Greg Bentley shares stories from his years singing tenor for The Hoppers, the Down East Boys, and the Squire Parsons Trio
Show Notes
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Transcript
Lightly edited for clarity.
Daniel Mount (00:03)
Thank you for listening to Southern Gospel Journal. My name is Daniel Mount and I am joined today by Greg Bentley. Good morning. How are you this morning?
Greg Bentley (00:10)
Good morning, Daniel. I’m doing great. Appreciate you having me on.
Daniel Mount (00:14)
Great to see your face again and talk to you again.
Greg Bentley (00:16)
Yeah, it’s been a little while. Used to see you around the building all the time.
Daniel Mount (00:18)
Yeah! And then we did drop by maybe a year or two ago, but it was before the hurricane.
Greg Bentley (00:23)
Yeah.
Daniel Mount (00:24)
All right. Could we start with your background? Like where you grew up, your testimony and what first sparked your love for Southern Gospel music?
Greg Bentley (00:32)
Okay, sure. I grew up in a military family, so a lot of people think, well, you probably moved a lot, but we actually, my dad didn’t take us all the different places when he went overseas. So I was actually born in North Carolina, down near Fayetteville, Fort Bragg Army base. And then not long after I was born, he was transferred to Fort Rucker, Alabama.
So I grew up the first twelve years of my life in southern Alabama. And that’s actually where I was when I got saved at First Baptist Church, Daleville, Alabama, July 15th, 1973.
Daniel Mount (01:11)
Wonderful.
Greg Bentley (01:21)
And that lets you know how old I am now! But it was great there.
Both of my parents’ families were from Boone, North Carolina. And so when my dad retired, my brother and myself were like, we used to go to Boone every summer for vacation. And so we were like, “Let’s move to Boone, let’s move to Boone.” And Mom and Dad decided, “Why not? You know, we’re retired from the military now, let’s move.”
So basically my life from twelve years old until I moved away and started singing was in Boone. And that’s where I actually got introduced to Southern Gospel music.
First twelve years of my life, I don’t know that I had ever heard what Southern Gospel was. I don’t have any recollection of that at all. And we moved to Boone, and of course all the churches around Boone have Saturday night singing, Sunday night singing. That’s just a big area for your listeners.
Some of the people from that area, the Greenes. I grew up with Tim and Kim and their younger brother Tony. The Hayes family, Mylon Hayes family now, but the original Hayes family, Mylon and his sister Sharon and Janet and their family. So there’s a lot of gospel music in the Boone area. And so that’s kind of where I got into it.
And that’s partially because of my mom’s side of the family. My grandfather was very much into music. He taught. the old shape-note singing. And he made sure all of his kids would learn how to sing, and some played instruments. So that’s where the musical side of my life came from, was from my mom’s side, the Teague family. So that’s kind of how it all got started. And then from there, it just kind of, we’ll get in through the rest of it from there.
Daniel Mount (02:55)
Mm-hmm.
All right, so do you remember if your interest in Gospel Music just gradually grew? Or was there one or a couple of particular moments where you heard something really powerful live and you were like, that’s what I want to do?
Greg Bentley (03:11)
It really came on pretty quickly in the Boone area. Of course, some of the local or the TV stations that we could get there back then, was all broadcast. There was no internet or cable television or anything like that. But one of the channels that we could get had the Gospel Singing Jubilee Show. And so getting up on Sunday morning, getting ready for church, turn on the TV and that would come on.
I was just really taken by the whole thing of the music and the harmonies and all that kind of stuff. And thankfully, Boone being a big area for music. Some of those groups would come through the area and do concerts there in the Boone area. And so the first time I went to one, I was like, “Wow, this is really neat.” I want to sing, not knowing that you could actually do it for a living. I just wanted to sing.
So my brother and my grandfather on my mom’s side, Grandpa Teague, and a couple cousins and an uncle actually got together and started singing some. And then it started growing a little bit more and a little bit more and one would say, “I can’t do it anymore” and stuff like that. And so that’s really where it all got started, just watching the Gospel Singing Jubilee.
Daniel Mount (04:23)
Did you have a family group name? And did you do any recordings, or was it just live?
