Bluegrass Gospel
Bluegrass Gospel
The Music Ministry of Jerry and Tammy Sullivan
Heavily influenced by Bill Monroe, the “Father of Bluegrass” in the 1940s and ’50s, gospel music in the South began to shift into bluegrass gospel, a style that combines both genres. In Bluegrass Gospel: The Music Ministry of Jerry and Tammy Sullivan, anthropologist and journalist Jack Edward Bernhardt explores the lives, music, and ministry of acclaimed father-daughter bluegrass gospel performers and recording artists Jerry (1933–2014) and Tammy Sullivan (1964–2017) of southwest Alabama.
Beginning in 1993, Bernhardt lived and traveled with the Sullivans as they took their music and testimony along bumpy back roads to backwoods sanctuaries from the Florida Panhandle to Mississippi, Louisiana’s bayous, Texas, Arkansas, and beyond. The author’s compelling narrative combines long-term fieldwork with extensive oral histories, archival research, photography, and tape recordings of the Sullivans’ music and testimonies in secular and sacred contexts. Bernhardt describes in vivid detail the challenges of life on the road through unforeseen circumstances and the financial uncertainty of performing for pass-the-collection-basket “love offerings,” while remaining committed to doing the work they felt called to do. In an afterword by Marty Stuart, Jerry’s friend and cowriter of the 1995 Grammy-nominated “At the Feet of God,” Stuart recounts his experiences playing mandolin with the Sullivan Family on the “Brush Arbor Trail” as a talented, wide-eyed twelve-year-old.
In the penultimate chapter, Bernhardt accompanies Tammy’s widower, Jonathan Causey, and their son, Jon Gideon, to churches along the same gospel trail blazed by Jerry and Tammy. With their own music ministry, the Causeys continue the legacy of song and testimony the Sullivans pursued for thirty-five years.
Ultimately, Bernhardt reflects on how his relationship with the Sullivans led to friendship and mutual respect for cultural differences that endure through time. The result is an intimate portrayal of life, faith, and family-based music ministry in the South today as in the past.
Showing the coexistence of traditional values and modern musical practices—downhome millennial religion promoted in dynamic bluegrass style—Bernhardt has paid tribute to a way of life and musical culture that are unknown to most of us. What a pleasure to have been invited to welcome the publication of a work that adds a significant element to America’s multidimensional religious musical heritage.
Highly recommended for fans of the Sullivan Family (in all configurations through the years); for believers who love pure, unadulterated, Holy Spirit-fueled and -inspired gospel music and the stories that go with it; and for readers with an academic curiosity about a fascinating, very real world that lies off the beaten path of main denominations and interstate highways.
Jack Edward Bernhardt, an anthropologist and journalist, wrote about bluegrass, gospel, and country music for more than thirty years for Raleigh, North Carolina’s The News and Observer. He has also written extensively on archaeology and music for several publications, including The Bluegrass Reader, New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Alabama’s Sacred Music Traditions, Bluegrass Unlimited, Country Music Annual, and Caves and Culture. He is former vice president of the North Carolina Folklore Society.
