ILike most children growing up in mainstream Protestant denominations in the mid-twentieth century, I associated Homer Rodeheaver’s name – if it came up – with hymns and gospel songs, including the beloved “The Old Rugged Cross” by my grandmother Allie. As an adult immersed in black gospel music, I paid little heed to the mostly sketchy scholarship on Rodeheaver. His Billy Sunday-style revivalism, mass community chanting (involving mostly white singers), and trombone styles barely seemed to intersect with my work. His association with Sunday was particularly awkward in a Elmer’s Portico kind of pass.

In fact, I was wrong on almost every point.

Homer Rodeheaver has a lot to do with all kinds of gospel music, as Kevin Mungons and Douglas Yeo demonstrate in their compelling and eminently readable biography of a wildly underrated and rarely appreciated figure who had a significant impact on sacred music, Black and white. Homer Rodeheaver and the rise of the gospel music industry introduces readers to a man who was clearly long overdue for a scholarly reassessment.

Mungons is a highly respected writer and researcher. Yeo a trombone master, having performed with major symphonies and taught at university level. Together they untangle a number of personal, professional and musical knots in Rodeheaver’s hectic, turbulent and woefully under-documented life.

Taking on the Nation

In the authors’ account, Rodeheaver emerges as a complex, creative and entrepreneurial marvel capable of predicting (and profiting from) future trends in sacred music. They reveal how he was able to promote African Americans and their gospel songs even as he (apparently) turned a blind eye to some of the mechanics of the Ku Klux Klan. All told, the book raises the possibility that Rodeheaver had a more lasting impact than his original boss, Billy Sunday.

Coming of age just after the dawn of the 20th century, Rodeheaver was a young man of exceptional musical talent. Despite everything, he had an extremely engaging personality. People liked it. Throughout his life, they trusted him. They wanted to succeed him. And they invariably helped him succeed.

The authors explore the humble (but by no means impoverished) beginnings of Rodeheaver in rural Hocking County, Ohio. Growing up, his sprawling religious family felt the early influence of the revivalism movement sweeping the American South and Midwest, fueled by the evangelism of Dwight L. Moody and the new gospel songs of Ira D. Sankey, William Bradbury, Philip P. Bliss, and others. At Ohio Wesleyan University, young Rodeheaver took to public speaking, acting, singing, selling hymns door to door, and for some reason playing the trombone.

In the hands of what Mungons and Yeo describe as Rodeheaver’s “effervescent, outgoing personality”, the trombone became his personal “trademark”, his distinguishing characteristic as he led the singing for ever larger revivals, chants community and evangelistic meetings. Here, Yeo’s expertise provides significant insight: “Homer’s trombone playing wasn’t very good.” But for a man with a million-dollar personality (and abundant ambition), that never really seemed to matter.

From there, Rodeheaver turned to the regional revival circuit, hopping from evangelist to evangelist, leading the music that was essential to the loud services. All the while he was becoming something of an attraction himself, and by 1908 he had linked up with the influential “fraternity” of gospel music publishers in Chicago. The two sides of Rodeheaver’s professional life – as a charismatic songwriter and a gospel editor listening to great music – have nurtured and strengthened each other. He soon realized that the secret to success (along with a winning personality, a shrewd and instinctive understanding of how to generate media coverage and, well, a trombone) was to sing the songs that people wanted to hear, then turn around and sell them. very songs.

In the United States’ World War I revival circuit, Billy Dimanche was the dominant figure: an avid orator who rose to rock-star status in Central America for preaching the gospel to Mammoth, worshiping crowds. For munges (who is also a musician) and Yeo, there was a certain inevitability to the ultimate partnership between the Nation’s fastest songwriter and its preeminent evangelist. Young, folkloric, dashingly beautiful and very single, Rodeheaver eventually replaced longtime Sunday song frontman Fred G. Fischer, and in 1910 the team took the nation by storm.

What separated Rodeheaver from singing executives affiliated with other major revivalists (many of whom also adopted trombones) was his early relationship with Chicago Gospel publishing houses. Her innate sympathy attacked her to popular gospel publishers and composers, and her hymnodians and songs of songs became staples of the tours of Billy Sunday, who regularly packed 10,000-seat arenas, the night after at night, creating an inexhaustible demand for the songs they featured. Over time, Rodeheaver founded his own hugely successful publishing house.

Fibered to a catchy and uplifting (rather than gospel) theme song, “Light up the corner of where you are,” Rodeheaver’s star eventually eclipsed Sunday’s, which found the dwindling crowd in the Second World War. RodeHeaver recorded dozens of times to “liven it up” dozens of times, performed it for thousands more, and would sing it throughout his life as an example of the power and importance of community singing, the central theme of his career. Such was his popularity that he was able to weather the notorious scandal of his career: allegations by a Georgia Miss Georgia that Rodeheaver called systemic about their engagement.

Medium to medium

Rodeheaver, who foresaw the decline of the Great Revivals, watched her publishing company flourish, as she bought (or bought the copyrights to) the hymn and gospel songs The Nation Wanted to Sing, including “the sturdy old cross”. When much of the gospel publishing industry faltered in the 1920s, Rodeheaver bought up the failing houses and their vast stores of hymns and songs. He was also among the first major religious artists to enter the new recorded music industry and, in short, owned popular recording studios and a seminal religious record label, Rainbow Records. When radio emerged as the next big thing, Rodeheaver was there too. Somehow, write Mungons and Yeo, he unerringly “jumped from medium to medium”, mostly with great financial success, well into the 1940s.

Rodeheaver eventually became friends with the most promising of the younger generation of evangelists, Billy Graham, as well as Graham’s long-running songwriter Cliff Barrows, who also incorporated a trombone into the team’s early days. But a harrowing travel schedule, which would have exhausted a much younger man, quickly took its toll, resulting in Rodeheaver’s death in December 1955.

In addition to providing a detailed biography, Mungons and Yeo also devote fascinating chapters to Rodeheaver’s importance in the early days of the recorded music industry, his unwavering support for African-American spirituals, and his complicated relationship with Jim Crow. Although Rodeheaver forged friendships with well-known African Americans of the day, including Thomas Dorsey, he also participated in separate evangelical meetings and saw some of his best-known copyrights used and subverted by the KLAN. From today’s perspective, of course, these things are completely unacceptable. But the authors also make a compelling case for the authenticity of Rodeheaver’s lifelong support of African-American causes and his love of black sacred music.

Like virtually all of the books in the University of Illinois’ popular Music in American Life series, Homer Rodeheaver and the rise of the gospel music industry fills important gaps in our understanding of different aspects of music history. Mungons and Yeo elevate their contribution with meticulous detail and research; a penchant for finding fascinating and revealing stories and anecdotes; and a sparkling, highly readable style of prose that is too rare in most academic books.

Robert F. Darden is a professor of journalism, public relations and new media at Baylor University. He is the author of two dozen books, the most recent of which Nothing But Love in God’s Water, Volume 1: Black Sacred Music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement and Nothing But Love in God’s Water, Volume 2: Black Sacred Music, From Sit-Ins to Resurrection City.