Douglas Harrison
Department of Language and Literature
Florida Gulf Coast University

Abstract

Although the Bill and Gloria Gaither Homecoming Friends concert and video series is a ubiquitous presence in Christian entertainment, its cultural function and influence are not well understood. This essay argues that alongside the established view of the Homecoming series as an inwardly focused method some Christians use to interpret the vicissitudes of evangelical experience, the Homecoming phenomenon also exerts an outwardly shaping force. Drawing on a line of sports reunion videos that share key similarities with Homecoming, this essay traces the emergence of the Homecoming series as a transcultural narrative framework within which to commodify nostalgic re-engagements with the past—both religious and secular.

[1] Within the overlapping worlds of American gospel music, contemporary Christian entertainment, and multi-media televangelism, the longstanding 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) to join. What started as a happenstance gathering of “old-timers” from the bygone heyday of southern (which is to say, white) gospel music in a Nashville, Tennessee, studio in February 1991 has since become an institution in the Christian entertainment industry.¹ The concept is deceptively simple. Bill Gaither, who rose to fame in Christian music as a songwriter and mentor to other writers and performers in the 1970s and 1980s,² invites many of his friends, peers, and (at least in the early days of Homecoming) his gospel-music idols from childhood to join him on a stage, where 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.³ Songs need not even be, though most are, religious; for more than a year in the first decade of this century, the Homecoming tour opened with the chorus of “Lean on Me.” Stories, jokes, testimonies, and the pageant of Homecoming friends enjoying each other’s company and musical gifts hold the show together. Gaither himself generally stands in the foreground of the frame, where he cracks jokes between songs or reminisces about a lifetime spent in gospel and Christian music. At other times, he will single out one or another of the Homecoming friends to sing solos or in groups. Though he likes to describe himself and his wife as a team⁴—she is his longtime co-writer and usually offers an ornate prayer, sentimental poem, or meditative reading at some point during each recording—Gaither is obviously the impresario of his own show: the ultimate Homecoming friend; known and liked by everyone; peer to all, rival to none. Gaither has perfected displays of Christian friendship as performance art.

[2] Though it is difficult to say exactly how and in what way the Homecoming series has impacted Christian music (like so many other aspects of white gospel creative culture, Gaither and the Homecoming series remain woefully understudied), the case for the importance of Gaither music in general and the Homecoming series in particular in the development of mass-market Christian entertainment and the modern evangelical artistic imagination seems inarguable.⁵ Less clear is the influence, if any, the Homecoming series has had on markets and cultures beyond its own and those immediately adjacent to it.

[3] Others have touched on the impact of the Homecoming series within the evangelical Christian community. In his essay on the ceremonial function of the Gaither Homecoming videos, Michael Graves has shown the recurrence of ritual reinstatements of celebrities from southern gospel and Christian entertainment who “have not lived up to their professed Christian behavioral expectations and ideals.”⁶ Michael English, Calvin Newton, and Mylon LeFevre are each among white gospel’s favourite sons who openly transgressed conservative Christian cultural norms and were shut out of the mainstream of Christian music for their transgressions, only to be welcomed home much later by the Homecoming friends in ceremonial rites of repentance, forgiveness, and reacceptance.⁷ Though Graves is interested in a fairly narrow subset of prodigal-son moments in the Homecoming series, his argument suggests a broader psychosocial function for the Gaither Homecoming series as a tool that helps evangelical Christians understand their place in the world by reconciling competing ways of life and worldviews in musical dramas of love, acceptance, and graciousness. In this view, the ritualistic resolution of conflicts between orthodox believers and their prodigal sons in the Homecoming series constructs for its audiences a beatified image of Protestant Christianity in the Calvinist tradition triumphing over worldliness in an effulgence of pious tears, humble repentance, and sanctifying harmonies.

[4] But is it possible that, alongside this view of the Homecoming series as an inwardly focused method some Christians use to interpret the vicissitudes of evangelical experience, the Homecoming phenomenon might also exert an outwardly shaping force? That is, might the Homecoming model of commemorative bonding and sentimental friendship be more than a purely religious mode of expression, something else in addition to a means of effacing disjunctions between the sacred and the secular in certain sectors of contemporary life?⁸ Viewing the popularity of the Homecoming videos and concerts alongside another series of videos about nostalgic reunions that emerged in the wake of the Homecoming phenomenon suggests that the answer to both questions is yes. Drawing on the Gabriel Communication line of commercial videos that stage “reunions” of football stars from Division I universities in the South,⁹ I argue that the Homecoming series has become a transcultural narrative framework within which to commodify certain nostalgic re-engagements with the past—both religious and secular. These sports videos seemed to have absorbed from the Homecoming series a semiotic vocabulary with which to articulate the ritual exchange of sentiment and sympathy among legendary athletes bonded by their achievement, collegiate affiliation, and devotion to athletic ideals of excellence, loyalty, and honor. Whatever utility the Gaither Homecomings have within evangelicalism, Gabriel’s sports reunion videos suggest the Homecoming phenomenon also serves as an exportable method of managing the transformation of American life in cultures that partially include, but exist far beyond the confines of, the core Homecoming audience.¹⁰

More than Mimicry

[5] When I show the sports reunion videos to fans of the Homecoming Friends, one of the first things people comment upon is the structural similarities between the two. Like the Homecoming series, the sports reunions assemble famous friends in tiered semi-circles around powerful iconic objects—a grand piano for Homecomings, a miniature grid-iron for the sport legends (little yellow goal posts are mounted at each end of the set). In each series, the moderator sits in the foreground and functions both as a provocateur and a loose centre for the rhetorical energy; though each friend’s stories, memories, or testimonies are shared for everyone to hear and enjoy, they are notionally directed at the moderator, whose gentle urgings and queries help keep the program flowing more or less smoothly. In this way, no one friend appears to compete with another for more time or attention, since the moderator controls the pace. Aesthetically, the cover art for the sports videos echoes the style of Homecoming DVD covers, with sepia-toned photos of famous figures arranged in a collage of gently overlapping images, as if to reinforce the sense of each person’s individual star power, as well as the intergenerational connections the friends share. Conceptually, just as the Homecoming videos develop different aspects of the series’ overarching emphasis on the community of singing saints as a cornerstone of Christian life, the sports videos similarly assume that though the names and faces and stories vary from school to school—Auburn, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma—college football in the South deserves ceremonial commemoration for its role as “a would-be populist folk-religion,” to borrow Nathan Elmore’s phrase.¹¹ And perhaps most important, both series are built around heavily nostalgic remembrances of legendary figures and a sharing of stories and sentiment that both honor the dead and informally place the living within an unbroken arc of cultural greatness that the videos commemorate.

[6] In tallying up these similarities, I do not mean to suggest that the sports reunion videos are necessarily conscious reappropriations of the Gaither Homecoming approach. They may or may not be. The best one can say is that they are similar. Nor should the differences between the two be glossed over. In the first place, the only music present in the sports reunion videos is a non-diagetic soundtrack played before and after segments. Moreover, the athletes in the sports reunion videos possess very little of the Homecoming Friends’ unselfconscious ease of bearing in front of the camera, giving the sports videos a rougher, more exposed—and sometimes, more endearing—quality than the Homecoming videos (in the Auburn video, a former player’s cell phone goes off while a revered former coach is trying to tell a story that seems very important to him; later, another former coach launches off into a story about a long-ago Auburn team getting into a knife-fight in Georgia, only to reveal he doesn’t really remember the story and had hoped someone else in the room had been there, but no one had). To some extent, the often clumsy exchanges or outsized displays of downhome bonhomie on the sports reunion videos are no doubt purposeful, or at least desirable from a director’s standpoint. Too much polish on the performance would disrupt the video’s premise of unrehearsed reunions of a couple dozen pals casually swapping stories about their time with the same football team. Like ordinary conversation and life, some stories and memories are going to be better than others, and the unevenness conveys authenticity.

