"We Will Stand" Avalon ft. Russ Taff, Friday, August 12, 2022

Today we're going to talk about some repressed memories and the cringy music of my preteen years. Out of teenage rebellion, I started listening to a Contemporary Christian Radio station out of Greenville South Carolina around 1999 called HIS Radio and around this time my family also got the SKY Angel satellite system which gave us Praise TV, showing all the CCM music videos from the late '80s to the day as long as they weren't too hard.

YET WE BUILD WALLS BETWEEN OUR BROTHERS AND OURSELVES. The timeline is a little fuzzy, and rather than doing a well-researched post, I thought I'd examine an artifact from my past. Kind of like how K-pop today separates the boys from the girls, so did the '90s with boybands and girl groups. So did CCM. If you liked Spice Girls, why not try Point of Grace? If you liked The Backstreet Boys, obviously you would love 4Him. But then there was Avalon, a revolutionary co-ed group--and the alternative version of Avalon, Raze, a story for another day! Avalon was formed in Nashville, Tennessee, by a record executive who found four clean-cut men and women who had a love for evangelism and who could sing well together. The group originally consisted of Michael Passions and Janna Potter (later Janna Long) and two other members who left the group before they recorded their self-titled record with Jody McBrayer and Nikki Hassman-Anders filling out the group. Hassman-Anders left the group after their second record Testify to Love. In 2000, Janna married fellow CCM singer Greg Long, and in 2004, Greg replaced Michael Passions.

YOU'RE MY BROTHER, YOU'RE MY SISTER / SO TAKE ME BY THE HAND. Today's song, "We Will Stand" comes from Avalon's 2006 record, Stand. Originally performed by the featured artist, Russ Taff, a CCM singer-songwriter whose solo career proceeded Avalon's by over a decade, Taff and his wife Tori wrote the song in response to racial discrimination toward a black gospel singer. There are a few caveats to the inclusion proposed in this 1983 hit. The first caveat is mentioned in the lyrics: "I don't care what label you wear / If you believe in Jesus, you belong with me." Track three on the record, "Orphans of God," states: "There are no strangers / There are no outcasts / There are no orphans of God.” These two song seem to call all the outcasts to come and experience God’s love. But what about Avalon’s orphan, Michael Passions? In 2004 the press releases stated that Passions had left the group to peruse a solo career, and Janna Long’s husband Greg would be stepping in. In 2020, Passions revealed that he was asked to leave the group due to his sexuality. But solely blaming the members of Avalon for orphaning one of their founding members is missing the point. In his interview with The Washington Blade (see link above), Passions reveals that the record label (Sparrow Records) kept a "tight [sic] rein on [the group] because they created the group, it was their idea." Hence the contradictory story McBrayer allegedly told in an interview with CCM Magazine when Passions left the group. We could only brush the surface of the scandals in CCM in today's post, and there seems to be much more to talk about Avalon, Russ Taff, and the underbelly of the industry itself. It's always interesting to cover Christian music because there's "Thou shalt not lie" meets the tight reins of PR and image consulting. But instead of directly supporting Avalon, why not check out Ty Herndon and Kristen Chenoweth's inclusive version of "Orphans of God"?

Read the lyrics on Genius.

Listen to the recent episode of Good Christian Fun talking about this song.

Avalon version: