| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel. By James R. Goff Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xvi, 394 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2681-2. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8078-5346-1.)

I suspect that not many of the books reviewed in this journal come with an endorsement from Dolly Parton. The object of the country singer's praise is Close Harmony, by James R. Goff Jr., and it is indeed a worthy book. 1

Although a number of historians have written about country music and black gospel, the story of white gospel music--epitomized, the author says, in quartet singing--has heretofore received scant attention. Goff ably demonstrates that musicians as diverse as Amy Grant and the Oak Ridge Boys trace their roots to the Great Revival, which made congregational singing an integral part of evangelicalism, especially in the South. A few rudimentary songbooks appeared early in the nineteenth century, and at about the same time, shape notes were developed, primarily to serve a rural, uneducated audience. . . .

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