“As For Me and My House”: Christian Music Executives Roundtable

Journal of Popular Music Studies

Vol. 32, no. 1: pp. 10–25 (2020)

Abstract

At the 2018 IASPM-US conference in Nashville, I organized a roundtable of Christian music executives. Many popular music scholars know Nashville as home to country music and a hub for professional songwriters; tacitly absent from this identity is Nashville’s importance to evangelical Christianity in the United States. The city and its surrounding suburbs in middle Tennessee—referred to colloquially as the “buckle of the Bible Belt” and (sometimes derisively) as the “Protestant Vatican”—hosts the executive offices of several evangelical Christian denominations. The region provides religious training at many Christian colleges, universities, and seminaries. Thomas Nelson, one of the world’s largest Bible publishers, anchors Nashville’s Christian print publishing industry. Many of these institutions pre-date Christian rock and what we now call contemporary Christian music (CCM), which emerged alongside the Jesus People Movement on the West Coast in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The 2018 conference in Nashville provided a unique opportunity to gather Christian music executives to discuss the unique challenges and issues they face in a popular music market for which religious identity is necessarily a core component. Roundtable participants have worked in A&R, executive leadership, higher education, music ministry, music super- vision, production, publishing, radio promotions, and recording, among other roles, and represent more than 100 years of cumulative experience as music industry professionals.