In the music business over the past seventy years, God has been doing something hard to see from the inside while it was happening. But now that a bit of time has passed, it is clear. "Hindsight is 20-20," as they say, and an amazing story has unfolded that, once we know a few details, we can get a glimpse of what God did. It's an incredible tale.
The bottom line of the story is that over a couple of generations, God has taken a small, regional style of music, commonly known as gospel or black gospel, and used it to spread His love around the globe. The love of Christ has reached untold numbers of people through a genre of music that had the smallest of beginnings.
Multitudes of people were involved in this miracle, from singers and musicians to producers and marketers, from church choirs to quartets and groups. Still, for around seventy years, the conduit for much of what God did was a simple, quiet man of little education from a small town in Alabama who dared to believe that God could use him to do great things.
James Bullard is a man after God's heart. He's a trustworthy man, a man of his word. And his story needs to be read, heard and passed down to a generation of people who no longer believe that God will do what He said He would - show Himself strong through a man or woman whose heart was loyal. And James is just about the only person that remains from those days who can recall the details and relate the power of what God did through him.
On one hand, this book is a lesson in American history that deserves a place in our cultural story. On the other hand, it is a testimony of God's faithfulness in giving a boy a vision and then working through Him to do great things that would be almost impossible to believe were they not true.
An apostle is "one who is sent," and, simply put, this describes James Bullard as accurately as anything; a man sent and uniquely used as a vessel through whom God could draws untold numbers of people to His love, undergird the racial reconciliation movement, and take a small, regional genre of traditionally local music, and in one generation, spread it around the globe.
We have the unique opportunity to take a journey back with James to where it all started, and watch as God used an ordinary man to do extraordinary things. Now in his tenth decade of life, God has seen fit to do one more miracle through this selfless servant - he has given James the recollection of events in minute detail: people, places, events, and stories - and we can read them today as if we were there, standing beside him on cold Cleveland streets, on stage at the Apollo, or in the wings of the sanctuary with the BOS Singers as Dr. MLK Jr. got the attention of the world.
This is the story of how God worked through one man to bring gospel music to the world.