[7] Notwithstanding these surface differences, the sports reunions do seem to me clearly imitative. The similarities could be a result of conscious adaptation, or a more amorphous process of semiotic absorption across the permeable borders of adjacent fan cultures. In addition to the retail success of the video series and the popularity of concert tour, Homecoming has attracted an estimated 75 million viewers in syndicated distribution on a number of cable and premium content channels over the past decade—among them, The Nashville Network, Trinity Broadcast Network, The Inspirational Network, Gospel Music Television Network, PAX-TV, FamilyNet, Daystar, Crossroads, and XM satellite radio¹²—whose demographics are drawn in no small part from the overlapping worlds of college sports in the South and conservative Christian entertainment. In whatever way Homecoming’s influence has spread, the act of imitation, as Homi Bhaba has noted, is more than just mimicry. In echoing the Gaither Homecoming series, the reunited football players’ “representation of identity and meaning is rearticulated,” as Bhabha puts it.¹³ In this case, by repurposing the Homecoming approach to cultural history as an intergenerational exchange of nostalgic memories and sentimental stories, the sports reunion videos transform the athletes’ individual abilities and records of achievement from plot points of autobiography or school history into essential components of a symbolic fraternity encompassing not just famous players but anyone of any age who has cheered on these teams or revered one of its star athletes. The trailer for the Auburn video makes this point explicit, imploring viewers to enjoy the experience of former players and coaches “telling stories that made the Auburn Tigers one of the best college football programs in the nation.” What Liz Moor has written of British football holds true for college football in the South as well: the sport acts as an “organizing fantasy” for player and fan alike.¹⁴ The historic importance of each player or college athletic program is no longer a matter of an individual’s or a team’s achievement within a particular sport, athletic conference, or generation. Instead, these players’ contributions and the team’s significance are revalued as a repository for core values and meanings grounding a transhistorical community that is called into being through “telling stories” on tape, then selling and consuming those stories in the video-series format. Individual and collective identity is rearticulated, to echo Bhabha’s formulation again, through the commercialization of nostalgic manhood—carefully stylized in video recordings and reimagined as valuable cultural artifacts through repeated viewings and everyday retellings provided by ordinary fans who have watched the videos.

[8] For a long time, cultural critics considered this sort of self-indulgent nostalgia to be a form of “bad memory,” an evasion of history. As Sean Scanlan has written, “manifestations of nostalgia [have long been] critiqued and analyzed along two compatible, nearly parallel lines: nostalgia abused individual and collective memory and nostalgia [obscured] the relations between producers and consumers. Either way, nostalgia was simply bad, bad, bad.”¹⁵ The sports reunionists in these videos certainly do seem to expend a great deal of energy attempting to aggrandize their own athletic histories—most commonly by telling what amount to hero-observer stories in which the storyteller relates an encounter with legendary coaches or great players more senior than he. These stories become the raw ingredients of memory from which storied friendships and cultural traditions are launched: for instance, Johnny Majors and Gus Manning telling stories about the late Tennessee coach, General Bob Neyland; or former coach Doug Dickey telling about his second- and third-hand encounters with the legacy Neyland bequeathed to the program years after Neyland’s death. On the surface, these stories might easily appear to be sentimental justifications of the enormous amount of emotional energy and financial capital generated and spent by these universities’ football programs and their star athletes.

[9] But recent scholarly reconsiderations of nostalgia and its cultural function suggest that there is more going on here than self-regarding reappraisals of the past. In current criticism, as Scanlon notes, old notions of nostalgia as bad memory have “given way to nostalgia as a more ambivalent, more engaged, critical frame. […] Rather than an end reaction to yearning,” nostalgia is being increasingly “understood as a technique for provoking a secondary reaction.”¹⁶ Though these secondary reactions are contingent on the cultural context, the emphasis on nostalgia as cultural process encourages us to look at what nostalgic habits of culture are trying to achieve, often beneath or against the stated purposes of the subjects involved. In the case of sports reunion videos, the preoccupation with the past and the urge to recount it in public, stylized exchanges of fellow feeling seem to be not only acts of self-justification, but also efforts to understand contemporary life by relocating modern values in antecedent historical moments or traditions. At one point in the Tennessee video, former player Lester McClain makes this idea explicit: referring to the way that Neyland’s militaristic style and hard-driving commitment to standards of athletic success remain alive long after Neyland, McClain said, “Coach Neyland coached us all,” even those who never knew him. Early on in the Auburn video, former player Vince Dooley makes references to the “great spirit among the people” at Auburn that Dooley and several other speakers associate most powerfully with Coach Ralph “Shug” Jordan, a mid-century contemporary to Tennessee’s Neyland. Like Neyland, Jordan was a former military man known both for his toughness and his gentlemanly conduct (indeed “Gentleman” Jordan was his nickname). For Dooley, Jordan was a “pattern” for excellence and achievement who modeled what it meant to be an “Auburn man.” Such stylized reengagements with the past, in the form of legends reuniting on screen in the present, allow the famous person to subsume his personal achievement within a continuum of greatness that has less to do with athletic prowess or physical ability and more to do with preserving a set of cultural ideas associated with sports teams and athletics programs at some of the South’s most revered universities. Meanwhile, the overt sentimentality of these sports legends authorizes the fan to take attachments to the home team beyond school pride and to treat emotional investments in a particular sports team as an ennobling act of cultural preservation.

Adaptable Structures of Feeling

[10] To students and fans of the Homecoming series, the effusion of fellow feeling, especially from “legendary” males in powerful or prominent positions, is nothing new. Although Graves left it undeveloped in his article, one main implication of his analysis is that the Gaither Homecoming phenomenon creates a safe psychospiritual context in which men can express deeply felt emotions about matters of the spiritual self and the soul without imperiling their masculinity or slipping into “feminine” roles often associated with displays of religious affect and effervescences of spirit in patriarchal cultures.