Greg Bentley (04:28)
When we first started singing, I honestly don’t know that we actually ever put a name together for it. And it was just going around to the local churches on those fourth Saturday night, fifth Sunday night singing type things. But once I ended up starting to sing with a couple other cousins, we took it a little bit more seriously.
And we actually had a name, and I don’t know that you’ll find a recording out there. We did do one album, but the group’s name was The Proclamations. Proclaiming the Good News. We actually traveled and sang Western North Carolina, East Tennessee, Southern Virginia, part of South Carolina for, I would guess probably four years or so and just had a great time doing it.
Daniel Mount (05:15)
Okay. You sang tenor and did you play an instrument?
Greg Bentley (05:21)
Did not play anything. I took three years of piano, but if you sit me down at a piano, you would never know that I took three years of piano! I was definitely more interested in the singing side of things. And in fact my piano teacher, she said, “You have a bad habit. You’re playing songs you know and you’re playing them by ear. You’re not playing them by note.” And she could never break me from that habit. So it didn’t help me a whole lot to do piano.
Daniel Mount (05:47)
Alright, so what were your early tenor singing influences? Who did you hear and you were like, I want to sing like that or maybe you modeled a little bit of what you do after that kind of thing.
Greg Bentley (05:59)
Some people will get this right off the bat: Johnny Cook. Well, the first time I heard the Goodmans with Johnny Cook, and I knew I could sing that range because I was, you know, still young. And I was like, that’s what I want to do. I want to do that. So he was the first tenor thing.
Our family are cousins that traveled and sang quite a bit. We were a mixed group. And so it was Gary who sang basically lead and played piano. His wife Vanessa sang alto and then I sang the tenor part above her. And so I knew I could sing those parts.
My favorite group when I first got into music was the Hinsons. Loved the Hinsons back when Chris Hawkins, who is now Chris Freeman, was with them. And we did a lot of their songs. And so it wasn’t just the tenors that I was really drawn to. Johnny Cook, Johnny Perrack was with the Kingsmen at that time. And then Ernie [Phillips] came just right after that. Archie Watkins. It wasn’t just those. It was the female vocals as well because we did a lot of their songs.
Daniel Mount (06:49)
Mm-hmm. Makes sense you’d sing the highest part, whether it was originally a man or woman who’d recorded that part. That makes sense. So what did your audition process look like for joining the Hoppers? How did you hear about the opening, or how they hear about you? And did you sing songs on the audition? Had they already heard you sing somewhere else? What did that all look like?
Greg Bentley (07:14)
Well, actually, our family vacation, once we moved to Boone and of course got to following music, our summer family vacation was going to the Hoppers camp meeting up in Virginia called Watermelon Park. So I kind of got to know them a little bit there. Dean and myself were six months apart in age. So here, both of us are 13, 14-year-old teenagers running around and riding bikes all over the park and all this kind of stuff. So I kind of got to know them a little bit there.
But I entered their talent contest in 1981, I believe it was, and they did a group and a solo division in there, and I won the solo division. And so that kind of helps spur them that I could actually sing.
And then, before I got to the Hoppers, I was traveling with a group out of Burlington, North Carolina called the Christianaires. It was a male quartet. I don’t know where they heard about me, but somewhere they did and asked if I would come sing. At that time, they were a part-time kind of Southeastern group, trying to get a little bit farther along. And so I was the first paid employee of the Christianaires. So we sang with the Hoppers a couple times and actually had the Hoppers at our homecoming one year. And somebody went to Claude and said, you need to get that tenor with the Christian Heirs and Sharon Watts to do “Looking for a City”.
Daniel Mount (09:05)
Okay.
Greg Bentley (09:06)
And so we did. We did; and the funny part, I’ll never forget this, the funny part was they didn’t know how high I could sing. All they had heard was me doing quartet stuff with the Christianaires. So we get out there singing. My mind’s going back to, of course, Johnny Cook and I’m like, well, let’s just do it and see where we end up. So we’re singing it and we’re keep going up and up and up.
Well, Dean finally steps up behind Sharon. He says, “You’re not gonna let this guy out sing you, are you?” Well, when he did that with her, she’s fired up, she’s ready to go.
