Category: Southern Gospel

The living room floor where Paul Lancaster found gospel music

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Long before he was standing on stage with The Guardians, Paul Lancaster was a kid parked on his living room carpet, working his way through his mother’s record collection one album and eight track at a time.

“I sat in front of there and just pulling out albums and eight tracks,” Lancaster remembers, half laughing at himself. “I know that dates me a lot.”

That collection was sprawling and unpredictable. You could jump from Elvis to a Sunday morning quartet without warning. Lancaster wore out one particular Elvis eight track, drawn especially to the gospel side of the King’s catalog. “I loved the rhythmic singing of Walk Them Golden Stairs and Josh Fit the Battle,” he says. “Oh, it’s good stuff.”

From there, the collection opened into what Lancaster calls Jesus Music of the Air: Andrae Crouch, Sammy Hall, Don Francisco, names that shaped a generation of Southern gospel and contemporary Christian sound alike. For a kid on a living room floor, it was less a genre than a whole world.

Then there was the album he avoided entirely.

Southern gospel group The Guardians promotional photo. (Photo courtesy Daywind Records)

Tucked into his mother’s collection was a record by Jerry and the Goffs, its title alone enough to spook a young Lancaster: “God’s Gonna Get You for That.” He steered clear of it for years. “As a kid, I kind of shied away with it for a while until I listened to it, and it was really good, you know,” he says now, the fear replaced by fondness.

Looking back, Lancaster frames those afternoons as something close to formative, not because any single song set him on a path, but because of the sheer range of what he was hearing. “Those were a lot of good memories of sitting on my living room floor at home and listening to just a lot of different things from the day,” he says.

What actually set the hook came a few years later, when Lancaster was ten years old and saw Gold City Quartet perform live for the first time. “Then I was hooked for sure,” he says simply. No embellishment needed. That was the night the music stopped being something he listened to and became something he wanted to do.

Decades on, Lancaster sings alongside John Darin Rowsey, Pat Barker and Dale Forbes as The Guardians, a quartet built on tight harmony and a shared commitment to the gospel that shaped all of their childhoods in one form or another. The group has picked up three Dove Award nominations and multiple number one songs along the way, occasionally welcoming founding member Dean Hickman back to the stage, a man with more than 60 years in gospel music behind him.

Their newest single, “I Know You,” feels like a natural extension of the records that filled Lancaster’s childhood living room, songs built to be sung loud and mean it. The chorus lands with the plainspoken conviction Lancaster grew up on: “But I know you and who you are is holy. Who you are is mighty. Everything that I could never be. Who you are is faithful, merciful, and able. The righteous one that meets my every need. Who you are is great and worthy of all praise. With an empty grave to prove it all was true.”

It is not hard to hear an eight track kid in that chorus, still sitting on the floor, still pulling one more record off the shelf.

Mark Bishop is still writing songs about second chances

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AMY TURNER

Mark Bishop knows something about second chances, and it comes through in every corner of Where Do Blessings Come From?, the singer-songwriter’s new project for Sonlite Records. “This album, if it has a theme, seems to be about recognizing the good in life,” Bishop says, describing a record built around healing and hope rather than nostalgia for what’s already passed.

That distinction matters to him. Bishop isn’t interested in looking backward. The songs here argue, again and again, that the best is still ahead: joy that hasn’t arrived yet, peace that’s still being written. One standout track leans into a simple, defiant promise, that no matter how far gone someone feels their happiness is, there’s more waiting for them. It’s a small idea stated plainly, but Bishop sells it with the conviction of someone who’s lived it.

“God gives us hope,” he says. “This world most often promises much more than it can deliver. But God promises our greatest joy is yet to be experienced.”

The focus track, “Over and over again,” takes a different approach, tracing familiar Biblical figures (David, Daniel, the Exodus story) as evidence for a larger pattern: a God who shows up, repeatedly, across generations. The chorus hammers that repetition home, turning history into reassurance.

Between the half dozen singles that have carried Bishop through the better part of 2025, starting with “Grandkids,” and the newer material rounding out the collection, the record moves fluidly between the domestic and the divine. It’s a range that’s become something of a signature for him, and it’s part of why Where Do Blessings Come From? plays less like a collection of singles and more like a sustained argument.

For Bishop, that argument starts at the very beginning. “There was no love before God,” he says, “just an empty void.” In his telling, creation wasn’t only the physical world, it was the invention of an entire emotional register: love, peace, joy, all of it as new then as the mountains and the seas.

Blessings, in Bishop’s framing, are the residue of that act. “Little nods and kisses from an eternal plane,” he calls them, artifacts of a love too large for heaven to fully hold, occasionally spilling down into ordinary life.

It’s a big theological claim wrapped in an unpretentious package, which is very much the point. Bishop has built a career writing songs that carry weight without ever sounding heavy, and Where Do Blessings Come From? keeps that streak alive. Ask him where the title comes from, and the answer loops back to something close to a thesis statement: “The God who created you, that’s where your blessings come from.”

Sonny Clardy signs with Butler Music Group

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Butler Music Group (BMG) has announced the signing of Southern Gospel artist Sonny Clardy to its artist roster.

Clardy, a singer, songwriter, music evangelist, and speaker, has served in full-time ministry for more than 25 years. He’s known for his heartfelt songwriting, powerful vocals, and Christ-centered message that has encouraged audiences across the country.

As part of the new partnership, Clardy is currently in the studio recording a new album under the direction of producer Les Butler. The project features several of Nashville’s top musicians and will showcase Clardy’s signature sound alongside a collection of songs he penned himself.

“I couldn’t be more excited to be working with Sonny on this new album,” said Les Butler, owner and producer of Butler Music Group. “He is an exceptionally gifted singer and songwriter whose music genuinely ministers to people. Every song he sings carries authenticity and a message that reaches the hearts of listeners.”

