The Rhetoric of Southern Gospel Music

Michael P. Graves and David Fillingim

Essays on Southern Gospel Music

More than Precious Memories is the first book of its kind—a collection of essays offering scholarly analysis and interpretation of Southern Gospel Music. Believing Southern Gospel Music to be a significant cultural and religious phenomenon worthy of the best efforts of scholarship, Graves and Fillingim have assembled a diverse group of scholars who apply a variety of methods and theories to the task of understanding Southern Gospel Music and its cultural context. These scholars and approaches include the following.

• Scott Tucker, looks at the theme of “heaven” in six of the Gaither Homecoming songbooks

• David Fillingim looks at how Southern Gospel Music answers the question of theodicy from the perspective of the rural, white, working class

• Robert M. McManus explores selected song lyrics to show how Southern Gospel Music helps construct the identity of the community compared to Contemporary Christian Music

• Darlene R. Graves identifies key sustaining personality strengths of women that tend to preserve consistency between their public performance and personal spiritual walk

• Elizabeth F. Desnoyers-Colas and Stephanie Howard (Asabi) explore Southern Gospel and Black Gospel music, through the influence of Thomas A. Dorsey

• Michael Graves examines how the culture of Southern Gospel Music deals with its inevitable prodigal sons

• Raymond D.S. Anderson analyzes the Gaither Homecoming videos as examples of the postmodern turn in American popular Christian culture

• John D. Keeler presents the first audience study of Southern Gospel Music employing a “Uses and Gratifications” research framework

• Paul A. Creasman examines the ways Southern Gospel Music as a culture memorializes its dead by use of the Internet

• Naaman Wood reviews significant scholarly approaches to the study of popular music

Michael P. Graves is Professor of Communication Studies at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

David Fillingim is a professor of Religion and Philosophy at Shorter College in Rome, Georgia, and is a former pastor and hospital chaplain. He is the author of Redneck Liberation: Country Music as Theology (Mercer, 2003).

Also in the Music in the American South Series

Redneck Liberation: Country Music as Theology

They Heard Georgia Signing

Honey in the Rock: The Ruby Pickens Tartt Collection of Religious Folk Songs from Sumter County, Alabama

Call us toll free at 800-637-2378, ext. 2880 or 800-342-0841, ext. 2880 (in GA)
For help on orders email us at mupressorders@mercer.edu

240 pages, 6 x 9

978-0-86554-857-2

$45.00s, Cloth

Index, Bibliography

MUP/H644

Available February 2005

Religious Studies

310 pages, 6 x 9

978-0-86554-955-5

$25.00s, Paper

Index, Bibliography

MUP/P303