So Connie comes over behind me and she’s like, “Come on, can you do one more?”
I think, if I remember right, we ended in F-sharp because they finally just said, “Okay, y’all sing one together. We can’t just keep going.” So that’s kind of really where the Hoppers realized who I was and how I could sing.
And it wasn’t but probably six months after that, maybe, that the Christianaires decided to fold. And so I went back home to Boone. One day, I had come in from town, and Dad said, “Claude Hopper called you today and wants you to call him back. And here’s his number.”
So I called Claude and I said, “This is Greg Bentley. I understand you called. What do you need?”
He said, “I need somebody to fill in for Connie for a couple weeks. And I didn’t know if you might be able to do that, or if you were still singing, or whatever.”
And I said, “Well, I’m not singing right now, so sure, I could come do it. When would you need me to come down?”
This was on, like, a Tuesday. He said, “Can you be here Thursday morning?”
And I was like, wow, that’s short notice. “Sure.”
And so I packed up stuff, went, drove down, got on the bus, didn’t know what we were going to be singing. We learned the songs for Thursday night on the way to the date. I’m sure I missed half of it because I just wasn’t familiar with some of it. But that’s how I got started with the Hoppers. I was actually filling in for Connie and that was went on for a couple months because she was having a really hard time with allergies.
Daniel Mount (11:04)
So this wasn’t the cancer. This wasn’t the cancer fight.
Greg Bentley (11:25)
No, it was after she had had cancer the first time. So it wasn’t any kind of a health issue like that. So I stayed for, I want to say I was there three or four months just filling in. And then when Connie would go, they just kept me on stage and said, “If Connie needs some help, she can just look to you.” And it ended up becoming a full-time position. They decided to hire me at that time. There’s the period of time when I first started there was five vocals with The Hoppers.
Daniel Mount (11:55)
I want to ask a question about that, but go back to one little detail first. Just curious: That 1981 or thereabouts Watermelon Festival talent contest that you entered. Do you have any recollection of what you sang there?
Greg Bentley (11:59)
I sang the Goodman version of “These Are They”.
Daniel Mount (12:12)
That’s an amazing song.
Greg Bentley (12:14)
And I did an up-tempo song that was really just driving and stayed up in the high range, and I’m drawing a blank on what that song was. But that was the two songs that I, we got to sing two songs and that was the two songs that I sang.
Daniel Mount (12:25)
Yeah. I think many Southern Gospel fans, as far as they know, “These Are They” was first ever sung by David Phelps. And you have a treat coming if you go to YouTube and look at Vestal Goodman singing that song.
Greg Bentley (12:35)
Yes. Yes!
Daniel Mount (12:43)
So I was actually going to ask a question about that first initial period when you were with the Hoppers because I was going back through the albums from that era and I was a little confused because the Traveling Ride album is 1984 and you’re pictured on the back cover, but not the front cover, and I don’t hear your voice on any of the tracks.
But then the next year in 1985 is Citizen of Two Worlds, and you’re on the front cover and I hear your voice at least some of the time. So that ’84 album, was that when you were like, you’ve been brought on full time, but you’re doubling a part. So they put your picture in the back but didn’t even have you on the album vocally? Is that kind of what was going on there?
Greg Bentley (13:25)
Yeah, they had actually recorded that album already when I got technically hired. And so they just put a picture on the back just because I was a part of the group even though I was not on the album at all. We did one album before Citizen of Two Worlds.
Daniel Mount (13:47)
Was it, so this is one I couldn’t find much because it’s just nowhere online. There was, I Know What Lies Ahead, is that the name of it? In some more like cover songs, like a table project?
Greg Bentley (13:56)
We did a table project that was basically just cover songs. And I can’t remember what the title of the album was. I’m sure I have a copy of it at the house somewhere. But that would have been the first one. We actually recorded that at Robbie Hiner’s studio. I remember that. The Citizen of Two Worlds album was the first, I guess what we call today, a mainline album, even though the Hoppers were not actually on a label at that point.
We did the “Citizen of Two Worlds” album. And that was the first album that Lari Goss produced, if I remember right. Or Stand For Jesus might have been his first one?
Daniel Mount (14:37)
I just sent you a link to the SG History page that lists the Hoppers albums from that era, just to try to straighten it out in my head as much as anything. There’s one on there called I Know What Lies Ahead that has some… that might be it? But again, you’re not on the front cover of that one. And there might just be a table album that they don’t know about.
There’s also Special Requests. I see this one. “Oh, For A Thousand Tongues,” “Looking for a City”, “John Saw,” “He Looked Beyond My Faults.”
Greg Bentley (14:40)
Yeah. That’s the one.
Daniel Mount (15:03)
That sounds right. Okay, so that’s the first one you were on vocally. Okay, so that came out first.
Greg Bentley (15:03)
Yes, because I remember one of the main reasons that we did it was because of “Looking for a City.” Claude wanted that because we were doing it every night. And so Claude wanted that for the table. So that was the first one. And then “Citizen of Two Worlds” would have come later in the year.
And the request one, it being a table project, I doubt that anybody has ever … that one has gotten hid somewhere.
Daniel Mount (15:28)
Okay. It’s nowhere to be found on YouTube or anywhere else.
Greg Bentley (15:38)
Yeah, yeah. I probably have a cassette of that one somewhere.
Daniel Mount (15:42)
Cool. All right. So on Citizen of Two Worlds, I had a couple of questions about that song in particular, because when I think of your time with the Hoppers, especially I think of “Marriage Supper of the Lamb,” and “Citizen of Two Worlds.” Those are the two songs that come to mind first from that era, in part because those are two songs the Hoppers continued singing for years thereafter. And they were still singing them when I discovered Southern Gospel and started hearing it.
Do you have any memories around the song “Citizen of Two Worlds” coming to the group? Like how it was picked, the arrangement, if you were part of any of that process?
Or like another aspect of that is I understand it was written by George Lewis and published by the Hoppers Publishing Companies. I can’t find anything about him online. Like did you meet him? Do you know him? So anything like that around the song I think would be really interesting because I love the song and can’t find any of that anywhere online.
Greg Bentley (16:20)
Yeah. George Lewis was a music minister at a church. I honestly don’t know, I haven’t had any contact with him probably in at least 10 years. But as of that point, he was still a music minister at that point. He was a music minister. He wrote songs.
Daniel Mount (16:37)
Okay.
Greg Bentley (16:54)
I just assumed that he probably had sent it in to the Hoppers. Connie usually was the key for picking songs. Everything came into the office there. Joyce, which was Claude’s sister-in-law, she ran the office. Joyce would put them all in a box, send them to the bus. Of course, back then it was demos on cassettes, so we had to have cassettes, Walkmans or something like that to listen to music on.
But Connie would sit and listen through all the songs and then she would bring stuff to the bus and say, “Okay, I think these are good songs. I think we could do these. I can hear this kind of arrangement.” Most people didn’t realize she was as smart and as talented as she was in arranging, but she was really, really good with hearing what could come out.
And so she brought that one to the bus and she goes, “h”Here’s kind of what I’m hearing. First verse is gonna be the group singing and then we’ll go into the thing. It’s got repeats with it. So Sharon will take the first steps out of the first chorus, we’ll do the repeats. Then Dean will sing the second verse, and then we’ll come back and then when we do the invert and the parts, Greg, you’ll take the repeats at that point and do it through.” And we did it that way. It was our first radio single from that album, if I remember right, and it was very popular.
I still have people today come up and say, “Ihaven’t seen you in forever. Can you still sing “Citizen of Two Worlds”? It’s been a long time.
Daniel Mount (18:27)
Do you ever sing it still?
The melody is so low, would be hard to do that solo. You almost have to have harmonies to even pull it off.
Greg Bentley (18:36)
Yeah, that’s definitely a group song because it kind of loses some of its punch there if you try to do that as a solo. it’s been one of those that has lived on for sure.
Daniel Mount (18:48)
There’s something timeless about it. There’s something really special.
