If you are looking for clean wholesome music
that spans across all generations, touches the heart, and produces joy and
happiness, then you should consider bluegrass music. A good banjo or fiddle tune
will hold the attention of anyone from eight months to eighty years old.
Bluegrass is played on acoustic instruments because like classical music, it
originated before the electrical power companies ever came along. The most
common musical instruments used are the guitar, fiddle, mandolin, banjo, and
bass fiddle. The most important being the vocals and harmony singing. Bluegrass
has its roots in the old time folk and gospel music of the Appalachian
mountains. Out of the hills of Rosine, Kentucky came Bill Monroe who fused the
elements found in the old time music into what is now called bluegrass in 1948.
The words to the songs tell stories of everything from bears, whippoorwills,
dogs, horses, wa
termelons,
flowers, old home places, children, mothers, daddies, loved gained, love lost,
to the joy and travail of everyday life. While this music produces a toe tapping
joy it is the old time hymns and gospel music set to bluegrass that stirs the
soul and moves one to open their hearts to God.
Whether you are going to have a revival, camp meeting, brush arbor meeting,
tent meeting, or just an all day dinner on the ground, you need some old
fashioned gospel singing. The old fashioned gospel hymn is one of the most
joyous and expressive affirmations of faith that we can think of, as music is
one of the highest forms of spiritual expression. There's nothing like picking
out a good tune like "Shouting on the Hills of Glory" while the old folks sit
and listen, the kids play, the food is cooking, and the rest of us just sit and
fellowship. It is times like these that have uplifted and cheered many 
a
heavy heart. The words to the old hymns are powerful. Singing the old hymns will
get folks to thinking about things in life, about family, and the Almighty.
The Lord may quicken a gospel song or hymn to penetrate the hardest heart and
draw the lost to Him. Every person who is saved by grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ
has cause to
rejoice and sing songs of praise. Gospel hymns give us that opportunity. It was
the Camp Meetings of the early 1800s that gave rise to the “camp meeting songs”
as we know them. Charles A. Johnson in his book Frontier Camp Meeting (Dallas SMU Press) notes that camp meetings (revivals) would be attended by thousands
and that “camp meeting songs were composed and passed down through the
generations at other camp meetings and by circuit riders and backwoods
evangelists (missionaries). He notes that “camp meeting hymnody, however,
neither began nor ended on the campground. The songs found their way into the
cabins of backwoodsmen and were not infrequently a part of the family prayer
service.”
Our purpose is to bring songs and hymns of praise to those who are saved, and to be a testimony to the lost of what the Lord Jesus Christ can do for them. If you like the old time preaching, praying, singing and shouting; flat top guitars, fiddles, five string banjos, mandolins, and bass fiddles, then you'll like the music ministry of the McPherson Family.
Copyright © 1999-2007 by C.L. McPherson