Category: Southern Gospel

The Dunaways Return With New Single “That Sounds Like God To Me”

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Some groups have a confidence that comes from decades of experience. The Dunaways have that kind of confidence. So does Les Butler, the Hall of Fame producer who’s been in their corner since the songs started climbing charts back in the early 2000s. Now the two are reuniting for the family group’s first new single in years, and by the sound of it, nobody involved is treating this as a comeback so much as a continuation.

“That Sounds Like God To Me,” set to hit Southern Gospel radio in late summer 2026, was written by Tammy Dunaway and Marcia Henry after a real-life moment convinced them God’s fingerprints are all over the ordinary stuff of daily living. It’s not a flashy premise. It’s a familiar one, delivered with the kind of warmth that’s made the Dunaways a fixture in the genre since the turn of the millennium.

Butler, who produced the track, doesn’t hide his enthusiasm. “I can’t tell you how excited I am to create new music with one of the most talented families I’ve ever been privileged to work with,” he says. “The Dunaways are special. If you don’t believe me, go check out the catalogue of music we produced together, 2000-2020. It will bless your soul!”

That catalogue is substantial: number one songs, national radio play, and multiple placements on Gaither Music Group’s “Shout” series, the annual showcase of Southern Gospel’s best. It’s the kind of resume that makes a reunion feel less like a gamble and more like a homecoming.

For Randall, Tammy, and Kanah Dunaway, the sentiment runs both ways. “We are honored to once again partner with Les Butler and Family Music Group,” Tammy says. “Les has been a faithful friend and supporter of our ministry for many years. We are grateful for this opportunity and pray, ‘That Sounds Like God To Me’ will encourage hearts, strengthen faith, and remind listeners that God is always at work around us.”

The track features Kanah Dunaway on lead vocals, a choice that signals where the family’s sound is headed even as it stays rooted in the harmonies longtime fans know well. It’s a melody built for radio, and given the group’s track record, it seems likely to find its audience fast once it starts reaching stations this summer.

Through it all, the throughline stays the same as it’s always been for the Dunaways: Christ centered music, close family harmony, and a ministry that’s spanned churches, concerts, and conferences across the country for more than thirty years. New single, same mission.

Why Tribute Quartet’s new mountain song rolls away instead of climbing

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AMY TURNER

There’s something every songwriter chases: the instant a familiar story turns sideways and suddenly means something new. For Tribute Quartet’s Josh Singletary, that came while thinking about the stone in front of Jesus’s tomb, and just how little that stone actually mattered.

The group already has a mountain in its catalog of songs. “Halfway Up the Mountain” climbed to number one on the Singing News chart, the kind of song that becomes a signature. So when Tribute Quartet went looking for another mountain image, Singletary knew comparisons were inevitable. He also knew the new song had almost nothing in common with the old one.

“The great thing about this song, compared to Halfway Up the Mountain, is just the concept of it was a stone that rolled away,” Singletary explains. “It was a stone that was in front of the tomb. It could have been a mountain in front of the whole of that tomb, and it wouldn’t have mattered. It still would have moved.”

Provided to YouTube by Daywind Records
It Could Have Been A Mountain · Tribute Quartet
Forever
℗ 2026 Daywind Records
Released on: 2026-01-30

That idea became “It Could Have Been a Mountain,” a title that flips the usual mountain metaphor on its head. Where “Halfway Up the Mountain” is about the climb, the new song is about the size of the obstacle not mattering at all. Scale a mile high, seal it shut, do whatever you want to it; the resurrection happens anyway. The lyrics lean hard into that contrast, pairing images of the tomb sealed and guarded with the plain fact that none of it held. The hook repeats like a testimony being worked out in real time: it could have been a mountain, but it still rolled away.

There’s also a second layer built into the song, one that pulls the story out of scripture and into the pews. Verses about facing “a night” where “hope is failing,” about feeling “buried in your fear,” turn the empty tomb into a template for whatever mountain a listener happens to be carrying. It’s a familiar move in southern gospel writing, taking a doctrinal moment and making it personal, but Singletary’s framing gives it a sharper edge than most: the size of your mountain was never really the point.

Singletary himself is something of a study in scale versus substance. He was born in Raiford, Florida, a town small enough that it barely shows up on a map, and there’s nothing small about what he’s built since. As Tribute Quartet’s baritone and pianist, he’s also become one of the genre’s steadier utility players, working as an arranger, producer, and studio musician on projects well outside his own group’s output. He now lives in Lebanon, Tennessee, with his wife, Kahlie, and their dog, Hovie, close enough to Nashville’s session rooms to keep that side of his career humming alongside the road schedule.

