The first true gospel music encyclopedia, Uncloudy Days explores the artists who profoundly influenced early rock 'n' roll and soul music and provided inspiration for millions of the faithful."--BOOK JACKET.

From Africa through the spirituals, from minstrel music through jubilee, and from traditional to contemporary gospel, "People Get Ready!" provides, for the first time, an accessible overview of this musical genre.

From tent revivals to radio and records with a gospel music innovator Homer Rodeheaver merged evangelical hymns and African American spirituals with popular music to create a potent gospel style. Kevin Mungons and Douglas Yeo examine his enormous influence on gospel music against the backdrop of Christian music history and Rodeheaver's impact as a cultural and business figure. Rodeheaver rose to fame as the trombone-playing song leader for evangelist Billy Sunday. As revivalism declined after World War I, Rodeheaver leveraged his place in America's newborn celebrity culture to start the first gospel record label and launch a nationwide radio program. His groundbreaking combination of hymnal publishing and recording technology helped define the early Christian music industry. In his later years, he influenced figures like Billy Graham and witnessed the music's split into southern gospel and black gospel. Clear-eyed and revealing, Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry is an overdue consideration of a pioneering figure in American music.

In this ambitious book on southern gospel music, Douglas Harrison reexamines the music's historical emergence and its function as a modern cultural phenomenon. Rather than a single rhetoric focusing on the afterlife as compensation for worldly sacrifice, Harrison presents southern gospel as a network of interconnected messages that evangelical Christians use to make individual sense of both Protestant theological doctrines and their own lived experiences. Harrison explores how listeners and consumers of southern gospel integrate its lyrics and music into their own religious experience, building up individual--and potentially subversive--meanings beneath a surface of evangelical consensus. Reassessing the contributions of such figures as Aldine Kieffer, James D. Vaughan, and Bill and Gloria Gaither, Then Sings My Soul traces an alternative history of southern gospel in the twentieth century, one that emphasizes the music's interaction with broader shifts in American life beyond the narrow confines of southern gospel's borders. His discussion includes the "gay-gospel paradox"--the experience of non-heterosexuals in gospel music--as a cipher for fundamentalism's conflict with the postmodern world.

The Sound of Light is a sweeping overview of the history of gospel music. Powerful and incisive, it traces contemporary Christianity and Christian music to the 16th century and the Protestant Reformation after examining music in the Bible and early church music. From the psalms of the early Puritans through the hymns of human composure of Isaac Watts and the social activism of the Wesleys, gospel music was established in 18th century America. With the camp meeting songs of the Kentucky Revival, the spirituals that came from the slave culture, and the hymns from the great revival after the Civil War, gospel music advanced through the 19th century. The 20th century brought recording technology and electronic media to the table. Gospel music has developed with Christian revivals and the history of American gospel music is the history of Christianity in America. Gospel music reflects the American spirit of freedom and the free market as a Christian culture emerges in the 20th century, providing a spiritual as well as economic foundation. The Sound of Light presents gospel music as part of the history of contemporary Christianity. It is a work broad in scope that defines a music essential to understanding American culture as well as American music in the 20th century. Don Cusic is the author of ten books, including the biography Eddy Arnold: I'll Hold You in My Heart and an encyclopedia of cowboys, Cowboys and the Wild West: An A-Z Guide from the Chisholm Trail to the Silver Screen. He joined the faculty at Middle Tennessee State University in 1982, teaching courses in the music business. He earned a Masters and Doctorate in Literature from MTSU. Since August of 1994, Cusic has been Professor of Music Business at Belmont University.

The Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music is the first comprehensive reference to cover this important American musical form. Coverage includes all aspects of both African-American and white gospel from history and performers to recording techniques and styles as well as the influence of gospel on different musical genres and cultural trends.

(Piano/Vocal/Guitar Artist Songbook). This songbook includes all 15 songs from the 2006 release, Jackson's first ever gospel album. Songs: Blessed Assurance * How Great Thou Art * I'll Fly Away * In the Garden * The Old Rugged Cross * Softly and Tenderly * What a Friend We Have in Jesus * and more.

Gospel music evolved in often surprising directions during the post-Civil Rights era. Claudrena N. Harold's in-depth look at late-century gospel focuses on musicians like Yolanda Adams, Andraé Crouch, the Clark Sisters, Al Green, Take 6, and the Winans, and on the network of black record shops, churches, and businesses that nurtured the music. Harold details the creative shifts, sonic innovations, theological tensions, and political assertions that transformed the music, and revisits the debates within the community over groundbreaking recordings and gospel's incorporation of rhythm and blues, funk, hip-hop, and other popular forms. At the same time, she details how sociopolitical and cultural developments like the Black Power Movement and the emergence of the Christian Right shaped both the art and attitudes of African American performers. Weaving insightful analysis into a collective biography of gospel icons, When Sunday Comes explores the music's essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural selves.

Cleveland's Gospel Music documents the history of black gospel music from the 1920s through the 1980s. The gospel quartet groups, radio announcers, solo artists, and promoters established Cleveland as the gospel singers' metropolitan hub. An integral part of Cleveland's history and its rich African-American community, gospel singers didn't sing for money or fame, but sang to the glory of God, often beyond the point of exhaustion. This work is a celebration of the past praises of those who sang tirelessly for some 60 years.

(Easy Piano Songbook). The name says it all: over 70 of the best P&W songs today. Titles include: Awesome God * Blessed Be Your Name * Come, Now Is the Time to Worship * Days of Elijah * Here I Am to Worship * Open the Eyes of My Heart * Shout to the Lord * We Fall Down * and more.