[11]In his impresario role, Gaither largely neutralizes the threat of feminization in several related ways. First, Gaither is a successful “star” in his own right. As a songwriter, publisher, and entertainment entrepreneur, Gaither has amassed four decades’ worth of paradigm-shifting innovations in Christian musical styles and business models for delivering content to Christian audiences. The American Society for Composers, Authors, and Publishers named the Gaithers “Songwriters of the Century” in 2000,¹⁷ and though the title feels overwrought, it does suggest the extent to which Gaither music has influenced American music, especially commercially viable expressions of religious nostalgia in our post-modern era of irony. His stylistic influence has been vast. In the 1970s, he pioneered praise and worship music with “There’s Just Something About that Name,” “Family of God,” and other now-canonical choruses. His inspirational songs—most famously “The King is Coming”—have become anthems of contemporary evangelicalism. And he has penned modern hymns—“He Touched Me” and “Because He Lives”—that achieved something approaching instant-classic status up their first appearing in Protestant church music. Meanwhile, he has created platforms for his music that have become templates for mass-market Christian music theatre. Before the Homecoming tour, there was the Gaither Trio national tours in the 1970s and 1980s that innovatively used a traveling troupe of friends and a variety-show format that both shaped and was shaped by Gaither’s Praise Gatherings. These events succeeded in the 1970s by merging music, religious motivational speakers, and evangelists a means of creating “a worship experience that involved more than music.”¹⁸ In the 1990s, Gaither opened the short-lived Celebration Theater in Branson, Missouri—a venture leveraged in part against the successes of the trio and the annual Praise Gaitherings. Individually, these interrelated enterprises prefigure in one way or another the Vegas-Broadway-Praise hybrid that the Homecoming series and tour ultimately perfected.¹⁹ Collectively, Gaither’s portfolio of business ventures and innovations have made the Gaither name and style omnipresent in American Christian music, and this omnipresence lends to Gaither a certain aura of untouchability in the Homecoming series. Thus, when he embraces highly emotional forms of expression that might be emasculating to many other public personae, Gaither effectively indemnifies others from any loss of esteem for engaging in similar behaviours.

[12] It would be inaccurate to say that Gaither Homecoming videos have been responsible for naturalizing emotional expressions of masculinity in evangelicalism. Stretching back to the first Great Awakening, the revivals of Charles Grandison Finney, the big-tent evangelism of Billy Sunday and Dwight Moody, and running through to Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Joel Osteen, male expressions of emotionalism and melodrama have long dominated the more evangelical strains of American Protestantism. Gaither’s achievement has been to popularize a commercialized form of patriarchal religious emotionalism that portrays it as the inevitable consequence of the gospel message in song. If, as the old song says, “I sing because I’m happy / I sing because I’m free,” the Gaither Homecoming friends might be said to cry, repent, lament, rejoice and testify because they sing gospel songs.²⁰ These effusions of emotion are not only the province of men in the Homecoming videos. But the patriarchal tendencies of conservative Protestant Christianity in America make displays of emotion from men rarer and riskier. Consequently, if sentimental homecomings were not professionally advantageous, it is unlikely that performers would align themselves with the Homecoming friends. Part of what makes the Homecoming setting an acceptable space in which Christian entertainers can show vulnerabilities to religious emotionalism and spiritual feelings without seeming to have been domineered or unmanned is that the Homecoming stage appears professionally non-threatening. Gaither has made his mark on the music world as a writer and businessman, not primarily as a singer or player (his singing ability is at best average). So while his renown surpasses almost every other Christian performer with whom he appears, his accomplishments put him in an echelon of achievement all his own, and his presence tends to ennoble others without challenging their status or eroding their claims to fame as vocalists or instrumentalists. Gaither reinforces the notion of his stage as a safe-zone by including self-deprecating displays of his own ordinariness: playing up his “occasional stammer” and regularly relying on comedy skits and jokes that revolve around making fun of Bill Gaither—his highly coiffed hair, his big nose, his affectations on stage, his mediocre singing voice, even his fame itself.²¹

[13] Taken together, these two dynamics—Gaither’s status in Christian music and the cultivated reputation his shows have for being non-competitive—work in conjunction with evangelical Christian culture’s tendency to defer to authority figures and prefer hierarchies wherever possible. The result is that Gaither occupies a unique role in American evangelical culture. Respected for his artistic achievements as a songwriter, admired for his support of younger artists, and revered for his business acumen and enormous wealth, Gaither is nevertheless also viewed as the perpetually wide-eyed fanboy, awe-struck by the beauty and power of his beloved gospel music—rather like Garrison Keillor’s creating (by becoming) the object of his own awe on stage.²²

[14] Charges that artists who travel with Gaither have sold out or surrendered some measure of artistic integrity regularly circulate just below the surface in the small, insular world of southern gospel, where too much mainstream popularity or financial success is often suspect. But for the most part, any negative associations fans or audiences might be inclined to impute to their favourite Homecoming friends for their involvement with Gaither can be transferred to his account. It is his show after all, and the ministerial pretensions of most gospel artists provide a ready reply to any such critiques of their integrity: Homecoming is still among the most popular acts in the Christian music business, and for professional musicians who claim to be musical evangelists, turning down Gaither’s offer would be tantamount to abdicating Christian duty (and professionally disadvantageous as well). At the same time, the goodwill, enjoyment, and inspiration that consumers seem to seek and find in Gaither Homecomings pay out double: once to Gaither himself as the show’s namesake, and then again to the Homecoming Friends involved in creating the music. Homecoming gives the impression that these Christian performers have managed to achieve commercial success without succumbing to the compromises of commercialism. Perhaps this appearance of commercially successful saintliness helps explain why so many gospel and Christian music entertainers have agreed to appear on the Homecoming tour under contractual terms that financially redound lopsidedly to Gaither’s benefit.²³

[15] The unique structure of gospel-music culture makes it virtually impossible to replicate in secular life the kind of role Gaither occupies in Christian music. But the sports reunion videos seem to have clearly absorbed the lessons of Gaither’s dual function as both a peer to the stars and a super-fan. The Tennessee Football Legends Reunion is hosted by Bob Kesling,²⁴director of Broadcasting at the University of Tennessee and lead broadcaster for Volunteer football games since the late 1990s. Though Kesling lacks achievement in college sports equivalent to Gaither’s success in professional Christian music, Kesling occupies an ultimate-insider position within Tennessee football as a highly visible and renowned figure well-known by die-hard fans. This status allows Kesling to perform the role in the reunion video of a Gaitheresque moderator. As “the voice” of Volunteer sports, Kesling has respectability within the Tennessee football world without rising to the level of national fame.²⁵ Similarly, the Auburn video is hosted by Paul Ellen, a widely recognized sports announcer in Alabama who hosts a pregame show during the college football season.²⁶ In both cases, each announcer-cum-raconteur can plausibly present himself as a privileged insider without at all appearing to rival or diminish the reputations of the assembled stars.

[16] The similarities of Kesling’s, Ellen’s, and Gaither’s roles in these videos are perhaps most meaningful, however, as indicators of the deep “structures of feeling” and expression, as Raymond Williams used the term to describe “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt,”²⁷ that southern college football culture and the Homecoming Christian music culture share. Viewed as sites of “nuanced interactions between selected and interpreted beliefs” and “acted and justified experiences,” as Williams puts it, these videos reveal a persistent preoccupation with forms of discourse that call into being the significance of the cultural traditions being celebrated.²⁸ The Auburn football video manifests this propensity in the tendency among speakers to linger over Auburn’s rise in the 1940s and 1950s from a backwater football club to national prominence by the 1960s onward. This transition is most powerfully symbolized for several former players and staff by the mid-century physical renovation of the original Auburn stadium—where fans sat, as former trainer Kenny Howard says, on “two-by-tens” strung between concrete blocks—to its modern expanded form that seats over 80,000 fans and is known by the current name, Jordan-Hare Stadium. The cinder-blocks-and-lumber beginnings of the modern Auburn program seems to contain powerful nostalgic value among speakers on the video, for whom the old stadium functions as an imaginative cipher for what former player Liston Eddins describes as the team’s “underdog role” in college sports. Many of the stories on the video focus, not on the big wins or famous triumphs, but on memorable losses sustained during times of rebuilding the program—phases of struggle when there were “long odds against” the team’s success—that echo the upbuilding of the old stadium into a modern sports megacenter. Thus in the narrative that emerges on the video, the team’s ultimate success—six SEC titles and seventeen bowl appearances over five decades²⁹—are predicated on periods of prolonged struggle and have value not as evidence of athletic superiority but of the indomitability of the Auburn spirit. “Be loyal to Auburn and love it,” former coach Pat Dye recalls telling his players during the dark, early days of his tenure there. The school’s wins testify to this underlying loyalty which is notionally inspired by Auburn’s intrinsically special nature—“there’s something different about Auburn,” Dye says at one point—but is rhetorically constructed in the exchange of stories and memories.

