The account of Penrod’s audition depicts the arc of Gaither autocracy as bending toward respect for individual musicians’ self-determination. But the story of a preserved, pre-GVB Penrod recommends Gaither image-building as an exercise in transparency. The decision not to touch Penrod’s hair testifies to the Gaithers’ authority over their employees’ images, for the permitted retention of a haircut is as much an image-constructing maneuver as is the addition of a long coat. The laissez-faire nature of this executive decision makes it hardly seem an executive decision at all. The Bill of this story also constructs Penrod, but he does so in conversation with a partner (Gloria), and the construction appears to respect the “real” Penrod by permitting him to retain the hairdo with which he entered the Homecoming world. He follows Penrod’s story, not by denying that he built the “Homecoming Penrod,” but with another story of Penrod-building. The focus on Bill’s agency and Penrod’s relative passivity portends an interpretation of Bill as a conniving, perhaps autocratic bandleader. Bill, rather than Penrod himself, came up with the “long coat idea,” and the coats are added accessories to Penrod’s wardrobe. Penrod’s account highlights externality and supplementarity. This exchange illustrates Bill Gaither’s skill at stage-setting. Guy Penrod occupies a Homecoming space between order and disorder, freedom and determinism, individuality and conformity, soft patriarchy and rugged manliness, Jesus and John Wayne. However, the multiplicity also yields ambivalence and paradox-the same ambivalence and paradox charging discourses of white, evangelical, American manhood during the era of Penrod’s staging. These identities often mutually reinforce one another as they converge. While masculinity serves as my interpretive center, it will become clear that charting of Penrod’s masculinity necessitates investigating a number of other Penrods-among them the southern/western Penrod and the rural, white Penrod. However, a node is but a point of intersection-a tangle of numerous threads and streams of identity. I also examine which authenticities Guy Penrod projects and which authenticities Homecoming fans expect and receive from him, paying special attention to Penrod as a “real man.” Masculinity provides the node of my analysis of Penrod’s filmed and staged biography of Homecoming fans’ acceptance of him of the American evangelical culture of manhood out of which, and in which, he rises to fame and of a few of his “signature” songs. One can only be an authentic or artificial … something. Just as usability requires an end, authenticity and artificiality require referents. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that the persuasiveness of the Homecoming Penrod rides upon the Gaithers’ play between artifice and authenticity. And Guy Penrod represents one of the Gaithers’ most successful efforts at promise-keeping. To bring out the natural: the solipsistic promise of the cosmetic industry. Singers who relax-who are “just themselves”-typically sing better. And the improvements in Penrod’s vocal tone and pitch in later videos suggest that he did become more at ease on the Homecoming stage. The Homecoming corpus contains many more examples of the effusive Penrod than it does of the staid Penrod. Such an interpretation is understandable. The Guy Penrod of later videos is at once musically refined and liberated to “be himself” onstage-free to raise his hands, to smile and wave to the crowd as he sings, to act in all of those ways a good Christian man would act if he had nothing to hide and nothing to restrain him. 9 Close In the Homecoming community, which so intimately connects virtuosity and expressivity to personal/spiritual authenticity in its valuation of artists, fans may interpret the tentative Guy Penrod of the 1995 Ryman show as at least underdeveloped, at best necessarily artificial-performing under duress, manacled by the immense implicit pressure of having to answer for his predecessor’s trangressions and for his own otherness in an arena where familiarity reigns. To say of an established artist’s early work, “she was still finding her voice,” is to account for seeming discontinuities in the artist’s corpus and to link the apogee of aesthetic achievement to the often-painstaking achievement of authentic selfhood. Nervousness and caution typically accompany first performances.
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