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Joyce Martin Sanders Weight Loss - HealthMd Search Richard A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2000). "Gospel," as Heilbut has noted, is "the favored term for what working-class black congregations [do,] often to the exclusion to white traditions." For faster navigation, this Iframe is preloading the Wikiwand page for The Martins. 827-2340 or reach Martin R Mccullough at (253) 720-5263. 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. Explored through the Martins, how do non-musical categories of knowledge, patterns of affiliation, and cultural valuessuch as sense of placehelp clarify, sustain, or revalue religious music traditions, identities, subject positions, and the ideological commitments those traditions encompass? Joyce is married to Paul Sanders, a singer/songwriting musician, currently a member of the country band, Shenandoah where he plays bass and sings harmony. Although the male quartet continued to dominate southern gospel's self-image, the genre as a commercial enterprise became home for strains of more traditional white evangelical vernacular sacred musics, including explicitly pietistic bluegrass and country 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"). 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. DVD. Her story of brokenness and restoration encourages thousands on social media and from the stage. 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. 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. Sunday services to reach the unchurched through polished music, multimedia, and sermons referencing popular culture and other familiar themes. Judy Martin is married to Jake Hess, Jr., the son of the legendary southern gospel lead singer Jake Hess. 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). Mike Joyce was born February 12, 1941, in Detroit, MI, USA. Any Arkansas setting becomes synonymous with the Ozark hillbilly. 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. Gaither's remark associates a universality to The Martins, who are legitimated by the origins their music is purported to transcend. The core of this essay began as a conference paper for the 2013 conference of the Society for American Music. See Heilbut, "Black Urban Hymnody." 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. "38Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 7. "43Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 124. The Martin kids are still singing | Entertainment - LancasterOnline Joyce Martin Sanders | BetterTogether.tv Joyce Martin Sanders: "My Childhood Christmas Miracle - YouTube Siblings, Joyce, Jonathan and Judy, collectively known as The Martins, have enjoyed count- less radio hits and performances at concert halls, arenas, auditoriums and churches worldwide. She has two children. Business as Mission . Is Joyce Martin. . "Home" functions primarily in southern gospel as a meaning-making tool for experience in this life, not the next. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2009. 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. . tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_21', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_21').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The rise of CCM participated in the transformation of conservative and fundamentalist Christian culture in the United States beginning in the 1970s and intensifying in the 1980s and 1990s. See Shearon et al., "Gospel Music," and Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News in Bad Times (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2001 [1979]) and Harrison, "Why Southern Gospel Music Matters," Religion and American Culture 18, no. Douglas Harrison is Associate Professor of English and Assistant Director of the Center for Faculty Innovation at James Madison University. Researched in the 1990s and published in 2002, Close Harmony traces the music's development from the nineteenth century. Joyce Martin Sanders (b. January 6, 1968) lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband Paul, and she has two children. They have won several Dove Awards (Christian music's Grammy) in the southern gospel, inspirational, and Christian country categories, and received a Grammy nomination in the Best Southern, Country, or Bluegrass Gospel Album category. The Martins - Wikipedia Clearly this story of The Martins's beginning as Homecoming Friends is important to them because they are depicted in the narrative as so natively talented that Bill Gaither purportedly allows them to perform without ever having himself auditioned them. "6Not that "southern gospel" never made an appearance before the 1970s and 1980s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. "I've many thoughts about the show tonight," she tweeted, "most of which are probably better left inside my head. 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. Researched in the 1990s and published in 2002. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_5', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_5').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Among these people, "the term southern gospel," as I have noted elsewhere, "was not used to describe the music [in its professional, commercialized form] until the 1970s and did not gain widespread use until the 1980s. Media releases promoting The Martins tout this diversity and eclecticism. : Gaither Music, 2011. Bob Joyce died December 10, 1981, in San Francisco, CA, USA. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Joyce is married to Paul Sanders, a singer/songwriting musician, currently a member of the country band, Shenandoah where he plays bass and sings harmony. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_56', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_56').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); A particular Arkansas primitivism merits attention here. Joyce Rogers. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_42', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_42').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Each video or concert is a variation on a format: Bill and Gloria Gaither invite many of the aging stars of southern gospel's mid-twentieth-century golden age to join them and their musical friends, peers, and rising stars from southern gospel and a range of subgenres on the more traditional and conventional sides of North American Christian musiccountry gospel, bluegrass, inspirational, and choral and hymnody. The precipitous decline in "Christian/Gospel" has devastated most sectors of the market. Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music. In this context, gospel music functions as a style of vernacular religious entertainment and a form of evangelical cultural experience transcending denominations or confessional traditions. Before then the music was simply known to its practitioners and fans as gospel. There was no love lost between southern gospel and the "Queen of Christian Pop" to begin with, but after Grant's rise to fame, she became a galvanizing symbol for southern gospel of cultural accommodation run amok in doctrinally compromised music. See Robert K. Whalen, "Premillennialism," The Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements, ed. . 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. 'Cause it's worth every . "Place" signifies a physical location, a material culture, a set of affiliated social relations, and more nebulous meanings associated with place as a concept. 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. By leveraging anxieties about cultural authenticity and relevance roiling conservative evangelical and fundamentalist culture, Homecoming creates "a musical screen onto which people from a wide range of Christian cultural traditions within the American middle class can project their own religious concerns and spiritual aspirations. 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. For a fuller discussion of "southern" as a racial signifier and readings of race and white gospel see Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 96103. (See Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 182183). And see Jos Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Jonathan Martin (b. There is also the sense that The Martins's appeal reaches across the spectrum of religious beliefs and musical tastes that form the conservative end of the white Christian music entertainment market. Start the wiki Similar Artists Charlotte Ritchie 703 listeners Bill & Gloria Gaither 10,674 listeners The Isaacs 11,665 listeners Show more North American gospel history and the cultural realities of contemporary southern gospel defy further generalization. (Jennifer Jones, "Natalie Grant Responds after Leaving Grammys Early," Christianitytoday.com, January 29, 2014, accessed January 31, 2014, http://www.christiantoday.com/article/mass.wedding.at. In the final decades of the twentieth century, these disagreements opened up a fault line between southern gospel and CCM, with each camp pursuing styles of music that implied divergent theories of musical evangelism. Between highlights, Bill Gaither interviews Joyce, Judy, and Jonathan,54The interviews are actually excerpts taken from long conversations filmed in a homey setting in which The Martins sit side-by-side on a large couch facing the camera and Bill Gaither sits in an overstuffed armchair to the right of the frame. Blevins, Brooks. In cultural geography, "sense of place" refers to the feelings and emotions a place evokes and that help constitute it.14Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 169. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_14', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_14').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); More than just feelings or emotions, such sense of place encompasses perceptions, assumptions, and habits of thought and behavior of people who are part of a place. EIN: 95-2844062. Joyce Martin-Sanders is known for Gaither's Pond (1997). With the dissolution of the "Christian-cultural synthesis," fundamentalists, Noll concludes, "made a virtue of their alienation. Within southern gospel, perhaps the most polarizing figure thought to embody this accommodationist dynamic is Amy Grant, who began as a CCM ingnue ("Father's Eyes," "El Shaddai" and "Angels") and subsequently landed crossover hits in American pop during the 1980s (her debut outside of CCM came in a duet with Peter Cetera, "The Next Time I Fall In Love"). Jonathan Martin and his wife, Dara, live in Des Moines with their six children (Craig Harris, "Martins Storm Back onto the Scene," sgnscoops.com, December 17, 2013 [accessed January 31, 2014)]. Martin P. Joyce might be a juvenile justice worker in Youngstown, Ohio. The Martins Biography, Songs, & Albums | AllMusic During the 1990s, The Martins rose to national and international success, showcasing their stunning and distinctive harmonies before a vast array of audiences . 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 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. The Best of the Martins, 2011. 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. He was very busy and was getting ready for the next day's video. 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. . From these materials emerge patterns of description, allusive gestures, cultural maneuvers, and possibilities for self-concept through which southern gospel identities are constructed and reimagined. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_27', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_27').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true });And it is that, to a certain extent. Instead, CCM performers and fans came together around a common commitment to reclaim the devil's music for God. Lower compositional sophistication, more uneven production quality, and rougher cuts by commercial standardsall defining features of the southern gospel sound of the past twenty yearscan function for many evangelicals and fundamentalists as indices of a more real music and catalysts for a more authentic experience of the religious self. 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. It's a new day for Southern Gospel. Many fans and most observers interpreted her actions and words as a rebuke of a mass wedding of gay and straight couples performed during the broadcast. [5] Jonathan Martin (b. My sources include celebrity interviews of performers, DVD bonus features, album covers, and online press coverage. Judy Martin Hess lives in Columbus, Georgia with her husband Jake Hess Jr. and their four children. The Martins's arrival on the national gospel scene participates in a familiar narrative of the country kids from Nowheresville, USA, making it big. See Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 13. I Love to the Tell the Story: 25 Timeless Hymns, won a 1996 Grammy for Best Southern Gospel, Country Gospel, or Bluegrass Gospel Album. For more on Gaither Homecomings and their role and appeal in southern gospel and beyond, see ibid., 110136. 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. Just as I Am: 30 Favorite Old Time Hymns, was nominated for a 1998 Grammy in the same category. As one of three sibling members of the gospel group The Martins, she travels all over the place getting to do the thing she loves. Unlike "northern urban" gospel (a phrase with no currency outside academe), it is the preferred way to self-identify within the culture and the most widely recognized way to describe the music to outsiders. 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. See Shearon, email to H-Southern Music Network mailing list, March 27, 2009. