Southern Gospel Singing

Still a favorite for many

MARILYN AYERS BERRONG isn’t much for what she calls “seven-eleven songs,” those repetitive pieces of praise popular in many contemporary church services, where worshippers sing the same seven words eleven times. But give her a good old Southern gospel song, and she’s in heaven. “It touches the soul,” she says. “It’s got a message. It’s got a beautiful melody.”

With many of the older Southern gospel songs, “Neither Do I Condemn Thee,” for instance, the message of salvation is complete, from beginning to end. Songs today just don’t do that, she says.

Berrong grew up in Habersham County, Georgia, listening to such gospel groups as Hovie Lister and the Statesmen Quartet, the Blackwood Brothers, and the LeFevre Trio. Starting when she was about eight years old, her parents, Winston and Cleo Ayers, would drive eighty miles to Atlanta to attend all-night gospel singings at the Atlanta City Auditorium. And they kept going back every year, mainly because their daughter insisted.

“It was really great,” she says. “It was something you never forgot, especially for a little mountain girl from nowhere. It was wonderful.” The family never took vacations, but, to Berrong, all-night singings were close enough to basking in the sunshine on a sandy beach.

Most of those all-night gospel singings are gone now. Most of the singers in the old groups have realized the heavenly reward they sang about for years. Others are spending the winter of their lives surrounded by photographs and memories of concerts long ago.

The biggest gospel events now are the Bill Gaither concerts and the annual National Quartet Convention, moved a few years ago from Louisville, Kentucky, to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Gaither, a popular songwriter of Southern gospel and contemporary Christian songs, appears in several major cities every year and draws crowds of several thousands.

“I like them,” Berrong, who now lives in Hiawassee, Georgia, says of the Gaither concerts. “They’re not as good as the all-night singings. They don’t do as much of the old gospel music that I like, but, you know, they’re good.”

Calvin McGuyrt, a historian of Southern gospel music, remembers the all-night singings vividly, because he was one of the singers. He’s been singing with the Georgians Quartet since the 1950s, when the group was first organized. “If you made that venue in Atlanta, then you were considered to be in the elite,” he says. Apologizing for getting a bit secular with a spiritual subject, he explains that taking part in the all-night singings of old was akin to a Super Bowl experience. “Your blood was already boiling by the time you got there,” he says. “It was a great atmosphere; the crowd was big, and most of the time, it was a sellout,” especially when two, three, or four of the top groups were there.

Wally Fowler, sometimes called “Mr. Gospel Music,” organized the first all-night singing in 1948 in Thomasville, Georgia, and then started a circuit of performances, says McGuyrt. Before long, all-night singings were being staged in the Waycross Memorial Stadium in Waycross, Georgia, where twelve-to-fifteen thousand people would sit from sundown to sunup as group after group sang the night air full of gospel praise.

Other singings were held in many cities, including Bonifay, Florida; at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, home of the Grand Ole Opry; in Greenville, South Carolina; and in Birmingham, Alabama.

McGuyrt started singing gospel in 1949, when he was twelve years old. He sang tenor, but then his voice lowered to baritone. His father, W. L. “Smiling Mac” McGuyrt, had led the Stamps Melody Quartet, a shape note singing group, in the mid-twentieth century, and in 1955, Calvin became the leader. The quartet changed its name to the Georgians Quartet, following a recommendation from Hovie Lister of the Statesmen Quartet.

The Georgians—who were named the Southeastern Southern Gospel Music Conference’s Male Quartet of the Year in 2012—recently added another member, meaning that McGuyrt, now in his seventies, no longer sings at most of their concerts. “I don’t have to work so hard,” he says, “but I’m still the leader and the quarterback.” McGuyrt writes most of the group’s songs. In fact, the quartet has recorded more than one hundred of his pieces.

Gospel music has changed since its glory days of fifty or sixty years ago. Audience members are grayer; opportunities to sing are fewer; crowds, except those for the big-name groups, are smaller; contemporary Christian music is bigger. But whether the popularity of Southern gospel is waning depends on who’s talking.

It’s very much waned in the Southeast, says Alan Kendall, who has forsaken singing with a group and gone to a solo ministry. “To me,” he says, “there’s an oversaturation of artists and groups. And some of them don’t have quality music. I think a lot could be done to raise the bar quality-wise, entertainment-wise even.”

Some gospel fans and singers think “entertainment” is a dirty word, but not Kendall.

People who say that gospel singing shouldn’t be entertaining are pigeonholing God, he says. “I’ve been learning that the more you keep an audience engaged, the more receptive they are to the gospel. A lot of practice needs to go toward better music, better entertainment value. But it’ll take a long time to change the present mind-set.”

Gospel music, he says, is bigger in the North and West, a reverse from the trend decades ago. People in those regions tend to get out more and make concerts part of their weekly ritual. And there’s a push for the music overseas, too.

The last group Kendall performed with was a revamp of the Rebels Quartet. He went solo in 2015 and since then is busier than he’s been in four years. “I sing in churches, to senior groups, at festivals, concert settings, anybody that’ll have me,” he says. The father of two young girls, Kendall, who lives in Towns County, Georgia, can do more solo appearances than group singings and still have more time with his family.

Donald A. “Don” Elrod has retired after singing in Southern gospel groups for thirty-five years, eight years with the Singing Deacons of his church, twelve with First Corinthians, and the last fifteen with Georgia, a trio.

