52 thoughts on “GOH: Moving Up To Gloryland”

    1. Dear SFL Reader:

      OK so where do I send my money to make the music stop?

      Christian Socialist

  7. For high schoolers, they did a good job. They will get even better as they learn, and as their voices mature.

    Those tight harmonies are intimidating, and they will get better at those, too.

    Once they get comfortable and more polished, the song will be quite a bit bouncier than this!

      1. Grin.

        The bass actually sings pretty well. The rest of them need to work a bit more. To be fair, I rarely hear singers of their age who have arrived. I think that if we were to hear them again, five years later, we might be quite impressed.

        2. Ernie Haase & Signature Sound (that group) is a Southern Gospel quartet, although some of their other stuff doesn’t sound like “typical” SG.

  9. Back in high school, I was in several groups like this.

    It was totally nerve-wracking: we were expected to be technically perfect, while communicating the message and simultaneously not look as if we were enjoying the song too much.

    These kids did a pretty good job. It’s too bad they aren’t really enjoying themselves because of all the pressures placed on them.

    1. Yes, I normally listen and don’t watch, but I was really struck (before the song started) at how unhappy or stressed or they looked.

      1. If the MOG ain’t happy, aint’ nobody happy…and he don’t look happy with this performance!

      2. They’re so desperate to NOT be like the charismatics that they force people to sing like animatronic robots.

        This artificial formality deadens excitement and drains the song of meaning, to me. It’s almost excruciating for me now to have to hear people sing so woodenly. Authorities say the singers have to be like that in order to avoid drawing attention to themselves or make the song more about them than about God, but I think, especially in our emotional, open culture, that singing so stiffly is MORE distracting.

    2. You nailed it. They didn’t want to enjoy what they were doing in case they were rebuked. Shoulda picked a dirge, I guess. But otherwise: way to go, kids!

  10. Happy 1920, everybody!

    This might be a fun little barber-shop chorus if they could actually hit more of the notes.

    But I can’t make out many of the words they’re sining. Perhaps that’s for the best.

    1. I must have enjoyed it more than that grumpy man seated on the right, though (our right, the singers’ left). He sure seems put out by the performance.

      1. My cat seems to have the same opinion. When I played the tune, he woke up from his mid-day nap and scowled at me.

  11. The two kids in the middle look so miserable. They have that look of quiet, beaten-down desperation I remember so well.

    1. Anybody know why these YouTube vids sometimes embed here when I copy the links, but sometimes they don’t? 😐

    2. I don’t think that train was headed for glory, maybe Reno, NV? Anyway, that was fun! Thank you, Big Gary….Sorry,can’t help with YouTube vid prob.

  13. For years, a fundie/Hyles clone pastor in CA would not allow Southern gospel music to be sung or played in his church, because he thought it would lead Christans into worldly country music. Okaaaay. So, a few members (and their friends) who loved Southern gospel would go on the sly, to see groups like the Cathedrals in nearby cities, performing in (gasp!) non-Baptist churches, and when the pastor got wind of it, he started preaching against those concerts and those that went to them.

    It was found out that the pastor’s wife had been borrowing DVD’s of similar group’s concerts because she liked that kind of music, but was forbidden to go. Soon it was wispered about, and low and behold, the preaching stopped! Then, guess what was in the new hymn book published by this maga fundie church…ah ha, Southern gospel songs! Of course, these tunes were watered down to sound less Southern, making them sound terrible!

    So, if you think this group sounds bad (which I think they did a good job, but if I hadn’t known the song already, I’d agree with Big “487” Gary that they could have enunciated a little better. Not an easy thing to do with this style, unless you’re professional), you haven’t heard this fundie church’s group specials trying NOT to sing Southern style while singing Southern gospel! I have, and it’s pure torture!!!

    1. Ah, the Cathedrals. Our favorite group in high school because they weren’t totally and completely banned, just severely frowned upon.

      My mom did refer to it as the “devil’s music” more than once though. But since my brother and I drove to school on our own, she knew she couldn’t force us to stop listening to that kind of music.

      1. When I was in Bible college two friends and I went to a Cathedrals concert but we were turned in by another student. But we only got a slap on the wrist because most of the staff knew we went but did not turn us in because they wanted to go to.

      2. I’m still amazed by the variety of fundy experiences I have read about on this site. Music just wasn’t such a big deal in our church. We had guest singers who did southern gospel, the “official” Sunday music was sometimes praise music or from the hymnal, and we had a family of bluegrass singers in the congregation. For members, rock music was definitely banned, but country music and anything pre-Elvis got tacit approval. I was allowed to listen to CCM and christian rock and even went to a Petra concert once.

        But when it came to things like TV or movies…well, that was a whole nother story, as we say in Texas. Same for clothes and dating (ha!) and books–but there was apparently an exception for music when it came to controlling behavior. It’s so odd how different MOGs decide to obsess about different things.