[17]The cultural capital generated by these celebrations in turn can then be deployed to revaluate cultural history and to address a range of psychosocial concerns and aspirations embedded within each subculture: fears about the legitimacy of self and community and their traditions, desires for recognition of one’s achievements beyond the parochial borders of a particular college or the insular subculture of gospel music, and other diffuse but persistent needs to feel that one’s work in the world matters, and can be validated both internally by one’s peers and externally by outsiders. In the sports nostalgia videos, the recorded conversations collectively strive to reveal the unseen essence or hidden life force behind great athletic programs. By humanizing the stars and developing the personalities of each in their interactions with one another, the videos encourage viewers to see in these reminiscences a previously submerged, pseudo-spiritual thread running from one generation of football players, coaches, and fans to another, and sustained not only by the athletic enterprise on the field, but also by the related community and its values. “It’s great to be an Auburn Tiger,” Dye recalls hearing fans chant long after Auburn had left the field for the locker room in the wake a big loss. That devotion, that Auburn spirit, Dye says he told his team, “that’s what it’s all about.” Though the videos don’t present these kinds of moments as complete acts of serendipity, they do emphasize the appearance of unforced friendship and spontaneous chords of memory that emerge immediately among these men in the fortuitous upwelling of team spirit expressed more or less steadily for over two hours.

The Private Origins of Popular Culture

[18] As Bill Gaither describes it, the idea for the Homecoming series came from the kind of serendipitous events, caught on tape, that the sports nostalgia producers could only wish for: what started as a one-day session to record some gospel music legends singing the old standard “Where Could I Go” suddenly turned into a hours-long exchange of favourite memories, old stories, a beloved songs. The process of editing and releasing the recording of the event suggested the possibility of other, similar recordings, to Gaither, and thus was Homecoming born. Retelling all this his 2003 autobiography, It’s More Than Music, Gaither writes that the Homecoming idea took hold at a time when “it seemed as though the big days of my career were over. I was fifty-five years of age, and after enjoying a successful career writing and performing music for more than three decades, in 1991 the music world was about to pass me by.”³⁰ This was not the first crisis of Gaither’s career. Indeed, as he portrays himself in an earlier autobiography from 1992, I Almost Missed the Sunset, Gaither’s public persona and personal identity have been forged in periodic passages of intensely felt anxiety or upheaval. In his childhood, Gaither—born in 1936—recalls his coming into awareness of the “big Russian bear and the depressing cloud of communism that seemed to constantly hang over our heads,” and he positions his early songwriting and singing career as a personal effort to turn back the encroaching godlessness of the red menace.³¹ Remembering the end of the 1960s, when his career as a songwriter and publisher was beginning to take off, Gaither describes important evolutions in his writing and performance style that emerged directly in response to the “negativity” of Cold War American life:

Astronauts had walked on the moon, but leaders had been struck down too. John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. There had been riots and looting, even death on college campuses. The “God is Dead” debate had raged during the 1960s too. The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago had become an ugly spectacle. All that negativity gnawed in the back of my mind, having been raised under the threat of communism and with memories of the depression recounted nearly every day. Somehow, the decade we had come out of and the warnings I had grown up with didn’t mesh with the all the good things that were happening in our ministry [i.e., The Gaither Trio and Gaither’s publishing company].³²

This vision of a world rife with hidden danger and unseen snares that disrupt peaceful life in bursts of psychosocial turbulence recurs often in Gaither’s autobiographical writings—especially at pivotal moments in his professional development. Long before, Gaither tells of being “cornered” by someone he thought was a friend and accused of being a fraud in 1970, he confesses to having had a persistent “wondering” and a series of “private debates with myself” and “my psyche” about “unconfirmed reports that someone was questioning me,” doubting his sincerity. The reports were true. A close friend ultimately accused Gaither of being a sellout and a fraud. The accusation was “devastating,” Gaither writes, sending him into a “black hole”—a year-long struggle with depression, mononucleosis, and creative drought from which he was unable to emerge until the arrival of his first son, whose birth in 1971 inspired Gaither and his wife to write one of their most famous compositions, “Because He Lives.”³³

[19] It can be initially difficult to comprehend the severity and intensity of Gaither’s reaction to his friend’s accusation; the response is so out of proportion to the charge itself (one undoubtedly rooted in petty jealousies, and fairly tame as personal attacks in the entertainment business go). How could someone rise to such prominence and success without a thicker skin? Understood, however, as symptomatic of a Cold War predisposition to worry over invisible enemies and forces waiting in the shadows to destroy faithful Christians in moments of vulnerability, Gaither’s response makes more sense. Indeed, I read Gaither’s abiding anxiety about ominous, lurking threats to personal or professional identity and fears about the stability of the Judeo-Christian basis for mainstream American society in the post-World War II era as the gestalt of Gaither’s life and work, and the dominant paradigm through which he interprets his experience and career.

[20] Though It’s More than Music is less intimately autobiographical and more explicitly aimed at capitalizing on the success of the Homecoming tour in the preceding decade than I Almost Missed the Sunset, both books function at one important level as Gaither’s literary efforts to cope with pervasive personal and professional anxiety by describing successes or turning points in his career as the initially unrealized gifts of a God-sent crisis. In so doing, these crises humanize Gaither, whose fame can—as is so often the case with the famous—make him seem one-dimensional or impervious to ordinary feeling and failure. As Gaither had done in his 1992 autobiography, he universalizes his struggles in his 2003 book, presenting the middle-aged crisis of relevance and depression and his contemplation of the bittersweet approach of the golden years that open More than Music as a moment with which many of his reading fans will personally identify. Indeed, Gaither’s two autobiographies collectively leave the impression that he sees himself as a kind of evangelical everyman whose experience has been writ large by God’s uncommon blessings on a common life of ordinary Christian service, sacrifice, and strife.

[21] In his study of the late 19^th-century American response to “overcivilized” forms of modern existence, T.J. Jackson Lears has shown how moments of general cultural anxiety about historical change can give rise to widespread reactive transformations in American life that receive particular articulation in the dominant modes of an era’s art and pop culture.³⁴ Extended to the post-World War II generations, whose creative imaginations were forged by the realities of Cold War America, Lears’s approach suggests that Gaither’s life, as described in his autobiographies, tropes a common reaction against a familiar set of anxieties and fears: offsetting private tensions and problems with public, professionally stylized responses. As the most successful phase of Gaither’s professional life, the Homecoming series stands as one highly visible, formal example of how conservative American Protestantism responded to psychosocial instabilities common to Gaither and many other aging Americans in the early 1990s—not least among them, the encroachments of age and the possibility of professional irrelevance at a time of geopolitical upheaval in the last days of the Cold War. The emergence of these anxieties echo those earlier fears Gaither expresses about the doomsday scenarios associated with Cold War apocalypse and other forms of modern nihilism. Just as Gaither describes his early songwriting as an act of resistance to modern godlessness, the Homecoming series emerges in More than Music as an archetypal commemoration of Christian entertainment’s greatest generation and its increasingly unfashionable values. But as Lears suggests, what starts as resistance to change often becomes a change agent itself, and so it is with the Homecoming series. For one sector of aging Christians, Gaither Homecomings have come to function as a new idiom in which to engage and symbolically resolve contemporary feelings of irrelevancy and aspirations for renewed spiritual vigor in late life.

