Positive Daily Commentary on Southern Gospel
What are the best blogs by professional Southern Gospel performers? Which give the most insight into their day-to-day life, road life, or the recording process?
Keith Waggoner and Paul Jackson are on my daily reads. Who are on yours?
In the news:
David Mann launched a new Southern Gospel blog, Southern Gospel Discussions, at www.southerngospeldiscussions.blogspot.com. There’s currently only one post up, so I don’t really have any in-depth commentary as of yet, but I thought I’d pass the word along.
Today’s must-read post comes from Wes Burke’s Burke’s Brainwork blog. The post, Debut Projects after Group Changes, has sparked an interesting discussion. Check it out!
Fellow SG blogger John Scheideman did his most recent post on the most significant albums in Southern Gospel history. In an email exchange afterwards, we touched on how nearly impossible “best” is to quantify. I’m not entirely certain how we got to this point, but we more or less dared one another to post a top 10 favorite Southern Gospel albums list in our respective blogs.
So, totally freeing myself from the pressure to make a “best-of” list that I can give quantifiable justification for, here are my personal favorites:
My short list must have been at least 35 entries long. So I couldn’t stop at 10. Sorry, John, but here goes!
And, for whatever it’s worth, here are my “honorable mention” runners-up:
What are your top 10 (or 20) favorites?
Alexa is a website that ranks most websites by the amount of traffic they receive. The system is not fool-proof; it only tracks website activity for those individuals who have downloaded and installed its Alexa Toolbar. (For the record, I am not one of them.) So if more fans of one website have the toolbar than fans of another website, that website’s ranking will be disproportionately high.
Southern Gospel’s fans tend to be older, and perhaps less tech-savvy than those who frequent web design or graphic design websites. So Southern Gospel’s numbers might be a little lower than they ought to be. But with that understood, here are the current numbers for various well-known websites in our genre.
News Websites
Artist Websites
These searches can be tricky; all blogspot blogs come up with a ranking of “9,” since that is the site’s overall ranking. Signature Sound’s website is part of MusicCityNetworks, and so ranked (in the 40,000s) counting the combined traffic from many different artists’ sites.
Southern Gospel blogger John Scheideman, probably the most active Southern Gospel blogger on the West Coast, is posting daily updates from the Great Western Southern Gospel Fan Festival (GWSGFF) in Fresno, California. He’s already posted on the Thursday and Friday performances, and promises Saturday’s summary (late) tonight. Check it out to find out which songs (and groups) are getting a response on the West Coast.
UPDATE (5/4/08, 7:51 AM): Check out his coverage of the third and final day as well. Now I finally know what he’s talking about when he talks about Liberty Quartet with these words:
Tonight they had the crowd eatting out of their hands by their third song. After a rousing patriotic medley, they got the crowd off their seats with a lively original song penned by Waggoner. They finished with a great cover of the old Speers hit, “City Coming Down”, where they were joined on stage by the members of Greater Vision. When Royce hit those bottom notes, the look on Gerald Wolfe’s face almost said, “Next time we do another “Quartets” project, you’re going to be one of my basses!” Liberty’s set thrilled me and pumped me up…and rocked the house! …
You name it, they can do it all. The rest of the country NEEDS to be exposed to the Liberty Quartet…if you’re a gospel fan, you’re almost sure to love this group.
It has been a slow news day so far (what can I say–it’s 6:30 AM!), so I’ll follow David Bruce Murray’s lead and post a link to this fascinating article.
Executive summary: This article makes the case that an artist only needs 1,000 true fans–fans who purchase everything they release–to make a living. Everyone else–the occasional fans, who will purchase something they particularly like–is the icing on the cake. But if you can build a solid fan base of 1,000 dedicated fans, you can build a long-term career.
I don’t know that I would agree with everything the author says, but the article certainly is thought-provoking.
Several months ago, Wes Burke started the Burke’s Brainwork blog. It’s gotten off to a strong start, as Burke has made a strong effort to post daily. (For anyone who hasn’t tried it, this can be quite a challenge!)
Anyhow, yesterday he welcomed another contributor to his blog. Nate Pritchard, who comments as “natesings” on this blog and others, will now be contributing occasional posts. Stop over and welcome him to the blogosphere!
Liberty Quartet’s tenor Keith Waggoner writes a blog that has both personal/family and Southern Gospel-related posts. But it’s invariably interesting enough to make my daily read list. Yesterday’s post on how he’s faced the modern vs. traditional music debate from both sides is interesting and informative reading, even if it does carry the title “Soapbox Rant.” Particularly interesting is when he discusses a somewhat frequent occurrence, when those who view their music as too traditional often come up afterwards and sheepishly admit that it actually blessed them.
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