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4. The Gaitherization of Contemporary Southern Gospel Within the overlapping worlds of gospel music, contemporary Christian entertainment, and multimedia televangelism in America, the long-standing success of the Bill and Gloria Gaither Homecoming Friends franchise has been a fact of professional life for almost a generation—a ubiquitous presence to compete with, admire, envy, or (when invited) join. What started as a happenstance gathering of “old-timers” from the heyday of midcentury southern gospel music at the Master’s Touch studio in Nashville, Tennessee, in February 1991, has since become an institution in American evangelical life.1 Today, Homecoming exists as both an annual concert tour and a video series. Exact production and retail sales figures are difficult to secure, but as early as 1996, just five years after the launch of the first Homecoming video recording, Bill Gaither said that Homecoming sales had exceeded three million units.2 Today the Gaither Music Web site offers more than two hundred different Homecoming-themed videos or video bundles for sale. These include installments in the regular Homecoming Friends series, children’s videos, “best-of” recombinations of video recordings by particularly popular Homecoming personalities throughout their time on the concert tour, dozens of companion songbooks and other memorabilia, a magazine, and a subscriber-based online community. At its peak, the Gaither Homecoming was regularly drawing crowds upwards of twenty thousand and beyond, rivaling the largest single-night draw at the National Quartet Convention, the southern gospel industry’s weeklong flagship event. In 2004 the tour’s eleventh year and arguably its zenith, Homecoming ticket sales worldwide outranked Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, and Rod Stewart each.3 In 2009 almost three-quarters of southern gospel fans and professionals reported Gaitherization of Contemporary Southern Gospel 111 having attended a Gaither Homecoming event in the past decade, nearly two times the number of people who report having attended the National Quartet Convention during that same period.4 For decades now, Gaither’s endorsement has launched the careers of numerous performers who have gone on to dominate gospel and Christian music. Meanwhile, the Gaithers have taken their popular brand of southern gospel and inspirational Christian music worldwide, recording events in the Holy Land, South Africa , Ireland, Canada, and Australia. Its enduring popularity and pervasive presence easily make the Gaither Homecoming franchise the Christian entertainment equivalent of the Grand Ole Opry in country music, if the Opry were constantly touring all over the world. This is all the more remarkable given that Bill Gaither rose to fame not in southern gospel, but in contemporary Christian music as a songwriter and performer in the 1970s and sustained his place in the industry as a mentor to other CCM writers and performers.5 Gaither often talks from the stage and has written about growing up enthralled with gospel music and attending the Stamps-Baxter singing school as a teenager. Though he is fond of telling audiences that he always wanted to be a singer, his songwriting made him famous, especially after his wife, Gloria, started collaborating with him on songwriting and performing concerts with him on the weekends. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Gaither Trio—most famously Bill and Gloria Gaither and Bill’s brother, Danny—became a vehicle for original Gaither songs. By the mid-1970s, Gaither quit his regular job teaching high school and hit the road full-time. There he developed the style of aw-shucks showmanship that years later reinforced Homecoming’s down-home bonhomie. The Homecoming concept is deceptively simple. Gaither invites friends, peers, rising stars, and, most important, those gospel music idols from his childhood who are still alive to join him on a stage. Everyone sits around a piano and sings: old songs, new songs, gospel songs, hymns. Despite the connections between Homecoming and southern gospel music, no single song style predominates. Casual observers may come away from the Homecoming series thinking it more generically homogenous than it actually is because the songs on Gaither’s shows demonstrate remarkable consistency in the arrangements, a consistency that mutes the variety of the music. Songs need not always be religious; for more than a year in the early 2000s, for example, the Homecoming tour opened with the chorus of the pop song “Lean on Me.” More recently, the emotional centerpiece of the Homecoming concert tour involved a song that used the tune from Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia, joined to Christian-humanist lyrics that were written by Gloria Gaither and emphasize the long-suffering...

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