance afflicting" southern gospel and contemporary evangelicalism. Mae is her 18-year-old daughter. This movement was popular among (though not exclusive to) non-denominational evangelical megachurches. 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 videos still air regularly on many local-access religious television channels, but sales today are largely driven through merchandizing at concerts, the Gaither, "Gospel hymns" refer to a repertoire of American sacred songs that "first appeared in religious revivals during the 1850s, but which flourished with the urban revivalism that arose in the English-speaking world in the last third of the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth century." Jonathan Martin and his wife, Dara, live in Des Moines with their six children (Craig Harris, ", In the 1990s and early 2000s, Gaither Homecoming was popular on the now-defunct TNN cable channel. July 30, 2013. http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/culture/6221/the_gospel_ church_and_the_ruining_of_gay_lives__an_interview_with_anthony_heilbut/. Beyond the style it captures, this clip points to the structures of thought and feeling that underlie The Martins's appeal and southern gospel music more generally. See Harrison, Here, I am borrowing an image first popularized by Ray Stevens in ", Although CCM borrows heavily from mainstream secular music and performance styles, it does so to cultivate a canon of popular music that signifies Christianity's cultural relevance and the music's evangelistic savvy, while claiming a special status derived from CCM's pious commitments to conservative evangelical values and theological positions. Singing and songwriting is what Joyce does. After Grant's divorce from Gary Chapman, her symbolic function in southern gospel expanded to include the corrupting effect of musical compromises on personal morality and the heternormative family.Southern gospel's disdain of CCM can come off as a kind of "Sister Bertha Better Than You" self-righteousness.27Here, I am borrowing an image first popularized by Ray Stevens in "Mississippi Squirrel Revival," on He Thinks He's Ray Stevens (Universal, 1987, MCAC-5517). Gaither's questions establish Jonathan's lifelong love of "huntin'" as linked to his Arkansas adolescence. These congregations structured worship, congregational culture, and church outreach to target "those who had never established a relationship with Christ and the Church, and those trying to reconnect" (Lester Ruth, "Lex Agendi, Lex Orandi: Toward an Understanding of Seeker Services as a New Kind of Liturgy," Worship 70, no. Harrison, Douglas. It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). Created by: siremidor on 28-March-2013 - Last Edited by admin on 07-January-2016. Toward the end of his life, Andy Griffith recorded multiple southern gospel albums. Mark Five, [no identifying number]. DVD. For more on southern gospel's shift within Christian entertainment from a "dominant" to a "residual" status, see Harrison, "Seeker" sensitive models of congregational development and worship emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as part of the so-called church-growth movement, an organized effort to expand church membership and participation beyond traditional populations. "2Ibid., 2. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_2', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_2').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); This tradition is distinctive for its cultivation of close harmony sung in ensemblestraditionally male quartets, a formation that dominated the commercial sector of southern gospel through roughly the first half of the twentieth century, and more recently, mixed-gender foursomes and trios, often comprising family members.3Today's professional southern gospel includes many family and mixed gender foursomes and trios, configurations that were and are common in the singing convention world that dominated southern gospel in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. More deeply, southern gospel functioned as a figurative space of cultural retrenchment against the music's loss of reputational capital within white evangelical popular culture.24For more on southern gospel's shift within Christian entertainment from a "dominant" to a "residual" status, see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 103109. Trinity Broadcasting Network is the D.B.A. of Trinity Christian Center of Santa Ana Inc., a California religious non-profit corporation holding 501(C)(3) status with the Internal Revenue Service. Following the rapture is Tribulation, a seven-year period during which Anti-Christ reigns on earth, Millennium (during which time Satan is bound), and ultimately the establishment and eternal reign of Christ's kingdom. Arkansas, writes Brooks Blevins, "has become in many ways indistinguishable from concurrent stereotypes of backwoods southerners or of southern mountaineers and hillbillies," despite the geographical, cultural, and social differences between the Ozark and Ouachita hill country to the north of the state, the Mississippi River alluvial region to the east, and the "primeval swampland" in the state's southern half. A notable elision in this storyand it points to more general (mis)understandings about the Gaithers's personaeis the role of Gloria Gaither. But professional southern gospel has always been strongly grounded its history and identity in the male quartet. The church's leadership believed the approach would attract people searching for answers, bring them into a relationship with Christ, and then capitalize on their contagious fervor to evangelize others" (Matt Branaugh, "Willow Creek's 'Huge Shift,'" ChristianityToday.com, May 15, 2008, accessed May 15, 2014, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/june/5.13.html). See David Fillingim, "A Flight From Liminality: 'Home' in Country and Gospel Music,". See Shearon et al., "Gospel Music." For more on the rise and spread of southern gospel regionally and nationally, see James R. Goff Jr., Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel (Chapel HIll: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 50109; Don Cusic, The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel Music (Madison: Popular Press, 1990), 153162; 171176. A fan's review of The Best of The Martins video on Amazon.com captures this dynamic succinctly: "I wouldn't consider the Martins southern gospel," the reviewer writes, "as their sound is more contemporary but they have a love of the Lord and that comes across strong in their work and their lives. When she came out, Mark grabbed her arm and said, "You have to hear these kids sing!" Interested in submitting your work to Southern Spaces. 