From tent revivals to radio and records with a gospel music innovator

Homer Rodeheaver merged evangelical hymns and African American spirituals with popular music to create a potent gospel style. Kevin Mungons and Douglas Yeo examine his enormous influence on gospel music against the backdrop of Christian music history and Rodeheaver's impact as a cultural and business figure. Rodeheaver rose to fame as the trombone-playing song leader for evangelist Billy Sunday. As revivalism declined after World War I, Rodeheaver leveraged his place in America's newborn celebrity culture to start the first gospel record label and launch a nationwide radio program. His groundbreaking combination of hymnal publishing and recording technology helped define the early Christian music industry. In his later years, he influenced figures like Billy Graham and witnessed the music's split into southern gospel and black gospel.

Clear-eyed and revealing, Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry is an overdue consideration of a pioneering figure in American music.

| Cover Title page Copyright Contents Introduction 1. Prologue 2. Southern Roots and Early Years 3. Gospel Songs and Urban Revivalism 4. Commercial Gospel Music 5. New Technology to Promote an Old Story 6. The Mission of Rainbow Records 7. Spirituals and Minstrelsy 8. Jim Crow Revivalism Meets the Klan 9. Preserving and Exporting the Gospel Songs 10. Falling Out of Step at the Close of an Era 11. Epilogue: "It's Up to You, Rody, to Free Them" Acknowledgments Notes Index Back cover |"Well-written, thoroughly researched, and altogether engaging. . . Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry is a work of substantial scholarship, which will come as no surprise to those familiar with Yeo's previous work." —Historic Brass Society

"Well-written, thoroughly researched, and all together engaging. . . Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry is a work of substantial scholarship, which will come as no surprise to those familiar with Yeo's previous work." —Historic Brass Society Journal

"Mungons and Yeo's book, Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry, combines painstaking research with insightful sociological and musicological analysis. Although co-authored, the book has a unified narrative. . . . Even if one has only marginal interest in Home Rodeheaver as a person, this scholarly description of American society at the turn of the 20th century proves fascinating and illuminating." —International Trombone Association

|Kevin Mungons is a writer for print and digital platforms and editorial manager at Moody Bible Institute. Douglas Yeo was bass trombonist of the Boston Symphony and has taught trombone at Wheaton College and Arizona State University.