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Introduction A Native Informant’s Report from the Field In July 2000, New York Times writer R. W. Apple Jr. went to Nashville to write about his experience there in a travel piece for the newspaper. For the scholar of culture, the report is perhaps most interesting for a moment of acute discomfort Apple had while attending a performance at the Grand Ole Opry. He and his travel companion, he wrote, “realized what aliens we were in this culture when the crowd lustily cheered an explicitly sexist, rabidly homophobic, stunningly anti-government ditty called ‘We Want America Back.’”1 Apple was hearing what was at the time a chart-topping song performed by the Steeles, a southern gospel family who made a name for themselves in the late 1990s as quasi-sociopolitical singing activists. The group popularized other songs besides “We Want America Back,” but it was this jeremiad set to music—about reclaiming a once godly nation from the destructive grip of sin—that landed the Steeles on the Opry stage. Released in 1996, the song capitalized on widespread conservative Christian displeasure over the country’s perceived turn toward godless impunity during the Clinton years. Apple’s description of the song was not factually inaccurate, but in his inimitably arch way, he succumbed to the trap of intentionally outrageous rhetoric from the Christian Right. As Susan Harding has shown, this rhetoric operates by seizing on criticism from half-comprehending critics like Apple and treating it as an attack from unbelieving outsiders bent on destroying Christianity.2 A few weeks after Apple’s column appeared in print, I was at the National Quartet Convention (NQC) in Louisville, Kentucky. During one of the packed-out evening concerts that anchor the event, Jeff Steele, the family patriarch, took the stage and proudly cited 2 Introduction criticism of the group and their song in the Times, which is a galvanizing symbol of East Coast atheism to American fundamentalists, as evidence that the forces of darkness were attacking the advancing army of Christian righteousness in a battle for the soul of the country. The crowd—in this case, upwards of twenty thousand, roughly five times the capacity of the Opry—cheered lustily. Apple might be forgiven the lapse, for he made a mistake common to many humanist intellectuals and academics: treating conservative evangelical values and culture as a curious artifact from some socially recalcitrant land that time forgot.Southern gospel is arguably “America’s most enduring yet obscure musical subculture,” but it is a part of America—evangelical, fiercely fundamentalist, intensely pietistic, intellectually literal minded—in which many academics are at best visiting scholars, at worst intellectual tourists of the R. W. Apple variety.3 To complicate things even more, for at least eighty years in both the academic and the popular imagination, gospel singing has always already been “the favored term for what workingclass black congregations [do],”often to the exclusion of white traditions.4 When nonblack gospel has been the primary focus of scholarly attention, it has typically emphasized gospel first of northern, urban extraction long associated with hymns of the so-called Sunday-school movement in the mid–nineteenth century, and later the evangelistic music typified by Ira Sankey, who was Dwight Moody’s music director during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and Homer Rodeheaver, Billy Sunday’s music man from 1910 to 1930.5 Southern sacred music has both shaped and been shaped by these phases of white gospel’s broader development (as well as the later white gospel music of the Billy Graham era). Nevertheless, sustained scholarly attention has come late and infrequently to professional white gospel music with a southern accent.6 The term southern gospel was not used to describe this music until the 1970s and did not gain widespread use until the 1980s. Before then the music was simply known to its practitioners and fans as gospel, a “vague and inadequate ” term that has historically encompassed a wide and shifting range of sacred music within Anglo-European and African American Protestantism in North America.7 In its broadest sense, today’s “southern gospel” includes a variety of musical expressions constituting the Protestant evangelical musical universe of the South. Southern gospel in its modern, professional form—the primary focus of this book—descends from a broad-based, post– Civil War recreational culture built around singing schools and community (or “convention”) singings popular among poor and working-class whites throughout the South and Midwest.8 This...

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