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. Biography Mini Bio (1) Joyce Martin-Sanders is known for Gaither's Pond (1997). Help; Joyce Martin-Sanders View source History She is divorced and has been for some time, but the date of her divorce is not listed. It emphasizes the unfolding of God's dealings with humanity in phases or eras ("dispensations"). The Martins. Indeed, specific aspects of a performer's biography usually only come into play for southern gospel when an instance of individual characteristics, crisis, or great fortune serve to point audiences toward notionally transcendent truths of fundamentalist theology. For an extended discussion of the psychodynamics of southern gospel, see ibid., 149. The Martins's family narrative emphasizes anti-modern, unsophisticated, and materially modest childhoods, reinforced with a washed-out photo of the family's ramshackle cabin. "Gospel," as Heilbut has noted, is "the favored term for what working-class black congregations [do,] often to the exclusion to white traditions." Claiming a home in southern gospel grounds The Martins in an imagined identity that they in turn hold out for fans seeking models of stability and reassurance in an extended moment of great cultural change and instability for white evangelical fundamentalist religious culture. 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. "43Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 124. The trio performed an a capella arrangement of the 1862 gospel hymn, "He Leadeth Me," a standby in the culture of Homecoming's fan base.44"Gospel hymns" refer to a repertoire of American sacred songs that "first appeared in religious revivals during the 1850s, but which flourished with the urban revivalism that arose in the English-speaking world in the last third of the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth century." Richard A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2000). She has two children. Rather, I aim to map a specific hot spot within the psychosocial terrain of contemporary professional southern gospel as an instance of a broader phenomenon that could be explored in US southern and rural imaginaries. It's a new day for Southern Gospel. 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"). At first, this meant reclaiming (or sonically imitating) mainly rock 'n' roll, but ultimately it came to encompass almost any kind of popular mainstream American music heard on commercial radio, especially among teen and youth audiences. Taylor's development of the social imaginary builds on (but also departs from) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006). Douglas Harrison is Associate Professor of English and Assistant Director of the Center for Faculty Innovation at James Madison University. To see the King. 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. Consequently, much of conservative Christian culture challenged secular narratives and norms. "Home" functions primarily in southern gospel as a meaning-making tool for experience in this life, not the next. 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. The southern gospel condemnation of CCM has long and deep roots.28Although CCM borrows heavily from mainstream secular music and performance styles, it does so to cultivate a canon of popular music that signifies Christianity's cultural relevance and the music's evangelistic savvy, while claiming a special status derived from CCM's pious commitments to conservative evangelical values and theological positions. Nominated in the "Gospel/Contemporary Christian Music" category, CCM soloist Natalie Grant attended the ceremony, only to leave before the show ended. At one point in the interview with The Martins, Gaither describes their music as "sophisticated," and Judy Martin Hess jokes that Gaither was not saying The Martins themselves are sophisticated, only their music. See Heilbut, "Black Urban Hymnody." 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. I have in mind the period in American conservative and fundamentalist evangelicalism inaugurated by Richard Nixon's conjuring of the ", 1990 coincides roughly with the emergence of what would become the, Within southern gospel, "CCM" designates nearly all other forms of commercial Christian music deemed insufficiently pious or overly commercialized (marketed in ways different from southern gospel). Spring Hill, 2005, CMD 1807. 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. 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. 1 (2008): 2758. This element of cultural separatism has reemerged in the past generation within southern gospel. Joyce E Martin 1946 Born c. 1946 Last Known Residence Texas Summary Joyce E Martin of Texas was born c. 1946. The Martins Biography by John Bush A brother-sisters trio of a cappella gospel harmonizers, the Martins consist of Joyce Martin McCollough, Jonathan Martin and Judy Martin Hess. 'Cause it's worth every . So we sang next day on the video [Precious Memories], "He Leadeth Me" . And that was actually the first time Bill heard us sing. .52The Martins, interview by J. Several prominent bluegrass and old time families have been mainstays of southern gospel since family acts began to emerge in the 1930s and 1940s: most prominently, The Lewis Family and The Chuck Wagon Gang, and later the Primitive Quartet, The Easters, and The Isaacs. For more on cultural-geographic conceptualizations of place, see John Agnew, The United States in the World Economy: A Regional Geography (London: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Cresswell, Place. She has Angelman Syndrome and is the happiest girl you will ever meet. 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. The conflation of "southern" and "white" to describe this music circulates widely among scholars and non-specialists, but has only been tentatively stated in scholarship. Any Arkansas setting becomes synonymous with the Ozark hillbilly. In addition, "many of the characteristics and stereotypes considered [representative of Arkansas as a whole]," Blevins concludes, are "extensions of broader regional and cultural images" applied by others to Arkansans.57Blevins, Arkansas/Arkansaw, 39, 9. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_57', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_57').