  14. My husband got a songbook titled “Moving Up to Gloryland” – this song – to use with the choir in the small country church that we first started ministering in after college. Although we did do this song once or twice, it was always considered too bouncy so we never did it again, but I always thought it was a lot of fun, since I was the pianist with all those fun back-and-forth chords.

    I remember the chorus being written, “Movin’, Movin’, moo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-vin'” but the singers above have safely changed it to “Moving, moving, moving, moving” to avoid any sliding!

  15. Ugh, I remember for 25 years teaching other singers to hold the microphone just so, to not move, to keep your feet a certain way an to not slide the notes and many of the other 1.5 billion IFB music rules.

    I feel so bad for teaching so many that this method is the ONLY biblical way to sing and not be worldly. I have such a 180 degree view now but there are still those I left behind passing it down to others.

    1. Hold the microphone? I remember mic holding being a sure sign of being NeoEvangelical. If you hand-hold the mic, next thing you know you’ll be breathing into it just like a nightclub crooner. I assisted a maintenance guy at my in-laws’ IFB church in Greenville, SC this past Christmas extend the stage (I mean platform, of course) for the Christmas play. They are hip enough to allow people to hold the mics if they want, but the stand is there for the REAL fundamentalists. What got me was when we had trouble putting the unlabeled mic cords back in the right places. I suggested it would help to have colored tape (such as seen in this video). He said they had the mics color coded for a couple weeks and the sound booth guys loved it, but someone complained that it looked like one a them Neo churches with their baaad music–probly start allowin Steve Green music in here next. The tape was off by the next Sunday. True story.

      1. Michael… I know what you’re saying. Here’s a story for you. My wife and I (along with some others from our church) were attending a Bill Gotherd seminar at Chicago’s University of Illinois circa 1985.

        During a break, we walked down to the main floor and met Bill. His father was there that day, and we were introduced to him. One of our friends, who loved my wife’s singing voice, introduced her to him by saying, “mr. Gotherd, you should hear her sing. She has an easy, natural voice to listen to, and I am always blessed with the message of her songs.”

        Mr Gotherd (senior) looked at her, without smiling, and said,”You don’t hold the microphone when you sing, do you?”

        I wish I was kidding. What kind of person, upon meeting a young lady for the first time, immediately jumps on her case about an imagined “sin”? (To say nothing of the ill-conceived notion that it’s somehow carnal to hold a mic.)

        Ay Carumba! You’d think he met Roger Daltry!!

  17. That guy sitting there looks like he is trying to have a bowel movement!! Looks so distressed.

  19. Did I see elbows brushing? Six inch rule… ** I actually didn’t see elbows brushing, but it was the first thing my mind thought to look for…after the mute button…

  20. This was one of my old IFB churches! They def allow more Southern Gospel than most other places we visited. :mrgreen:

  21. I feel bad for the girl in the middle. Maybe she is just nervous, but she looks completely miserable!

  22. I’ve been in a few of these quartets. Some of them sounded pretty decent.
    One of them, involving my cousins and I, was invited to sing at a united church in another town.
    At the same sing were the Raging Grannies, a non religious singing group with lyrics like ‘some people are straight and some people are gay/ the reason they tell is God made them this way.’ I guess our pianist was offended; one of the Grannies came up to me after and hoped we weren’t offended. I was quick to reassure her that I wasn’t, although I didn’t mention that I didn’t speak for the others.
    After that foray into ecumenicalism, that quartet was dubbed the Raging Hormones.

    But as for stage presence…
    At my old church, we were expected to be technically perfect, stand perfectly still – and show the joy of the Lord at the same time.

  24. I attended school here. TRUST ME when I say it. 80% of the people brain washed here end up so far from the cult ways they try to put in your mind and become what this place would call REBELS or followers of “THE ROCK CHURCH”. It’s their way or NO WAY.

    1. “The Rock Church” I need to check this out. They play rock music???? I spent 8 years at Triebor’s church and school and that was enough for me. He said “guitars and drums are evil”

      I’d give anything to find a fundy church that has more instruments than the old pie-anna and the fiddle.

      1. No their idea of good music is an organ and piano that’s all. NOT some place you wanna be.

        1. Sometimes at my old church North Valley Baptist, they would use the violin for worship. Then our M.O.G. Jack Triebor would go onto say “It’s good to hear the fiddle when it’s slow and not fast like a country and western song.” Recently someone said that Triebor’s radio station now plays southern gospel which I could never imagine since Triebor always “Played by the book”. I noticed once Bro. Martinez started to sing, the music got a tad bit faster but no one said anything since Bro. Martinez is a stud and one of only a few people from that place I actually like. 😀

Comments are closed.