CREATIVE MUSIC HISTORY

 

Twenty Years With Billy Sunday, by Homer Rodeheaver occupies a prominent place among the many volumes about Baseball Evangelist Billy Sunday which I have collected over the years.

But I can’t really say that I understood Homer Rodeheaver until I read the new book Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry by Kevin Mungons and Doug Yeo. I knew of his years with Sunday, but almost nothing about the tremendous influence of his career on gospel music in general.

“Researchers treated contemporary church music as if it were a “big bang” that came out of nowhere in the 1970s,” writes Mungons. “I knew better—and started searching for the roots of change.” He found them in the person of Homer Rodeheaver. During his research he came in contact with Doug Yeo, former bass trombonist for the Boston Symphony who taught at Wheaton College and Arizona State University and was asking the same questions of archivists. Together they wrote a historical volume which I thoroughly enjoyed and strongly recommend.

When I asked Kevin to recount his favorite story from the book he shared the following: “Rodeheaver started his own record label in 1920, mostly because it didn’t fit into the strict categories enforced by the big corporate labels of his era. Terms like hillbilly music and race music served as coded messages to a new generation of consumers—lines which could not be crossed. But in 1923 Rodeheaver walked into his studio with an African American ensemble and sang with them on a group of old spirituals. The recordings are milestones today and a reminder that racial unity starts when people sing together.”

Kevin serves as a writer for print and digital platforms and an editor at Moody Publishers. His book is available from University of Illinois Press.