David Bruce Murray
Jul 28, 2010
In The News|Observations
Nashville Is Not Happy With The GMA
(via Doug Harrison at Averyfinline) The Gospel Music Association is moving the Dove Awards out of Nashville for the first time ever. Click HERE to read about the “shock” and “disappointment” of the Nashville community when they learned the 2011 Dove Awards would be held in Atlanta. Label heads generally declined to comment, saying the GMA had made a unilateral decision without informing any of them directly.
GMA itself is suffering. They used to have a staff of eighteen employees, but that dropped to just three about a year ago.
I love awards shows as much as the next guy, but I sometimes wonder how much better or worse off the Christian music industry would be if there were no GMA, or at the very least, no Dove Awards.
The GMA’s mission is to bring together competitors from vastly different backgrounds, methods and theologies for the supposed purpose of promotion. Of course there’s a common purpose in terms of spreading the Gospel, but too often this gets forgotten in the rush to market and sell product to consumers. There was scandal fueled by jealousy from the very beginning as you can read in John Crenshaw’s July Singing News article. This carried over in the early 1980s as CCM began to take off and Southern Gospel artists saw their grip on the GMA slipping away. Southern Gospel pretty much walked away from the Dove Awards entirely once they realized they were no longer the only fish in the pond, in fact just a corner of the pond. This has only begun to change in more recent years, but Southern Gospel fans still feel slighted when Southern Gospel gets “only” a six minute segment on the telecast.
The 1998 definition of Gospel Music soured the perception of the GMA with artists in Nashville. They did their share of whining and complaining about the definition. The GMA ultimately backed down from it (like wimps), but the damage was already done. Now they’re blowing their lids because they’re going to have to travel down to Atlanta if they want to attend.
If an organization made up of competitors would work in any industry, though, you’d think it would work in Christian music. To their credit, the GMA has successfully brought together artists from many different genres of Christian music for 40 years for various common causes. They’ve also sponsored successful songwriting workshops and trained many would-be artists at various camps throughout the year, as well as bringing retailers, artists, radio, and labels together for a week every spring in Nashville. How much of that would have gone on without the GMA? Less, certainly, though it’s impossible to measure just how much.
