“God told me to give my records away”: Keith Green and the Ethics of Commerce in the 1970s U.S. Christian Music Industry
SAM conference presentation (2021). “God just told me to start my own label and give my records away.” So spoke Christian songwriter Keith Green to Billy Ray Hearn, his record label’s founder and owner, in 1979. Green was convicted that his music could not minister to those who most needed to hear God’s message unless it was freely available. In this paper, I examine Green’s career to illustrate how one artist navigated the delicate balance of ethical and commercial imperatives. I argue that ethical objectives can be just as important as aesthetic or commercial ones, particularly in their ability to establish markets’ boundaries.
Festivals and Musical Life
SAM seminar (2017). In this seminar, we examine the multiple ways in which festivals—understood as music communities (or scenes) concentrated into limited temporal and geographic frames—affect musical life in the Americas at the micro and macro levels, both historically and in the ethnographic present. Seminar participants should be prepared to present case studies that investigate and discuss the cultures, histories, values, and spaces developed in music festivals in the Americas.
“Is This the Blessing or the Curse?” Christian Popular Music’s Parallel History
IASPM-US conference presentation (2011). In this paper, I examine the historical forces that shaped the CCM industry as separate and distinct from the mainstream industry, and consider how these forces have also contributed to the relative absence of scholarship on Christian popular music within popular music studies’ canons. I rely primarily on historical and ethnographic research on the Christian popular music recording industry undertaken for my dissertation in 2009–2010.
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