“I could see from the time we started until I retired, opportunities to sing were fewer and fewer,” he says. “Primarily, we sang in churches, but it’s true of these auditoriums, too. Fewer churches are having Southern gospel concerts.”

And he agrees that the audience is getting older. Even at the National Quartet Convention, held annually, the listeners are senior adults, or at least fifty and older. “Who’s going to support gospel music later on?”

Elrod became interested in gospel music just out of high school when he worked at a radio station in Gainesville, Georgia. But today, radio stations that play only Southern gospel music are almost a thing of the past.

He says the market for Southern gospel is shrinking; CD sales are down; Christian bookstores offer few, if any, selections in the genre. That means Southern gospel groups must sell their music at concerts, sometimes at considerably reduced prices.

“I’m an optimistic kind of person,” he says, “and I hope it will continue and do well. My point of view: It’s certainly not growing.”

“To some degree,” Danny Ray Jones says, “Elrod is right. There’s plenty of room to argue either side.” But it all depends on how you look at the trend, and it’s certainly too early to write an obituary for Southern gospel music. Jones, editor in chief of Singing News, the chief publication for Southern gospel music, can rattle off several popular gospel events to support his claim, including Silver Dollar City’s largest amphitheater, Echo Hollow in Branson, Missouri, filled to capacity twelve nights in a row; sold-out concerts of the Booth Brothers and the Collingsworth Family; and monthlong capacity concerts at Dollywood, a theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

Jones believes attendance in the United States has held steady through the years except for the all-night singings that were popular and prolific decades ago. Southern gospel music, he says, has gone more international these days. “Thanks to Bill Gaither, radio, and a whole bunch of things thrown into the pot, Southern gospel is actually reaching more people than ever. We have large pockets of Southern gospel in Ireland and some of the other European nations. There’s even a decent-size following in Brazil.” Other promoters have succeeded with multiday tours across Canada and along the US West Coast.

But he does see differences in church music. At one time, he says, Southern gospel was the music of choice. Then contemporary Christian music came along as the favorites of seminary graduates. But in certain parts of the country, that trend is changing back. “It’s not a sweeping movement,” he says, “but it’s there.”

Jones retired in 2015 as executive director of the Southern Gospel Music Association. But he’s still devoted to Southern gospel. “This is all I’ve ever known,” he says. “I really got into it when I was two weeks old, because that’s when my parents took me to my first event.”

Marilyn Berrong can relate. She grew up attending singing schools and singing out of Stamps-Baxter books.

“Everything we used back then was shape note singing,” she says. And today, as choir director at Woods Grove Baptist Church in Hiawassee, she’ll occasionally have choir members pull out one of the old books and sing notes instead of words, causing some listeners to think they are singing in tongues.

Berrong and her family operate the Mountain Home Music Theater in Hiawassee, which features bluegrass, country, and gospel music. She sings backup and solos, and her husband, Larry, who can play ten different instruments, leads the band.

The music theater is all about singing and having fun, rather than making money. Adults pay eight dollars, and children under ten are admitted free, just about enough to cover utilities, she says.

Occasionally, Berrong will book a Southern gospel group to sing at her church. The crowd is big when it’s a well-known group like the Chuck Wagon Gang. But when it’s a lesser-known group, maybe a hundred people will show up. “And unless your church guarantees them money,” she says, “they only come for a love offering. And when you have only a hundred people there, you’re not going to get a lot of money.”

Berrong is doubtful about the long-term future of Southern gospel music as she knew it, and for one reason that no one else mentioned: lack of live piano music. “One of the things that made Southern gospel music was the piano playing of a person in the quartet. And now, of course, they use tracks. A lot of people just don’t want to hear tracks. They want to hear live music when they go.”

And people don’t want to hear a whole lot of talk from the singers, she says. They come to hear singing, not talking.

Everyone agrees that songwriters Bill Gaither and his wife, Gloria, have done a lot for gospel music. They have written such favorites as “The Longer I Serve Him,” “Because He Lives,” “The King Is Coming,” and “He Touched Me.” Their concerts and homecoming videos sometimes feature well-known singers from the past. They have been able to cross over and attract fans who are not die-hard Southern gospel devotees but love other gospel music.

But Gaither concerts, Berrong says, are not like the all-night gospel singings she knew as a little girl. She misses people like pianist Hovie Lister, who always impressed her with his antics onstage. She misses the old songs that told the whole story of salvation through Jesus Christ from beginning to end. She misses the Martha Carson–type music. She misses “Satisfied” and “How Great Thou Art.”

She also misses Gospel Singing Jubilee on television. “I know at our house,” she says, “it came on at nine o’clock, and it was a signal that you better almost be dressed to go to church. Then you’d hear ‘Jubilee, Jubilee’ and know that you were in for thirty minutes of the best in Southern gospel: the Florida Boys, the Happy Goodman Family, the Palmetto State Quartet, Naomi and the Sego Brothers, just to name a few. Then you would hear ‘you’re invited to this happy Jubilee’ and know it was time to get in the car and go to church.” The Jubilee singing, she says, got her heart and mind ready for church and the pastor’s message.

Gospel Singing Jubilee, the longest-running television program in the history of gospel music, lasted for three decades and was seen throughout the country. Other lesser-known gospel programs are still televised in parts of the nation.

Marilyn Berrong cherishes her memories: of the all-night singings when she was a girl, of the Jubilee TV program, of enjoying gospel songs with her parents. And, like many fans, she’s hoping and praying for a great revival of those old songs that still touch her soul.