Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry
by Kevin Mungons and Douglas Yeo
From tent revivals to radio and records with a gospel music innovator
Homer Rodeheaver merged evangelical hymns, African American spirituals, and 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.
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.
Winner of the 2022 ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research—Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, Gospel, Hip Hop, Soul, or R&B.
- Read a Q and A with the authors
- Find out more at University of Illinois Press
KEVIN MUNGONS is a Chicago-based freelance writer and editor, and the backlist curator at Moody Publishers. DOUGLAS YEO was bass trombonist of the Boston Symphony and has taught trombone at Wheaton College, Arizona State University, and the University of Illinois.
University of Illinois Press—Music in American Life series. 350 pages, 65 photos.
Rodeheaver Photo Gallery
Reviews
“Like virtually all books in the University of Illinois’s much-honored Music in American Life series, Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry fills in significant blanks in our understanding of different aspects of music history. Mungons and Yeo elevate their contribution with meticulous detail and research; a penchant for finding fascinating, revealing stories and anecdotes; and a sparkling, highly readable prose style that’s all too rare in most academic books.”
—Christianity Today
“Rodeheaver’s gift for showmanship and keen instinct for marketing led him to wild success as a music director and publisher, yet he was motivated by faith in Christianity and the power of music to move people spiritually. . . . intriguing and thorough. . . . recommended.”
—Library Journal
“Kevin Mungons and Douglas Yeo’s biography of Homer Rodeheaver brightens an important corner of gospel music history that has gone unexplored for far too long. What they reveal in their remarkable portrait of ‘Reverend Trombone’ is a man both of his time and ahead of his time. It’s more than a tale of the emergence of gospel singing and revivalism, it’s a quintessentially American story about a quintessential American.”
—Robert Marovich, author of A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music
“I am truly taken by the book. It is good, informative, comprehensive, and free of the usual assortment of clichés, academic hems and haws, and over-spiritualization. It takes the often over-simplified view of music and revivalism and exposes it to a fascinating cross-weave of thought, content, and context which, to my embarrassment, I thought I had already had a handle on. I recommend it without reservation.“
—Harold Best, dean emeritus of the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music
“Refreshingly free of academic speak…sufficiently robust to please both advanced readers and the general public…combines painstaking research with insightful sociological and musicological analysis…the arguments are balanced and offer a clear-eyed appreciation of Rodeheaver’s many contributions, contradictions, and complexities.“
—ARSC Journal
“Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry is a work of substantial scholarship . . . Beyond simple biography, the contours of Rodeheaver’s remarkable life provide a platform for examining numerous aspects of early twentieth-century society . . . a well-written, thoroughly researched, and altogether engaging account of a once towering figure in American religious music.”
—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…this scholarly description of American society at the turn of the 20th century proves fascinating and illuminating.“
—International Trombone Association Journal