On a Friday morning in early October, musicians, industry executives, and politicians packed into the open-air café at the brand new Museum of Christian and Gospel Music — the first museum in the U.S. designed to celebrate the breadth of Christian music.
They spilled onto the downtown Nashville sidewalk, mere blocks away from historic churches and country stars' raucous tourist bars. It was a ceremony many years in the making.
There is an institution devoted to Black Gospel in St. Louis, one for white Southern gospel in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and the Gospel Music Association (GMA) has been inducting originators from both those traditions, along with Christian pop pioneers, into its Hall of Fame since 1972.
But for the entirety of those 50-plus years, the hall's been without a physical location. Past efforts to build one failed. But Jackie Patillo, the first woman and person of color to lead the GMA, pushed to create a comprehensive home for these musical histories once and for all.
"The word 'gospel' music really encompasses a message with lots of different sounds, so it's been awesome to see how we've gone from the hymns to choruses to rap music and the contemporary Christian music industry," said Patillo.
The museum now houses the GMA's Gospel Music Hall of Fame, and because its exhibits are designed to weave these varied musical lineages into one story, no one genre gets its own section. Instead, performers are organized according to either chronology or commonalities. One display describes all sorts of family bands, while another spotlights musicians who've embraced pastoring roles and pastors who've become recognized as musicians.
All that glitters is not gold
The museum has just 11,000 square feet so its executive director and team of curators had to be selective about its contents. But they didn't default to simply featuring the biggest-selling singers.
Even though Christian and gospel music have long operated as industries, they measure success differently from the rest of popular music: spiritual impact, a more ephemeral accomplishment, is touted just as much as commercial stats. And the artifacts on display are meant to reflect those priorities.
"We have one little area we're trying to put all the gold records in," explained Steve Gilreath, the museum's executive director. "You don't see them everywhere you go…it's just not about that with this industry."
The first item visitors encounter upon entering is a trophy, given to Bill Gaither when he received the songwriter of the year honor at the very first Dove Awards ceremony in 1969, celebrating excellence in Christian music.
Gaither is a noted composer of Southern gospel standards that proclaim faith in a saving God, and take sentimental comfort in it. Popularized by his vocal groups, many of his songs have even made it into church hymnals.
An American soundtrack
The museum highlights iconic singers, composers and choir directors in the culturally and musically distinct African American gospel lineage, too. That tradition supplied American music with its templates for catching the spirit and giving voice to profound lament and righteous conviction, and its canon served as the soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement.
"Gospel music, from the negro spiritual to now, has always been a [symbol] of hope," said Derek Minor, a museum honoree and gospel-schooled hip-hop artist.
"There was always an idea that God was coming back to liberate. The OG gospel artists, I don't think they were just trying to write great songs. They were trying to inspire people that were at their lowest," said Minor.
He has his own way of carrying on that tradition. On his 2018 album "The Trap," he brought gospel uplift to the present-day struggle to break cycles of poverty, violence and incarceration, a perspective that was met with surprise — people didn't expect that a Christian artist would depict those realities in his lyrics.
"There's a liberation that needs to happen in [this] moment as well," insisted Minor. "And that's what I wanna contribute to."
Religious/secular crossover
The idea of crafting devotional versions of secular styles was around long before Minor began rhyming. The museum has a particular focus on a period in the '70s and '80s when a whole new genre began to flourish: Christian Contemporary Music (CCM).
One of the largest artifacts in that section is a hulking, vintage studio console. Its inclusion came as a surprise to Brown Bannister, an engineer and producer who used it to help flesh out the sound of contemporary Christian pop.
"When I saw this in here, my heart just stopped," he recalled.
It reminded him of the seminal soft-rocking albums he shaped for Amy Grant and other Christian singer-songwriters, many of whom — like Bannister himself — have since been inducted into the Hall of Fame. The sonic textures he achieved with session players evolved with popular music trends, but one particular emphasis set the CCM approach apart.
"To me, Christian music — it's not about the music, it's about the lyric. That's what differentiates," said Bannister. "So you're making sure that you're serving the artists and serving the lyrics of their song and trying not to get in the way of the message. You're trying to enhance it."
That mindset was new to Rachael Lampa, who signed her first Christian record deal in 2000 at the age of 14.
Lampa is featured in an exhibit on artists who released their debut albums as teenage girls. She gravitated toward power ballads and rhythmic dance tracks that were in step with the era, but learned that having a Christian platform as a young woman meant that she was expected to be an ideal role model. (She says she once received criticism for simply wearing a tank top.)
"It's people trying to express themselves and express their experience," said Lampa. "But also be a teenager, getting to know who they are in the first place and then who God is and how to talk about that, how to sing about that."
Walking the halls of the new museum summoned moving memories for Lampa, and if it does the same for other visitors, GMA president Patillo ensured that space is set aside for their reflections.
"We're gonna give people an opportunity in a little testimonial booth where they can share how a song has impacted their lives," Patillo explained. "This music is about changing us, it's about nourishing us, it's feeding our soul and our spirit. And we get to tell those stories here."
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