The University Press of Mississippi has announced a July 15, 2025 release date for Bluegrass Gospel: The Music Ministry of Jerry and Tammy Sullivan, written by journalist Jack Edward Bernhardt.
Both an author and an anthropologist, Bernhardt did substantial field work traveling with the acclaimed father/daughter bluegrass gospel act, and seeing the impact of the Sullivan’s music and ministry on their audiences throughout the deep south during the 1990s. He combines his love and knowledge of the music with his eye for sociological trends to understand just how powerfully the people who followed Jerry and Tammy Sullivan loved what they offered.
Jerry and Tammy’s music career grew from the musical ministry of The Sullivan Family, which contained Jerry and his siblings Margie, Enoch, and Emmett. Their father, J B Sullivan, was a banjo player, and his eldest son, Arthur was building a Pentecostal ministry in southwest Alabama, and he encouraged the siblings to play and sing at revival meetings. Before long they were touring after finding a successful radio home at WRJW in Picayune, Mississippi in the early 1950s.
In the late ’70s, Jerry and his then 14-year-old daughter, Tammy, first recorded together, though they did not begin touring as a duo until Tammy had graduated from high school. Marty Stuart joined the group on mandolin and helped produce their next few albums.
Marty initially served as the impetus for Bernhardt to travel with the Sullivans, and Jack became immediately fascinated with the music and the way of life he saw along the Gulf Coast. He began recording oral histories of Jerry and Tammy, and others he met along the way.
Bernhardt wrote about traditional music for more than three decades at The News and Observer in Raleigh, NC. His wok on both music and archaeology has also appeared in The Bluegrass Reader, New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Alabama’s Sacred Music Traditions, Bluegrass Unlimited, Country Music Annual, and Caves and Culture.
Jerry Sullivan passed away in 2014 at 81 years of ago, and Tammy tragically fell to cancer three years later at only 51. The book follows them to these points, and even covers the work of Tammy’s husband and son to continue the bluegrass gospel music ministry she built with her father, which was always more important to them than making a living with their songs.
This should be one that every student of bluegrass history, and the effect of music on rural populations, will want in their library.
Pre-orders for Bluegrass Gospel: The Music Ministry of Jerry and Tammy Sullivan are enabled online, in either hardcover or paperback editions.