[22] While the Homecoming videos’ success involves their appeal to the nostalgic sentimentality of fundamentalist evangelicalism, the Homecoming Friends are popular and meaningful to a much wider range of conservative and moderate Christians. In essence these reunions of famous friends serve as a model for pan-Protestant religious affiliation in contemporary (secular) America.³⁵ I think this is the case because the Homecoming videos speak to concerns generated by conflicts between orthodox Protestantism and globalized, late-capitalist post-modernity, concerns dispersed widely throughout the American middle class and not solely the province of fundamentalist Christians. Devoted fans of southern gospel, which is overwhelmingly fundamentalist, tend to assume—counterfactually—that because the cast of Homecoming Friends is drawn primarily from the pietistic world of southern gospel music, Homecoming matters mainly as a piece of popular culture from within conservative, southern Protestant Christianity. For one thing, the Gaithers both descend from solidly Midwestern stock.³⁶ For another, the Homecoming tour’s theology has always been studiously ecumenical and nondenominational, full of denominationally generic celebrations of Christian charity and grace that conspicuously avoid the various theological thickets that separate different Protestant sects. This ecumenicalism explains, it seems to me, why the tour and series enjoys such tremendous success far beyond the borders of southern gospel and inspirational Christian music. If Homecoming can be said to have initially emerged from Gaither’s own sublimated crisis of religious legitimacy (and I think it can), it has succeeded and thrived by meaningfully addressing a wider crisis of relevance afflicting contemporary evangelicalism through religious musical entertainment. Psychodynamically, the effect of this sublimation as it manifests itself in the Homecoming series is to create a musical screen onto which people from a wide range of Judeo-Christian cultural traditions within the American middle class can project their own religious and spiritual aspirations. On-screen and in person, the Homecoming friends come together in the name of Christian unity from a variety of genres, religious backgrounds, levels of achievement, and as Graves has shown, often checkered pasts. At the same time, the series extends to its viewers an ongoing series of symbolic—if also oversimple—resolutions to the conflictual relationships modern evangelicals often have with pluralistic, multicultural American society.

[23] Understanding the Gaither series, then, as a cipher through which to publicly manage both collective and individual crises of relevance and other obstacles to stable identity construction, we might legitimately inquire after the underlying function the Gaither aesthetic as it is repurposed in the sports legends videos. Insofar as changes in college football mirror shifts in larger society, as John Sayle Watterson has shown,³⁷ the preoccupation in the sports legends series with celebrity—cultivating it, defining it, celebrating it—suggests that co-opting the Gaither framework may well be part of a broader expression of anxiety about the ascendant cult of the student athlete in top-tier Division I sports programs and in mainstream American society. In the past two decades or so, college football—and Division I sports in general—has undergone what has been called an “athletic arms race” of expansion,³⁸ ballooning into a multi-billion-dollar commercial enterprise built on the popular (and highly lucrative) construct of paraprofessional college athletes as embodiments of ideals about fair play and personal excellence, uncorrupted (or so the story goes) by the cartoonish excess of professional sports. Since the publication of the first Knight Commission report on intercollegiate athletics in 1991, it has become customary to look for the socio-cultural side-effects of turning student athletes into “amateur” celebrities,³⁹ and more and more evidence is mounting that commercializing university athletic departments has brought with it a host of ethical problems and pedagogical compromises that are antithetical to the academic and social goals of higher education in the liberal arts tradition.⁴⁰ Less obvious are the deep structural realignments in the collective imagination and cultural discourse that attend transformations as powerful and far-reaching as the rise of the college-sports entertainment industry. The always-on pace of cable sports television and sports talk radio and their fondness for highlights, superlatives, and hyperbole drive a dehistoricist way of thinking and acting that values history and its agents mainly for how comparisons to the past glamourize present achievement or deepen the significance of the contemporary moment. So at one level the sports legends series certainly does seem to be an effort to capitalize on the commercialization of college sports (until recently, the Tennessee football video, for instance, was featured on the University of Tennessee bookstore website, and the Auburn video is described in the trailer as a must-have for “every” true Auburn fan⁴¹). Nevertheless, the series does so by stylizing displays of deep reverence for one increasingly marginalized strand of sports history: the oldest men present in each college football video are given the best seats on the set, asked to speak first (followed by the next oldest generation and so on down the line to the youngest players), and are always deferred to by younger members of the group when stories converge or cross-talk ensues. In addition to cashing in on the ready supply of money circulating around college sports, this deferential approach to seniority may also speak powerfully to aging college-football stars—and by extension, to the fans who might identify with these professional athletes—watching their legacies disappear in the long shadow cast by increasingly commercialized celebrity culture of contemporary college sports.

[24] For these older men, modern college athletics as a mass-cultural phenomenon must seem vastly different than the system in which their achievements were historicized and their greatness acculturated.⁴² College-football celebrity is no longer measured mainly in receptions, yards rushed, and defensive tackles, but by much more elusive metrics such as star power, earning potential, and position in the upcoming NFL draft. In a contemporary era when college talent scouts are known to look for prospects at junior-high athletic events, a college football standout from the past faces the prospect of his name and accomplishments being effectively eclipsed by the next evermore highly anticipated crop of rising-star high-schoolers and their pliability to the corporative preference in sports entertainment for youth over age. This process unfolds at the expense of the bygone achievements from athletes of an earlier era, when bake-sale booster clubs were the most powerful monied interests in college sports.

[25] Faced with such transformational changes in college-sports culture and the possibility of being forgotten or simply fading away into irrelevancy, these older players begin to appear not unlike a fifty-year-old Bill Gaither, anxious about how his legacy will be understood and remembered, if at all, or the many older, struggling gospel stars of decades past whom he resurrected from obscurity for the first Homecoming video in 1991 and whose careers were redefined by their involvement in the subsequent video- and concert-series franchise. The drift—whether conscious or not—in the sports legends videos toward the Homecoming approach to nostalgic revaluations of subcultural history speaks to the common threat of obsolescence running just below the surface of both series and reinforces the vital role that strategically deployed structures of feeling play in ameliorating such threats.

