AMY TURNER

After forty years in the industry, Gary Casto still lights up when he talks about gospel music.

Since 2006, Tribute Quartet, Casto alongside Josh Singletary, Gus Gaches, and Ian Owens, has built a reputation as one of southern gospel’s most reliable forces: a multi-Dove-nominated, award-winning act that’s managed to stay both beloved and dynamic in a genre that doesn’t always reward both at once. Now they’re back in the studio, kicking off work on their fourth Quartet Tribute project, having just wrapped a song selection session with longtime producer Gerald Wolfe.

Casto, a West Virginia native who’s spent decades in nearly every corner of gospel music, is the group’s manager and lead vocalist, and he’s the one who dreamed up the Quartet Tribute concept in the first place. It wasn’t an easy sell.

“I try to always pick the right songs,” Casto says. “You know, when we started doing the quartet series, several folks told me, industry leaders says, that’s a great idea, but you’ll never be able to mix those songs in with your national projects. There’s no way.”

He wasn’t deterred. If anything, the skepticism lit something in him. “I love a challenge,” he says. “And I just said, Lord, we’ve got to do this. And we do it nightly.”

That stubborn faith has paid off. Tribute Quartet has spent years proving that classic and contemporary material can share a setlist without friction, that southern gospel audiences don’t need to choose between nostalgia and novelty; they want both, often in the same evening. It’s a small rebellion against the industry’s instinct to keep things tidy and categorized, and it’s worked because Casto refused to back down when people told him it wouldn’t.

As the group dives into its fourth installment in the series, that same restless mix of reverence and reinvention is driving them forward: music built to feel timely without losing its center, relevant to the moment without forgetting what brought the audience there in the first place. For Tribute Quartet, the mission underneath the music hasn’t moved an inch, even as everything around it keeps shifting.