So something I was really curious about, just looking in the album sequence, there’s two songs right next each other in the album sequence, which are “I Love America” and “Citizen of Two Worlds,” back to back. And now, I mean, you might not have been part of these conversations, or if you were, might not remember, that’s perfectly fine. But do you have any idea? I was just looking at that and wondering if the Hoppers put those two songs back to back so that people didn’t take “Citizen of Two Worlds” the wrong way.
Greg Bentley (18:51)
I don’t know that that had anything to do with it. I think it was back in that day, of course, we did vinyl. That was the big thing. And then we were doing cassettes as well. And so you had to sequence everything for vinyl because you’ve only got 13 minutes or 15 minutes per side.
Daniel Mount (19:18)
So that each song fit. Yeah.
Greg Bentley (19:41)
And so you’ve got to kind of time out your songs to where they fit right. They wanted to put “Citizen of Two Worlds” as a first song on side two, basically because of it being the album title. If it wasn’t going to be the first song on side one, it needed to be the first one on side two.
Daniel Mount (19:50)
That makes sense.
Okay. So then somewhere around that time, like late 85 or into 86, Sharon left and then they decided at that point, you kind of became a frontline member, a full-time frontline member of the group at that point. Is that kind of the timing of what happened?
Greg Bentley (20:06)
It is. When Sharon got married and left the group, they decided there’s really no need for us to necessarily bring [someone] in. There was a person, and there’s a lot of video out there of this. There was another girl that traveled with us. Her name is Stephanie Hopper. Stephanie was Claude’s brother Steve’s youngest daughter. And at this point, she was 14 or 15 years old. But an amazing singer, just great singer. So when Sharon, left they brought Stephanie in for a little while. But of course, her being that age, needing to finish school all that kind of stuff.
She wasn’t there to do any albums or anything like that, but she did do some Sing Out America shows, and there’s one other, I can’t remember where it was. Might have been the old PTL shows that has Stephanie on it as well. But when they found out it just wasn’t gonna work there, Claude and Connie said, we don’t need to hire somebody else. We’ll just put Greg on the top. Connie’s next, Dean and Claude. And so we went on that way until after Dean and Kim got married.
Daniel Mount (21:28)
Was it a really unusual thing for that era that you were singing harmonies above female alto, or were there other groups doing that?
Greg Bentley (21:37)
No, really that was very rare. It really was almost kind of that Goodman sound when Johnny Cook was there after Howard and Vestal left.
Daniel Mount (21:44)
Mm-hmm. After they left and it was Sam and Rusty and Tanya.
Greg Bentley (21:52)
Mm-hmm, and Johnny had the top part. And so it was it was very much a throwback to that sound. Best of my memory, we were the only Artist out there really still doing it that way. Most others had a soprano and then a guy below it if it was in that type of a format.
Daniel Mount (21:55)
Yeah, okay.
So I think it was five years before you joined the group in ’84. It would have been up through five years before that that Kirk Talley was with the group. Now did the Hoppers, was he singing a part above Connie at that point, kind of like you were doing? And so they’re kind of almost like returning to a Kirk Talley era sound, if that makes sense.
Greg Bentley (22:19)
A little bit, but the time that Kirk was there, Kirk was actually hired as the bass player. And so he didn’t sing on everything because at that time, Connie and Claude’s brother Will was a high tenor type singer as well. And so they just threw in Kirk from time to time.
And then of course, when Roger [Talley], who was playing piano for the Hoppers at that point when he married Debra, then Debra came to the group. And yes, she was above Connie.
Daniel Mount (23:02)
Yeah, she sang really high in those days.
Greg Bentley
And of course, at that point, it wasn’t long till The Cathedrals wanted to hire Kirk. And so Kirk went to The Cathedrals at that point.
Daniel Mount
Okay. Your tone, like when you joined the Hoppers, were you trying in any way in those first couple albums to kind of fit into a Kirk Talley style of placement, or was that just any similarities just happened to be the case?
Greg Bentley (23:31)
Yeah, those just happened to happen if they did. I definitely was not trying to do that in any way. My goal was to always try to do the most that I could to blend with Connie, just to keep that blend together there. Thankfully, we were able to do it for quite a while.
Daniel Mount (23:37)
Okay.