Half-lives of Homecoming

[26] By 2004, when the first of the Gabriel Communications nostalgia videos began appearing, the Homecoming series was into its second decade, and though at the height of its popularity, it was about to peak. Within a few years, the tour, as well as the series, was already beginning to decline. Bill Gaither is now well into the sunset years he approached with trepidation in the early 1990s, and many of the most beloved Homecoming friends have died, significantly diminishing the series’ commercial draw. But its popular cultural influence is arguably still growing. Perhaps most directly, this influence can be seen in the success of a Gaither protégé, the comedian Mark Lowry, who sang and entertained alongside Gaither for years as part of the Gaither Vocal Band. Lowry’s popularity on the Gaither tour has made him a marquee Christian entertainer in his own right, and for several years he starred in his own tours, traveling with a family of southern gospel singers who perform under the name LordSong, and the pianist Stan Whitmire (in late 2009, Lowry returned to the Gaither Vocal Band as part of a much-celebrated all-star reunion of several beloved former Vocal Band members). In his solo performances, Lowry’s style looks and sounds rather like Homecoming Redivivus: the comedy is edgier (a joke whose punch line involved Jesus and excrement was part of Lowry’s 2007-08 tour), the music is more impressionistic and free-form, and the collection of friends is smaller. But Lowry’s shows—which involve stories, testimonies, monologues, and humorous sermonettes disguised as Christian comedy, all threaded together with harmonically powerful music in the old gospel way that celebrates the redeeming bonds of Christian friendships and love—clearly descend from the Homecoming tradition.

[27] Indirectly, the Homecoming influence registers farther afield in not only the sports legends videos, but also another Gabriel Communication series, Country’s Family Reunion Celebration from earlier in this decade, devoted to sentimentalizing the legends of country and western music’s early years. As in the Gaither Homecomings (and the sports reunions), a cadre of “legends” sit semi-circularly reminiscing, singing, and sharing, as the cover of the DVD case puts it, “songs, laughter, tears, stories.”⁴³ However, this last line of videos feels more nakedly emulative and less emotionally convincing than the sports nostalgia videos, which succeed, however cloyingly, in suggesting that the featured university sports program owes its greatness not primarily to what has happened on the field, but to some sort of male bonding agent or other special emotional additive that binds stars, fans, and alma mater in an intergenerational brotherhood of heroic achievement and community pride. Obviously the country reunions aspire to the same sort of deeply felt expressions of sentimentality and touching exchanges of sympathy that are the running climax of the Gaither videos and tour. But the result when applied to country music resonates hollowly.

[28] Partly, this is because the stars themselves overreach in their attempts to show how much they like each other and to prove how intensely they still feel the muse that originally beckoned them all into country music careers forty or more years ago. Spontaneous byplay quickly deteriorates into incomprehensible crosstalk; marginally humorous or mildly witty remarks elicit wails of laughter entirely out of proportion to the jokes (many of them bawdier than funny). Several performers dress as they would have appeared on stage decades before—Johnny Counterfit, for instance, in an electric blue suit and bejeweled bolo tie—but the flamboyance looks too big for the small, homey set and the clash of costumes introduces a visual discordance to the proceedings that underlines the discordant behavior of several stars themselves. At one point, Bill Carlisle, well past eighty-five at the time of the taping, shouts the lyrics of two full verses of “No Help Wanted,” while careening with increasing instability around the stage to the hoedown beat of the song (at one point he flings his cane away from his body, apparently intending to reinforce the song’s central conceit: that the singer wants no help wooing the object of his affection). Later, several members of the cast make unsubtle jokes that involve singer Jan Howard and several references to Bill Clinton’s sexual activity in the Oval Office. (This behaviour is not true of everyone; Chet Atkins, for one, shifts and grimaces uneasily through most of the video, and quickly demurs whenever the talk turns to him.) Straining to establish themselves and their work as the indispensable prehistory of the country and western “family,” these aging icons inadvertently appear vaguely prehistoric.

[29] The bigger problem with these country videos, however, is that the recorded reunions fail to support their own premise. Singing a song on the Homecoming series that says “the love of God / Is greater far / Than gold or silver / Ever could afford”⁴⁴ can create sufficient conceptual and affective heft to support the weight placed upon it by the Homecoming Friends’ melodramatic pietism and fervent belief in gospel music as a modern mode of evangelism, soul saving, and ministry to the Christian spirit. Contrastingly, Freddy Hart introduces his rendition of “Easy Loving” on Country’s Family Reunion with the comment that the song has been “such a blessing” to him (and he sings with obviously genuine feeling), but the song’s formulaic lyrics about lost love and the blandishments of the old, abandoned home place fail to suggest any obvious reason why such a song would bless the singer in any unironic way. Similarly, when Jan Howard rises to sing her solo, the camera pans slowly across the stage, framing her through one of the faux, becurtained window panes encircling half the set. The cinematography is clearly meant to suggest a bucolic family scene, but the cheatin’ song Howard sings—“The One You Slip Around With”—cuts directly against the cinematographic suggestions of family happiness and togetherness.

[30] Inasmuch as contemporary country music continues to be defined by the paradoxical pull of piety (“Jesus Take the Wheel”⁴⁵) and profligacy (“Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off”⁴⁶), the performances on Country’s Family Reunion could justifiably be said to reunite many living ancestors of today’s psychosocially dissonant country genre. Yet at a more basic level, the outdated, old-fashioned ditties and barroom classics featured on Country’s Family Reunion confuse, rather than reinforce, the series’ implicit assertion of country music as a deep well of emotional, even spiritual, sustenance in the lives of its performers and fans.⁴⁷ Country music may serve a pseudo-metaphysical function for these and other people by functioning as a means of cultural distinction, but the organizing force of country music, like so many other mass-market musical genres, is primarily egocentric, reliant mainly on the charismatic pull of the performer’s public persona (the prominent role of charisma in country is especially true on other installments of Country’s Family Reunion that include the biggest names from country’s past, such as Roy Clark, Charlie Pride, Larry Gatlin, Crystal Gale⁴⁸). Without a transcendent concept such as God or Sports under which to subsume the celebrity ego, the emotional and sentimental energy generated by the interactions of these fading country stars has no common, unifying object that would convert raw nostalgia into meaningful glimpses of cultural history.

[31] Recalling Scanlon, whatever “secondary reaction” nostalgia enables here never clearly surfaces. As Pamela Fox demonstrates in her study of country music and the performance of rusticity, country’s evolution into a mainstream American form of popular music has dramatically altered the way contemporary country artists and fans understand their relation to country’s past.⁴⁹ The early years of mass-market country in the mid-century post-war boom, represented most famously by the infamous iconoclasm of Hank Williams, have nostalgic value today as historical symbols of authenticity, so long as they remain fixed in the past where they can be accessed as an imaginative resource in the present: witness the ubiquitous cowboy hat adorning so many male performers (an adornment that echoes Williams’s iconic headwear); for female artists, there’s the classic answer-song that reappears today in tunes such as Carrie Underwood’s “The Next He Cheats,” about a woman’s destructively retributive response to a cheatin’ boyfriend, or Faith Hill’s “Mississippi Girl,”⁵⁰ in which the singer responds to critics who say her worldwide fame—epitomized by her 2008 purchase of a Caribbean island—has disconnected her from her southern roots.⁵¹ These songs don’t specifically “answer” a previous song by a male performer, as in the classic answer-song form. But they participate in the answer-song tradition for female country singers by providing a response to some issue or question implicitly circulating in country’s collective imagination. In these examples, the past functions as a repository of gestures to be repurposed in service of contemporary country identity formation.