That dual life, road quartet member and behind-the-scenes producer, tends to show up in the songs he helps shape. “It Could Have Been a Mountain” has the structural instincts of someone who thinks about arrangement as much as message: a repeated hook built for a room to sing back, a bridge that widens the story from history to personal application, an ending that just keeps rolling the phrase away until it feels less like a chorus and more like a release.

Whether it reaches the chart peak “Halfway Up the Mountain” did remains to be seen. But for Singletary, the comparison was never really the goal. The whole point of the new song is that the mountain, and the number attached to it, was never the thing that mattered.

John Darin Rowsey found more than he expected in “Where Healing Happens”

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AMY TURNER

Some songwriters doesn’t chase the spotlight so much as build the stage for everyone else to stand on. John Darin Rowsey has spent decades doing exactly that, first with New Journey, then Karen Peck & New River, and for the last dozen-plus years as the songwriting engine behind The Guardians, the southern gospel quartet rounded out by Pat Barker, Paul Lancaster and Dale Forbes. Their new project, Where Healing Happens, might be the most personal thing he’s ever put his name on.

Rowsey started singing in front of crowds at 11 years old, an age when most kids are still figuring out how to talk to strangers. That early exposure shaped a career defined less by ego than by service; he’s the guy in the room writing the songs other people get to sing, and he’s made peace with that role in a way that feels almost countercultural in an industry built on hooks and headliners. Hundreds of songs, multiple number-one hits on the southern gospel charts, a Dove Award. The résumé speaks for itself. But ask him about this particular record, and something shifts in his voice.

“You know, it was really a labor of love,” Rowsey says. “I feel like the songs that are on this project speak my heart more so than just about any project I’ve ever been a part of.” He pauses on the why of it, landing somewhere true: “I guess it’s because we all walk through seasons that are difficult. We walk through seasons of joy. Every season is different, and different songs come out of those seasons.” The album, he explains, was built to meet people wherever they are, grief, gratitude, doubt, all of it: “We were able to pick songs on this project that help you walk through every season of your life.”

What catches Rowsey off guard, even now, is what happened once he handed the songs over to his bandmates. Writing them was one thing. Hearing them sung back was another entirely. “The guys took the lyrics and sung them, it was way above my expectations,” he says. “I thought I knew they would do a great job, but I never dreamed that they would interpret the songs the way they did.” There’s real surprise in that admission, the kind that only comes when collaboration outpaces even a songwriter’s own vision for his work. “I think this record means more to me because of that than any I’ve ever been a part of. So I’m really thankful for that.”

That gratitude tracks with everything The Guardians have built their identity around. Three Dove Award nominations, a string of number-one songs, Fan Awards, and still the group’s mantra traces back to John the Baptist in John 3:30: “He must increase but I must decrease.” It’s a strange thing to hear a quartet with this much chart success talk about diminishment as the goal, but that’s the tension that seems to animate the group, ambition in service of something bigger than themselves.

Occasionally they’re joined onstage by founding member Dean Hickman, a man who’s logged more than 60 years in southern gospel music, a living thread back to the genre’s roots standing next to a group actively reshaping what it sounds like now. It’s a lineage thing, the old guard blessing the new, and it fits the arc of a group whose newest record is, by its own songwriter’s account, less a product than a testimony.

Where Healing Happens isn’t trying to be everything to everyone. It’s trying to be honest about the seasons people actually live through. For Rowsey, that honesty is the whole point.

A mother’s grief inspires Amber Lynn’s ‘Till We’re Together

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TEXAS GOSPEL VOLUNTEER

Amber Lynn has spent years writing songs that speak to faith, hope, and perseverance. But her latest release reaches into a place far more personal, inviting listeners into a chapter of grief that continues to shape her life.

The Sonlite Records artist, who also serves as the lead vocalist for Southern Gospel trio 11th Hour, wrote the song alongside Kenna West, Lauren Talley, and Michael Farren. At its heart is the loss of the child she and her husband, Garrett, lost in 2021, a story she says remains impossible to separate from her faith.

Provided to YouTube by Syntax Creative
Till We’re Together · Amber Lynn
Till We’re Together
℗ 2026 Sonlite Records
Released on: 2026-07-10

“This song was written by myself, Kenna West, Lauren Talley, and Michael Farren, in loving memory of the precious child my husband and I lost in 2021,” Amber Lynn says. “Losing a child is a heartbreak that never truly leaves you, it’s a grief we will carry in our hearts for the rest of our lives.”