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Arkansas is not unique in being treated as the home of the benighted white southerner, redneck, or hillbilly, and the Arkansas imaginary is but one sort of white, working class, rurality. Goff's remains the most extensive and influential account of southern gospel's market decline. Heilbut notes that this vibrancy is driven by the rise of name-it-and-claim-it prosperity gospel in the black church, which is intensely homophobic and discourages its members from thinking in "broad sociological" categories in favor of a self-aggrandizing theology that links spiritual well-being with personal wealth (See "The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut," interview by Douglas Harrison, ReligionDispatches.com, July 30, 2013, accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/culture/6221/the_gospel_church_and_the_ruining_of_gay_lives%3 A_an_interview_with_anthony_heilbut/; and Heilbut, The Fan Who Knew Too Much: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations [New York: Knopf, 2012]). When and where did baseball player Bob Joyce die? This movement was popular among (though not exclusive to) non-denominational evangelical megachurches. The siblings all lived most of their formative years in Arkansas, where they learned to sing and with which their comments in public indicate a strong identification. 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. 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. Their continuing appeal has involved a narrative about their Arkansas identity as proof of authenticity as individual performers and for the genre of southern gospel. A journal about real and imagined spaces and places of the US South and their global connections. Sign up for updates about Better Together on TBN. Dochuk, Darren. Sharing her life with transparency is her passion. The popularity of Homecoming derives from its emergence duringand its response tothe declension crisis in southern gospel. 827-2340 or reach Martin R Mccullough at (253) 720-5263. Key figures include. Bill Clinton's presidential campaign used the Traveler name and image as a way to strengthen his populist appeal running against a Washington insider. "The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut," interview by Douglas Harrison. Menu. See Jones, Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands (UrbanaChampaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 9. Recording companies experienced similar contractions. "51Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 5. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_51', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_51').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); As The Martins achieved fame and renown, they did so less because of what and how they sang, and more because of the way in which they have presented themselves and their music, and the way the Gaither Homecoming appropriated them as children of traditional gospel values at a moment when the viability of these values was perceived to be in question. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_30', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_30').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Indeed, the style of four-part male harmony for which professional southern gospel is most well-known has been historically linked to the practice of piety and lived religious devotion in the premillennial dispensationalist tradition.31Premillennial dispensationalism has been the dominant theological paradigm for fundamentalist evangelicals in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. Joyce Martin is married to Paul Michael Sanders, who has had periodic jobs as a southern gospel singer. Compact Disc. 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. Nominated in the "Gospel/Contemporary Christian Music" category, CCM soloist Natalie Grant attended the ceremony, only to leave before the show ended. She keeps it real and points the way out of despair with an admonishing heart. The Martins hail from Hamburg near the Louisiana border in Ashley County, in the southeast quadrant of the state, where the west Gulf coastal plain meets the Mississippi Delta. CCM is a broad category built around religious songs that, to the uninitiated, can sound virtually indistinguishable from a cross-section of mainstream American adult contemporary and Top 40.20Within southern gospel, "CCM" designates nearly all other forms of commercial Christian music deemed insufficiently pious or overly commercialized (marketed in ways different from southern gospel). The cultural difference between the Ozark/Ouachita and Mississippi Delta regions of Arkansas is aptly captured by/in two recent films. Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Modern Social Imaginaries. During the last three decades of the twentieth century, these conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists ceased perceiving themselves in the Nixonian paradigm as a silent majority existing voicelessly and invisibly within mainstream US politics and culture. "45Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 3. Lord, let it be so, not just a dream. The values implied by customs and conditions are elemental in stereotypes of "Arkansas" as hillbilly territory. These bonds seem heavily predicated on shared assumptions that performers' professional legitimacy and artistic authenticity arise from a God-given prodigiousness untainted by the artifice of formal education or the contrivance of worldliness, which in southern gospel culture is associated with urban(e) or cosmopolitan ways of life. Joyce Martin Sanders is listed in the credits for the following albums: Year Artist Album Role ; 2013: Jason Crabb: Love Is Stronger: Guest Vocals : Joyce Martin Sanders. Lord, is this my heart. He just finished getting a tech degree in musical engineering. Not that "southern gospel" never made an appearance before the 1970s and 1980s. Martin Jarvis; Randy Edelman; David Jason; Michael Hordern; Oliver Williams; Community. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_43', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_43').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The Martins first appeared in 1993 on an early Gaither Homecoming video, Precious Memories. 3,147) where they became a popular regional Christian music act. Even though I do not have a better name for it, I remain deeply ambivalent about "northern urban gospel." Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. 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. 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. See Robert K. Whalen, "Premillennialism," The Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements, ed. Joyce Martin Sanders Weight Loss In essence, we are an agricultural area. The hottest acts in Christian music appropriated the musical conventions and performance styles of rock, pop, adult contemporary, heavy metal, and later, jazz, R&B, rap, hip-hop, and punk. + Add or change photo on IMDbPro . 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?