[32] Contrastingly, the Country Music Legends video brings the mid-century past eerily to half-life. Real people are singing, but their music lacks any unifying force. Without the mediating effect of post-modern irony or reappropriation (whether semiotic or lyrical), the honky-tonk personalities and their rhinestone flamboyance seem more quaint than jaunty, less audaciously flamboyant and more historically incoherent. The Homecoming friends and the sports legends draw upon a firmly established cultural consensus about the place of religious music and collegiate sports in the social or moral fabric of the community. But Country’s Family Reunion enjoys no such shared assumption. Taking its significance for granted, the series lapses into self-indulgent sentimentality without ever convincingly developing those aspects of country music that have historically attracted and deeply affected so many people.

[33] The uneven ways that the Homecoming series has been variously adapted by others speak most obviously to the pitfalls involved in translating religious idioms into secular settings. More deeply, however, the sports legends series and country reunions seem to point to the widely dispersed need in parts of modern southern vernacular cultures, not limited to contemporary evangelical Christianity, for access to structures of feeling that locate intrinsic psychosocial value in certain regional or subcultural traditions, while also commercializing those traditions in ways that validate them by the mass-market standards of mainstream American capitalism. No small part of these products’ appeal is their status as capitalized commodities that might best be described as nostalgic, vernacular reality films. Appearing on them, purchasing them, watching them, sharing them, talking about them—the process of creating and consuming the video celebrates the vernacular ways of life as descendants of valuable indigenous folk arts or as culturally authentic pastimes. At the same, the sale of these products has a vaguely ennobling and glamourizing effect, elevating these traditions to the status of viable commodities in the modern memory market.

[34] Secular imitations of the Homecoming approach reinforce a movement toward cultural frameworks that allow audiences to maintain citizenship in two, often conflicting or contradictory, worlds. One world comprises the dominant culture of “authentic” celebrity popularized in reality television and perpetuated more recently by so-called viral internet marketing campaigns that rely on the useful fiction of unlooked-for fame befalling ordinary people caught in moments of unrehearsed but intrinsically extraordinary life. The other world exists as a “residual” culture, in the sense that Williams used the word to describe subcultural pockets of life preserving values and meanings perceived to be under threat from mainstream society and its prevailing ideas.⁵² This Janus-faced quality to the Homecoming series helps account for much of its appeal and influence, which works by celebrating the uniquely identifying features of residual subcultures and simultaneously responding to aspirations these subcultures have for legitimacy in the wider world and dominant culture. In this light, the Gaither Homecomings function as a technology of cultural transformation. Understood as an instrument of pan-Southern culture in post-modern America, the Homecoming series effectively converts spectatorial modes of entertainment—gospel singings, college sports, country music—into communal consecrations of cultural history.

Notes

I am grateful to several people for their input, suggestions, and involvement as this project developed: Steve Hoskins, for alerting me to the existence of the sports reunion videos; Joe Wisdom, Jim Brock, and Brad Busbee for their various forms of support for this project; Mickey Gamble, Judi Linville, and Scott Vaughn for reading and commenting on drafts; Bill and Gloria Gaither for the brief but illuminating glimpse they gave me into their life and world on the road when the Homecoming tour came to Fort Myers, Florida; the anonymous readers for the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture; and the readers of averyfineline.com, who have read bits and parts of this essay as they emerged piecemeal online over the last few years - their feedback, and help with the arcana of southern gospel and Homecoming history, have been invaluable. Portions of this article will appear in a revised form in Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music. Copyright 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

