A Conversation with Gerald Wolfe

hi everyone Jamie Vaughn here with singing muse and I am here with the man himself Gerald Wolf's Gerald how are you doing today I'm doing great Jamie just sitting up on the back porch enjoying the weather yeah so what are you doing during isolation right now sitting on the back porch enjoy that's about it and eating ice cream eating ice with ice was very important I think it should be considered a food group all on its own and we're gonna have it in heaven I hope so I hope it'll be at that marriage supper of the lamb one night when we're we're all there world most of your life and you have been with the cathedrals and a founding member of Greater vision and in fact you are seven-time winner of seeing news fan Awards that is a testament and of itself of the longevity of your career and the importance of your ministry I'd love to hear about your influences in the music world well you know I grew up in a church that sang a lot of this kind of music and our church was more of a country church and we didn't do the what we would call the big church hymns we sang quartet music in our church and so growing up around that and then pulling all the concerts my mom and dad used to take me to see the Goodman's in the States mine and the black cords and the Cathedral spear family all those groups I grew up them and so it was just a natural progression for me I guess yeah to do this I'm you know 38 years on the road now now are you also a songwriter do you write a lot of music I have all right parody song but just for the guys on the bus I never liked first but no I don't robber it three songs and one of them two of them have been ported I'm gonna stop there if you could have written any song in the world what would it have been jesus paid it all that's the whole story that's that reps that just encompasses every song we sing jesus paid it all that's the message now I hear that you love Christmas almost as much as I do I would love to hear about your favorite Christmas song oh gosh you know I have so many Christmas recordings that when groups get created into a Christmas album they'll usually call me you know to ask for me to send them demos of songs I guess oh holy night is probably all around my favorite but I like a lot of the secular Christmas music - my favorite Christmas album is the carpenters oh yes portrait yeah followed closely by now the new colleagues words Christmas album it just came out last fall unbelievable it's amazing yeah there's a lot of good ones out there and I like knowledge yeah there are I think the carpenters in my top five absolutely yep I got your favorite for me I am I love Todd Agnew's do you hear what I hear it literally tells the story of the Nativity from beginning to end in every song so it even the carpenter is in there and the I'm sorry not the carpenter the innkeeper and Elizabeth has a song called Elizabeth's lullaby where she's saying to John about Jesus is born tonight and and then I love Sidewalk Prophets and their Christmas album mary had yourself a Merry Christmas and it has a song on there called hey moon and it is the Star of Bethlehem talking to the moon about the very first Christmas and about before it all became trees and lights and the red and green and what how holy that first night was I just love the writers thought process on that song that's a better oh yeah governor again Mary to use the album's name we're done okay and I hear you having a grandbaby what's that like I do it's our only granddaughter okay yeah the bad part of it is she lives in Peoria oh but they were traveling through here when the lockdown started so they they stopped here and spent almost three weeks with us that's nice yeah good good I'm sure it is hard not being able to be around her especially now knowing that you're not supposed to be no one's large Gerald when I was talking to people the other day and saying if you could ask your old wolf about anything what would you talk to him about and the him sing project that you were doing kept coming up over and over again I would love for you to tell our viewers more about that part of your ministry we hope is about gee almost 6 years ago now we were doing a concert in Indiana and on the second half I just took several requests from the audience and I put together a medley and played it all of the requests were hymns as I just put it together off the cuff you played it and the audience sang upon such sing-along I didn't ask him this thing but they did and when I when I was finished with that started yelling out other songs so for about 45 minutes we did an impromptu him sing client and when we got to the bus that night I told the guys I said you know there must be a lot of people that miss singing these songs every Sunday mm-hmm so we did it him singing at my church here in Tennessee and we did it on a Monday night and our church seats 1200 you know and I was thinking man if a hundred people show up it'll be kind of embarrassing so we opened the doors at night and more than 1400 people showed up on a Monday night so we recorded that our church we were gonna record it anyway just as we recorded it it it just went everywhere I mean he just took off so we started doing about 20 a year in different cities and churches and people would drive hundreds of miles and so about two and a half years ago my dad passed away and he had been in a nursing home for four months and every time I would go see him I would see this little room called an activity room and they were usually 1215 people in there but they were always sleeping they weren't having activities so the Lord laid on my heart and I know it was him because I wouldn't have thought of it not to send those him sing DVDs we had made to all the nursing homes in the country Wow I didn't I didn't know how many there were and so a friend of mine son manages a nursing home in Nashville so I called him and he hooked me up and I got the list and there are fifteen thousand six hundred and forty nursing homes two million two million people so some friends and I started foundation to start shipping goes out and we got a couple volunteers to help us and as of last week we had shipped sets of those DVDs there's three and said we had shipped sets of them to fourteen thousand nursing homes Wow and I wish you could read some of the cards yet you know how they're using Zoe Gill to be a video through the people singing and now I just this week I've got new messages from to Mercy homes that have figured out how to play the DVDs simultaneously on all the TVs and all the rooms oh wow they can't they can't get together you know for their Sunday worship now so now they're able to pop the music and a video into all the rooms and the activity director one of them emailed me and said she just stands in the hall and she can hear them singing from their rooms even though they're let's even though they're alone they're not really alone and so it's just been an amazing blessing for us to get to do that it's a privilege now can people donate to help you be able to afford to send these to all the nursing homes in America is there a way oh yeah yeah we have a website just for that it's called gospel music hem Singh Kham real easy gospel music em sing calm and there you can donate there it's tax-deductible and it costs us about $20 per facility to supply them with a set for those DVDs that includes shipping packaging all of that and when we finished the nursing homes which we hope to have that done by summer all of them then we will start on the assisted living facilities and there are thousands of those and many others the respite care day care centers and so it's a multi-year project but we're getting it we're going to get it done I love that absolutely love that if you were able to donate please make sure that you can and you do and if you could give people some advice about going through the trying times that we are as an ex-player planet what would you talk to them about I would just that tub and I say this to a lot of people you know all the songs we sang in gospel music Christian music in general are about the hope we have in Christ the love of God a promise of tomorrow the hopes for a better future all of those things and we sing about that all the time so now we have to ask ourselves do we really believe what we sing and if we do we need to live that way and not fret about it and complain and I'm and all those things you know all of us we do as well as anybody I mean everybody are going to make difficult season but we got a believable we sing and live it out so it doesn't matter if your gospel singer or preacher or a magazine contributor or a songwriter whatever it is just grab hold of those truths that we sing about and the words read about it scripture and believe that God knows what he's doing and it's gonna it's gonna work out exactly the way he's planned it thank you so much for taking time out today talk to us here at singing news greatly appreciate it I hope everyone goes to your website and donates to the gospel music him saying thank you so much I really really appreciate you talking singing news today Thank You Jay man please excuse my wandering eyes I keep looking at you with fear and I'm trying to look over there thank you so much for

Channel: SingingNewsOnline

Views: 5,681

Rating: 4.9603958 out of 5

Keywords: Singing News, Southern Gospel, Gerald Wolfe, Gospel Music

Id: bexVcV0bR7I

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020