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_12', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_12').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Of course, race is never far from any discussion of southern cultures, but it is also true that, in southern gospel, "overmuch emphasis on black-white polarities diminishes our understanding of cultural dynamics submerged beneath the surface of the music. 32 Their success in the late 1980s and early 1990s coincided with the resurgence of cultural separatism that has come to dominate southern gospel discourse. 2014.grammys.criticized.as.political.stunt.to.push.gay.marriage.agenda.natalie.grant.responds.after.early.exit/35586.htm). 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. 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. Certainly there are southern and rural imaginaries writ large and available for scholarly scrutiny. See Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford, 2013). 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." 1 (2008): 2758. Compact Disc. Teaching, learning, and singing gospel to fashion a meaningful identity shares in the reconstitutive ambitions of the New South movement more generally.29For a cogent analysis of how shape-note gospel from the South mediated cultural conflicts and status instabilities of white, southern farmers, see Gavin James Campbell, "'Old Can Be Used Instead of New': Shape Note Singing and the Crisis of Modernity in the South, 18801920," Journal of American Folklore 110, no. Sharing her life with transparency is her passion. See Heilbut, "Black Urban Hymnody." 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. Decade. Kim Hopper, Joyce Martin Sanders, Shane McConnell - YouTube Joyce Martin McCollough . Fox, Pamela. John F. Mooney, review of The Best of The Martins, directed by Bill Gaither, Amazon.com, July 29, 2013, accessed October 15, 2013, http://www.amazon.com/review/R399G8O3TFUQHH/. Another person named Martin P. Joyce was a judge who passed away in October of 2013.. Heilbut, Anthony. See Harrison. Michael actually took us there and Mark and Mike tried to figure out a way for Bill [Gaither] to hear us sing. 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. My focus on professional southern gospel music is distinct from the avocational or amateur tradition, known as convention singing. Dayton, The Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Grand Rapids: Francis Asbury Press, 1987); and Dodrill, "Evangelicalism Examined . When Gaither says, "You can take them anywhere," he seems to mean that in his role as producer and impresario he can rely on The Martins to stand and deliver whatever the show demands. 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. Mae is her 18-year-old daughter. The Martins - Personal Lives - LiquiSearch In 2013, the Doves moved back to Nashville, not to the Grand Ole Opry House but to the auditorium of a small religious college in the suburbs (Dave Paulson, "Dove Awards Fly Back to Nashville," USAToday.com, October 14, 2013, accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2013/10/14/dove-awards-nashville/2984327/). tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_38', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_38').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Certainly this is true of southern gospel. "The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut," interview by Douglas Harrison. Joyce Martin is a well known gospel singer. 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. But professional southern gospel has always been strongly grounded its history and identity in the male quartet. But it also resonates with less militant but hardly less conservative evangelicalsmostly whitewho respond powerfully to its organizing themes: proud piety, traditionalist notions of family, and unapologetic sentimentality about evangelistic faith and religious community. 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. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_19', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_19').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The emergence of The Martins as a national touring group relied strategically on their Arkansas roots. July 30, 2013. http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/culture/6221/the_gospel_ church_and_the_ruining_of_gay_lives__an_interview_with_anthony_heilbut/. They live in Nashville and have two children (Martin Sanders was married previously to Harrie McCullough, with whom he had a child). The Martins - American Profile Joyce E Martin 1946 Born c. 1946 Last Known Residence Texas Summary Joyce E Martin of Texas was born c. 1946. She released her . See Robert K. Whalen, "Premillennialism,". But professional southern gospel has always been strongly grounded its history and identity in the male quartet. 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. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_31', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_31').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); It is in this tradition of pietistic, blood-bought, soul-saving, life-giving harmony of the one true way to Christ that The Martins were raised and trained.32For more on The Martins's biography, see the following section and note 41. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_32', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_32').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); Their success in the late 1980s and early 1990s coincided with the resurgence of cultural separatism that has come to dominate southern gospel discourse.33This element of cultural separatism has reemerged in the past generation within southern gospel. These were "places so divorced from the frenzied modernization of twentieth-century America" that they presented an easily caricatured type from which to generalize about the state as a whole.59Ibid., 516, 67. tippy('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1524_1_59', { content: jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1524_1_59').html(), placement: 'bottom', theme: 'sosp', arrow: false, allowHTML: true }); The conflation of The Martins's southern Arkansas bayou background with upstate Ozark hillbillyism emerges through the rhetoric of Bill Gaither as host and interlocutor. 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. The cultural difference between the Ozark/Ouachita and Mississippi Delta regions of Arkansas is aptly captured by/in two recent films. Marty Joyce's birth. The Best of the Martins. Moreton, Bethany. Such work is as welcome as it is needed. How did the singer Joyce Sanders of the Martins lose weight? Faithful to the cause | | newspressnow.com 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. Dionne Dismuke, Joyce Martin Sanders, Judy Martin Hess - YouTube 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).