Bill & Gloria Gaither & Their Homecoming Friends - New Orleans Homecoming

Reviewed by Tony Cummings

Having the day before reviewing this 2002 release been speaking to a pastor in New Orleans where he told me about the devastation caused by the flood puts the witlessly corny intro full of shots of Mardi Gras and riverboats and homespun guff about pecan pie and jambalaya and where "the coffee is laced with chicory and the streets are filled with music" pretty irrelevant. After that we're off into a live concert filmed at New Orleans' Saenger Theatre. It starts badly. A massed cast version of "When The Saints Go Marching In" with a trad jazz band accompanying sounds a ringer for the kind of thing the Black & White Minstrels used to appal us with in the '60s. After such a lachrymose start things can only improve and later on we have The Gaither Vocal Band doing a jolly "On The Authority", the Lewis family offering some homespun country on "Honey In The Rock" and Jeff Easter offering some bluesy harmonica to accompany Sherman Andrus (remember Andrus Blackwood Company?) on Dorsey's classic "Precious Lord Take My Hand". But then there's "comedy" from Mark Lowry while "There Is A Fountain" by Vestal Goodman shows that the Southern gospel matriarch was in poor voice in those last few years. So, it has to be said that this is a DVD that is already showing its age.