“I truly believe this will be the finest recording of his career,” Butler added.

Clardy shared his own excitement about the partnership. “I feel honored to have Les Butler produce this project,” he said. “We are looking forward to great things together!”

The album is expected to release in late summer 2026, with more details, including the first radio single and release date, to be announced in the coming weeks.

A husband’s recovery from alcoholism gave the Jordan family band a new season

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AMY TURNER

There’s a strength that doesn’t announce itself. It shows up in the small, unglamorous moments: showing up to work while your world is quietly falling apart, keeping a family fed and functioning when you feel like you’re the only one holding it together. For Heather Rose Jordan, that strength became so woven into her daily life that she stopped noticing it as strength at all. It just felt like survival.

Heather sings, writes songs, and works as a product manager within The Jordan Family Band, a group built entirely around her family. Her husband Hutch handles production and sound alongside his own songwriting and vocals, and his journey through alcoholism and back out again has become central to how the couple now understands their own story, and how they hope to help others understand theirs.

It wasn’t until a conversation with a client, of all people, that Heather says the weight of what her family had walked through really landed.

“Me and Hutch were talking one morning and I was telling him about a conversation I had with a client of mine about our story,” Heather says. “I told her about the years Hutch spent in alcoholism, about how I felt like I lived as a single mom even though I wasn’t, and then going septic and getting so sick all while trying to open a business. And then came Hutch spending three months away in rehab. And when I finished, she just stopped and said, Heather, I’m so sorry, you’re so strong. I would have never known you went through all that.”

“I told Hutch, even though we’re quickly approaching one year of his sobriety, it truly feels like a lifetime ago,” she continues. “Since he came home, we’ve had so much fun. We’ve laughed, loved each other better, and truly enjoyed our little family so much. God has restored so much in our lives, and it’s hard to believe we were ever that broken. Truly, when we turn to Jesus, I believe he protects our minds from past traumas, shame, and brokenness. Now we get to live fully in his forgiveness and his restoration. And when we look back now, we don’t have to see what Satan tried to destroy. We only see the goodness and the faithfulness of God.”

It’s a lot to carry in one sentence: a business launch, a life-threatening illness, a marriage stretched thin by addiction, three months of separation while her husband got sober two states or two towns away, whatever the distance actually was, it must have felt like the whole world. And yet what stands out isn’t the hardship itself. It’s how quickly, in Heather’s telling, the hardship has receded into something almost unrecognizable, softened by everything that’s come since.

That’s the part worth sitting with. Nearly a year out from Hutch’s sobriety, the Jordans describe a household that sounds almost unremarkable in the best way: laughter, ease, a family simply enjoying being a family. For anyone who has lived alongside addiction, that description is not small. It’s the whole thing.

Alcoholism has a way of convincing the people living with it that recovery is either impossible or reserved for someone else, someone with more willpower, more support, more luck. The Jordans’ story pushes back on that. Hutch’s path out started, as it so often does, with a single admission: that he was an alcoholic, and that he couldn’t fix it alone.

That admission is the hinge point in nearly every recovery story, and it’s the same hinge point the Bible points to for sin more broadly. Scripture doesn’t soften its language on drunkenness, it’s named plainly as sin, but it also doesn’t stop there. The same faith that names the problem offers the way out: confession, surrender, and a willingness to let go of self-reliance.

For the Jordans, that surrender didn’t erase the three months of separation or the years that came before it. What it did was reframe them. Heather doesn’t describe herself as someone who survived a tragedy and is now just getting by. She describes a family restored, laughing again, loving each other better than before.

Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). For a family that once measured its days by how badly they were breaking, that promise of abundant life isn’t an abstraction. It’s Tuesday mornings that feel light. It’s a marriage where both people show up. It’s a household where sobriety isn’t just the absence of drinking, it’s the presence of something better.

8th Street’s Jonathan Thompson on the struggle behind Here Comes The Promise

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AMY TURNER

On 8th Street in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, there’s a little church called Pentecostal Mission where three boys grew up learning about Jesus, and about harmony. Jonathan Thompson, Ivan and Byron came up singing together in that building before life pulled them in different directions. Careers, families, distance. The kind of things that quietly end a lot of groups before they even start.

But in early 2017, something brought them back. They found themselves standing next to each other again, singing the same songs they’d grown up on, and the group that would become 8th Street was born from that reunion, named for the road that led them to church as kids.

Their latest single, “Here Comes The Promise,” carries that same thread of return, of finding your way back to something solid when life gets heavy. Thompson wrote the song, and he says the meaning isn’t buried too deep.

“The second verse of this song kind of goes more into letting everybody know that we’ve all been there,” Thompson explains. He’s talking about the moments that knock people sideways, the ones that feel unmanageable in the middle of them. “We’ve all had those things in our lives that come up that just feel like something we can’t handle.”

The verse he’s describing speaks to a friend caught in a struggle, unsure what to do, trying to carry it alone. It’s a scenario Thompson knows from the inside. “I’ve been there,” he says. “I’ve done that.” He admits there’s something almost stubborn in how people, himself included, keep reaching for their own solutions. “Sometimes I don’t know why, when we’ve got an almighty God, that we just want to try to do it our way.”

The answer the song offers is simple, and it’s the whole point of the title. Cast your cares on the master, it says.

“That’s exactly what we need to do,” Thompson says, “because I think when we do that, we just feel those arms encircle us, and we know that he is there for us, and those promises are going to come through.”

That sense of promise fulfilled isn’t just a lyric for 8th Street. It’s the arc of the group itself: three friends from a small church on a small street, who walked away and found their way back to the same harmony they started with.