1. See Homecoming Video Album, VHS, directed by Bill Gaither (1991; Nashville, TN: Starsong, 1991), which became the inaugural installment in the Homecoming Friends video series. Before Homecoming, Gaither had already established a substantial network of interrelated businesses that handled publishing, producing, promoting, distribution, and copyright clearance for Gaither music (Bill Gaither, I Almost Missed the Sunset: My Perspectives on Life and Music [Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1992], 59, 82, 103), and the presence of this existing infrastructure was no small reason why Gaither was able to move quickly to mass produce additional installments of the Homecoming series when he realized the potential of the Video Album. The success of the Homecoming series has spurred exponential growth in almost every other aspect of Gaither Music, Inc., and its subsidiaries, which have become a model of vertical integration in Christian music entertainment. Gaither himself writes at great length in both of his books about the value of carefully managed, vertically integrated business enterprises and portrays his financial success as evidence of godly stewardship of heaven’s blessings on the Gaithers’ ministerial efforts through their music (ibid., 61).
2. Perhaps recognizing the role that his own mentors and benefactors played in the early years of his professional development, Gaither has consistently (and strategically) promoted the careers of promising young talent in Christian music, including Michael W. Smith, Sandi Patty, Larnelle Harris, David Phelps, Steve Green, and the Martins. For more on Gaither’s vision of himself as a “putter together of talent,” see Gaither, I Almost Missed the Sunset, 20, 200.
3. Casual observers may come away from the Homecoming series thinking it is more stylistically homogenous than it actually is because the songs on Gaither shows demonstrate remarkable consistency in the arrangements, which tends to mute the generic variety of the music.
4. Bill Gaither, It’s More Than Music: Life Lessons for Loving God (New York: Faithway, 2003), 69-71.
5. 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 recording, Gaither told the historian James Goff in an interview that Homecoming sales had exceeded three million units (James Goff, Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel, [Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2002], 292). Today Gaither Music website offers 192 different videos or video bundles for sale (which include not just installments in the regular Homecoming series but also children’s videos and “best-of” recombinations of highlights from appearances of particularly popular Homecoming personalities throughout their time on the tour), dozens of companion songbooks and other memorabilia, a magazine, and a subscriber-based online community. In the tour’s eleventh year, Homecoming ticket sales worldwide outranked Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, and Rod Stewart (Mark Allen Powell, “There’s Just Something About That Man,” Christianity Today (April 2004), http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/april/1.32.html, accessed August 12, 2008). The Gaither imprimatur has launched several careers in gospel and Christian music, and at its peak, the Gaither Homecoming name was regularly drawing crowds that rivaled the largest single-night draw at the National Quartet Convention, the white gospel music industry’s weeklong, flagship event. Under the Homecoming banner, Bill and Gloria Gaither have recorded 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.
6. Michael Graves, “The Gaither Homecoming Videos and the Ceremonial Reinstatement of Southern Gospel Music Performers,” More Than Precious Memories: The Rhetoric of southern Gospel Music, Michael P. Graves and David Fillingim, eds. (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2004), 153.
7. Through moments of what Graves calls “video apologia” during various Homecoming tapings, those performers who have fallen out of favour with the faithful undergo an image restoration in the presence of their family, friends, and peers—and a recording camera. With Bill Gaither presiding in a “priestly manner” (Graves, “Ritual Reinstatements,” 170), the wanderers return to the fold through testimony, prayer, and the sharing of sentimental songs.
8. For more on southern gospel music’s role in masking the discontinuities of evangelical life, see Douglas Harrison, “Why Southern Gospel Music Matters,” Religion and American Culture, 18,1 (Winter 2008): 1-35.
9. See Tennessee Football Legends, DVD, directed by James Burton Yockey (Gabriel Communications, 2005) and Auburn Football Legends, DVD, directed by James Burton Yockey (Gabriel Communications, 2005). Other installments in the series focus on Alabama, and Oklahoma.
10. By core audience, I mean to refer to the nucleus of southern gospel music fans who were the logical early adopters of Homecoming videos, given that all but one performer in the first Homecoming video (Larry Gatlin) came from the world of southern gospel.
11. Nathan F. Elmore, “Revelry and Liturgy: On the Cultic Rite of College Football in Clemson, South Carolina,” The South Carolina Review 40,2 (March 2008): 163. If there was any conscious intent for the sports reunions videos to imitate the Homecoming series, it seems mostly likely that such an imitative impulse might have emerged from a desire to overlay college football with a spiritual or religious dimension by using nonverbal cues and rhetorical paradigms borrowed from the Homecoming franchise of religious videos, a choice that would make sense given the cultural overlap between the two fan cultures. However, based on the available evidence, the most one can say is that the self-seriousness of these sports videos may be spiritually aspirational. On the sacrosanct status of college football in the South, see John Sayle Watterson, College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). For football as a tool for cultural transformation and assimilation, see David Riesman and Reuel Denney, “Football in America: A Study in Cultural Diffusion,” American Quarterly, 3,4 (Winter 1951): 309-325; Andrew Doyle, “‘Causes Won, Not Lost’: College Football and the Modernization of the American South,” International Journal of the History of Sport 11, 2 (1994): 231-251; for sports as a secular religion in America, see From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion, ed. Joseph Price (Mercer University Press, 2001).
12. “Bill Gaither,” EMI.com, http://www.shopemi.com/bio.asp?artist_id=1905, accessed August 12, 2008. See also Gaither, More Than Music, 170-20.
13. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 90. I am grateful to Julianna Hoffman for reminding me of the importance of this passage and concept in Bhabha’s work.
14. Liz Moor, “‘The Buzz of Dressing’: Commodity Culture, Fraternity, and Football Fandom.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 105, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 329.
15. Sean Scanlan, "Introduction: Nostalgia", Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 5 (2008): 3.
16. Ibid, 4.
17. Bill Gaither, More Than Music, 305.
18. Gaither, It’s More Than Music, 178-188.
19. “Southern and Country Artists featured at Bill Gaither’s Celebration Theater,” Singing News, 23,2 (June 1992): 39-41. I am grateful to Dean Adkins for bringing this article to my attention.
20. “His Eye is On the Sparrow,” in Homecoming Souvenir Songbook Vol. II (Alexandria, IN: Praise Gathering Music Group): 34-45
21. Gaither, I Almost Missed the Sunset, 91. See also Mark Lowry’s comedy skit about all the humourous imperfections and foibles that the “famous” Bill Gaither reveals to Lowry as they travel on a tour bus together, on Bill & Gloria Gaither Present: Ryman Gospel Reunion With Their Homecoming Friends, DVD, directed by Bill Gaither (1995; Alexandria, Indiana: Gaither Music, 1996).
22. See Michael Nelson, “Church on Saturday Night: Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion,” The Virginia Quarterly Review 77,1 (Winter 2001): 1-18; and Sonja K. Foss and Karen A. Foss, “The Construction of Feminine Spectatorship in Garrison Keillor’s Radio Monologues,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 410-426.
23. Gospel music business executives and artists are reluctant to talk openly and for attribution about the contractual arrangements that Gaither requires of performers who appear on the Homecoming tour, but numerous discussions I’ve had with a variety of executives, artists, and other people involved in the industry confirm that artists who appear on Homecoming videos must relinquish virtually all remunerative rights to their appearance, which include royalties that would typically be generated for each artist by the sales of the video or televised broadcast of a concert.
24. FootballSpeakers.com, “Bob Kesling,” http://www.footballspeakers.com/h/index.php?pid=36&name=Bob-Kesling (accessed August 7, 2008).
25. Though he played college sports himself, his experience was limited to junior varsity games and was significant for the fact that, according to his internet biography, he once “caught a pass” (ibid.).
26. Auburn Official Athletic Site, “Announcers,” http://auburntigers.cstv.com (accessed February 10, 2010).
27. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.
28. Ibid.
29. AuburnTigers.cstv.com, “Auburn tradition,” http://auburntigers.cstv.com/trads/aub-trads.html (accessed February 12, 2010).
30. Gaither, It’s More Than Music, 1.
31. Gaither, Sunset, 54.
32. Ibid, 76.
33. Ibid, 79-82. See also Gaither, It’s More Than Music, 138-139.
34. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
35. Fairly soon after its inception, the Homecoming series began to attract much wider audiences than its original southern gospel fans. This wider appeal is perhaps most clearly evidenced by the series’ widespread syndication on cable and premium content channels (most prominently, the now defunct cable station TNN), which suggests that the phenomenon crosses denominational, socio-cultural, and geographic boundaries to include a wide range of middle class, North American Protestants.
36. Gaither, More Than Music, 22-40, 62-69.
37. Watterson, College Football, xvii.
38. Gene Buddig, “An Athletic Arms Race,” Phi Delta Kappan, 89,4 (December 2007): 283.
39. See “Keeping Faith With the Student Athlete: A New Model for Intercollegiate Athletics” (Knight Commissions, 1991); and “A Call to Action: Reconnecting College Sports and Higher Education” (Knight Commission, 2001).
40. Brad Wolverton, “As Athletics Donations Go Up, Some Leaders Fret Over Booster Interference,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 54,9 (26 October 2007): A40.
41. “Tennessee Football Legends” documentary, https://web.dii.utk.edu/utstore/pc-2862-2000-tennessee-football-legends-reunion-documentary.aspx (accessed May 23, 2008).
42. In the Auburn video, many disbelieving jokes are made about Ralph Jordan’s 1951 starting salary of $14,000. The sum is deceptively small—by 2007 standards, Jordan would have been making more than $110,000, more than double the $48,200 median income in America in 207 (Census.gov, “Household incomes rise, poverty rate declines” http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/income_wealth/010583.html (accessed February 12, 2010)—but even this sum is paltry compared to the six-figure salaries common among today’s top-tier college football coaches. For more on coaches salaries, see Steve Wieberg and Jodi Upton, “College Football Coaches Calling Lucrative Plays,” USAToday.com, http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/football/2007-12-04-coaches-pay_N.htm (accessed February 12, 2010).
43. Country’s Family Reunion Celebration, directed by James Burton Yokey (Nashville, TN: Gabriel Communications, 2005).
44. “The Love of God,” in Homecoming Souvenir Songbook Vol. II (Alexandria, IN: Praise Gathering Music Group, 1998): 96-97.
45. Brett James, Hillary Lindsey, Gordie Sampson, Jonathan Yudkin, lyricists, “Jesus, Take the Wheel,” on Some Hearts, Carrie Underwood, Arista , 2005.
46. Gary Hannan, John Wiggins, lyricists, “Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off,” on III, Joe Nichols, Universal, 2005.
47. This is not to say county music serves no cultural function, only that whatever function it does serve is effaced, rather than revealed, by these videos. For more on the meaning of country music, see Cecilia Tichi, High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); and Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky Tonk Bars, Cecilia Tichi, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
48. Deluxe Country Family Reunion Collection DVD Series, directed by James Burton Yokey (Gabriel Communications, 2008).
49. Pamela Fox, Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (University of Michigan Press, 2009).
50. John Rich, lyricist, “Mississippi Girl,” on Fireflies, Faith Hill, Capitol, 2005.
51. CountryHound.com, “Faith Hill and Tim McGraw Buy Island in the Bahamas” http://www.countryhound.com/faith-hill-tim-mcgraw-buy-island-in-bahamas (accessed February 12, 2010).
52. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 122.