Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 16, 1994 TAG: 9401090139
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by KENNETH LOCKE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By Howard Dorgan. University of Tennessee Press. Price not listed.
The next time you are out for a Sunday drive or when you are coming home from church, take a minute to fiddle with the AM band on your radio and see if you can tune in a local "fire and brimstone" preacher or perhaps a singer who belts out the tunes your grandmother sang.
You will be listening to what Howard Dorgan calls an "airwaves of Zion" program. A professor of Communications at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, Dorgan has spent the better part of 20 years studying the religious broadcasts of small AM radio stations in Appalachia. Once a standard piece of programming for these stations, airwaves of Zion broadcasts are slowly but surely dying out, the victims of demographics and the competition of prerecorded shows provided by large evangelical religious organizations.
Dorgan takes his camera and his scholar's eye to look at four representative broadcasts. He not only captures their individual styles but also something of the type of audience they serve and their role in the broader religious climate of Appalachia. The writing is compassionate, respectful and appreciative of what for many of us has been a religious and social staple over the years. Our culture will certainly be poorer when these broadcasts are finally gone, but until then we can be thankful that someone as understanding as Dorgan is chronicling their decline.
So the next time you come across someone shouting "glory hallelujah" on the radio don't tune them out. Stop and listen for a spell and then join in singing that old gospel favorite "We're marching to Zion, beautiful, beautiful Zion.
We're marching onward to Zion . . ."
- Kenneth Locke is a Radford pastor.
by CNB