Rather than masking that pain with elaborate production, the recording embraces simplicity. Built around Tim Parton’s piano with only subtle atmospheric accompaniment and produced by Roger Talley, the performance leaves room for every lyric to breathe. The result is an intimate meditation on loss, one that acknowledges the weight of unanswered questions while holding tightly to the promise of reunion.

“Yet even in the deepest sorrow,” she says, “we hold onto the hope of Heaven. The hope that one day we will finally say hello to our baby… and will never have to say goodbye again.”

That hope echoes throughout the song’s lyrics, which reflect on milestones that never came, a first smile, first steps, bedtime routines, and the lingering ache of a life imagined but never lived on earth. Rather than offering easy explanations, the song gives voice to emotions many grieving parents quietly carry.

For Amber Lynn, that honesty was essential.

“This song,” she says, “is for every mother and father who knows this pain, for every parent who carries both love and loss in the same breath. You are not alone.”

Her willingness to tell that story grows out of a lifetime shaped by faith and music. Raised in Sterlington, Louisiana, as the daughter of a pastor, Amber was surrounded by gospel music from an early age. As a teenager, she sensed a calling to write and minister through music, a journey that eventually led to the formation of 11th Hour.

She has since written more than 200 songs, with recordings by 11th Hour and artists including The Martins and The Whisnants. Along the way, she has earned recognition as both a vocalist and songwriter, while also completing a diploma in Christian counseling that allows her to minister at women’s conferences and concert events.

Today, Amber and Garrett are raising their son, Vinny, and daughter, Penny, while serving at their home church, Trinity Baptist in Asheville, North Carolina. Their family story now includes both profound joy and profound loss, realities that coexist in the message of her latest recording.

The song does not attempt to resolve grief. Instead, it offers something quieter: the assurance that sorrow can exist alongside hope, and that faith can sustain people through questions that may never be answered.

For Amber Lynn, that is the message she hopes listeners carry with them long after the final piano notes fade. “You are not alone.”

The Kingsmen blend tradition and new songs on anniversary album

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TEXAS GOSPEL VOLUNTEER

For seven decades, the Kingsmen have built a reputation by honoring Southern Gospel traditions while continuing to evolve. Their latest release, Still Jesus, reflects that balance, looking back at the group’s history while introducing new music that points toward its future.

The Horizon Records album, subtitled A Seventieth Anniversary Celebration, arrives as both a milestone and a statement of purpose. Rather than simply revisiting familiar material, the collection blends restored classics, previously unrecorded songs from the group’s archives, and brand-new recordings from some of gospel music’s most respected songwriters.

“For me,” says Kingsmen vocalist Alan Kendall, “this album is both a culmination and a beginning for the Kingsmen.”

That perspective shaped every decision behind the project. Kendall says the group wanted to celebrate its legacy without becoming confined by it.

“We have always been diligent to honor our Kingsmen roots,” he explains. “But those exact same roots also tell us that the Kingsmen have always been a forward-thinking group.”

That philosophy led the quartet to revisit classic arrangements while preserving the character longtime listeners have come to expect. The album also includes two older songs that had never been recorded by the Kingsmen, including one written by Squire Parsons in 1989, alongside five newly written selections from songwriters whose work has helped define the group’s modern catalog.

“Ronny Hinson, Kenna Turner West, Joseph Habedank, Lee Black, Rachel McCutcheon, and more, all sent us some of their finest material to date,” Kendall says.

The result is an album that moves comfortably between generations. Familiar harmonies anchor classics such as “I’ll Live Again,” while songs like “I Forgive Your Sin” and “When Sunday Morning Dawned” feature sweeping orchestration. Elsewhere, country influences shape tracks including “That Very Moment” and “I Stand Upon The Rock of Ages,” giving the collection a broader musical palette without losing its identity.

The closing track serves as the album’s emotional centerpiece. Nineteen former Kingsmen members reunite as an alumni choir to perform “Is That the Old Ship of Zion,” one of the group’s signature songs.

“I’ll advise our fans to listen to this album all the way through,” Kendall says. “It is quite a ride.”

For drummer Brandon Reese, whose father, Ray Dean Reese, helped establish the Kingsmen’s enduring legacy, the anniversary project carries both personal and spiritual significance. As the group’s manager and leader, he sees Still Jesus as more than a celebration of longevity.

“We tried to incorporate something that just about anybody would enjoy,” Reese says, pointing to the mix of new songs, re-recorded favorites, and appearances by more than 15 Kingsmen members spanning seven decades.

His hope, however, extends beyond the music itself.

“Most importantly,” Reese says, “it is my prayer that you hear something in this album that helps you in your every day walk, because no matter the issue, the answer is Still Jesus. And with the Kingsmen, even after 70 years, the answer will always be Still Jesus.”