Yeah. So the other Hoppers classic I mentioned that they still sang for decades thereafter that came from your era was “Marriage Supper of the Lamb.” It was a 1988 live album; you were on that original version. So I heard the newer versions first, you know, the Gather videos and whatnot. And so I was used to it being an up-tempo song. And it was just a real surprise to me to go back and hear the original and hear it more mid-tempo. ⁓
Greg Bentley (24:01)
Yeah.
Daniel Mount (24:20)
So, did you, after you put it on the live album, did you start to speed it up in live performances during your time or was it mid-tempo your whole time and then it turning into up-tempo came later?
Greg Bentley (24:31)
Yeah, it was mid-tempo the whole time that we did it. Jean Cantor wrote that song – a great friend with both the Hoppers and the Greenes because she was from Boone. And so her demo that she brought to us was kind of that mid-tempo feel. And so we just learned it that way right off the bat. And it stayed that way. I mean, it was one of our very popular songs back then.
And so, you when we did the live album, you know, that’s obviously the tempo that we put it in and stayed that way. When Kim came with the group and they decided to cover that song again, Lari Goss produced that album and Lari said, let’s do this as a more upbeat thing. I can hear this working really well for that. And so they went that route with it.
Daniel Mount (25:20)
He had such an ear for what a song could be. There are so many good producers with different skill sets, but I don’t know how many stories I’ve heard of a song sounding different in some way and then Lari having a different vision for it that was just so creative. He was a blessing to our industry.
Greg Bentley (25:23)
Yes. Yes, for sure.
Daniel Mount (25:39)
So, other than the two I mentioned, in your days with the Hoppers, what were the other audience favorites? The songs that people would really be disappointed if you didn’t sing live?
Greg Bentley (25:49)
Well, obviously, you know, just about anything that Connie was featured on. Everybody loves Connie. And I do too. You know, that’s the welcoming to the family that Connie provided for pretty much so anyone who worked there.
Just goes on and on. On the live album, actually the very first song, “Step Along,” was an old Hopper song from quite a ways back. Actually that was back in the Kirk days that they had recorded it before. And it was always one of those that was a fan favorite. People just really enjoyed the feel of it, stuff like that. So that was, that one was very much of one that people constantly ask for.
Trying to think, obviously, “Citizen of Two Worlds,” “Stand for Jesus,” which actually became an album title as well. That one, I believe, was the first Lari Goss album, if I remember right. That song was one that people really, really loved. It’s a song that Connie wrote. So that was always a favorite.
I’m trying to think – off the top of my head, “Smoke of the Battle,” which was also an album title. That was a radio single for us. I’ve actually had people come up and say that was one of my favorite songs that y’all did back in the day. Because it just had a really good groove to it. Just a lot of drive to it. So that was a very popular one back in the day as well. I’m drawing blanks on a lot of the other stuff.
Daniel Mount (26:56)
No problem. That’s a good start.
Greg Bentley (27:19)
“Heavenly Honey”, of course, was one of them that they actually ended up revisiting too, because “Heavenly Honey” was on the “Citizen of Two Worlds” album. And they went back and re-recorded that one as well.
Daniel Mount (27:27)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think those are a good starting point just for people who only know the newer Hoppers to go pull up a few older songs and get introduced to the 80s version of the group.
So when Dean married Kim, she didn’t join the group immediately. There was a year or more when she was going out with the Greenes every week, and Dean was going out with the Hoppers every week. But when she did join, that was when your with the Hoppers came to an end, right?
Greg Bentley (27:37)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Daniel Mount (27:58)
So, you know, as we were talking about, you’re singing a harmony part above Connie, so it’s kind of essentially Kim came in singing your part until they redid new albums, new arrangements built around the new four voices. She kind of came in and sang your part when you joined then, right?
Greg Bentley (28:14)
Yes, we were just about the time that she was going to join. We were in the process of cutting the On These Grounds album, which came out in, I think, 1990, somewhere around there. And so that album, if you go back and listen to that album, I did half of it and Kim did half of it. And that was kind of the transition period.
But it wasn’t long after we did that album, the Quartet Convention after that, that Down East Boys reached out and said, “Hey, we’re looking for a tenor singer. We understand Kim is coming to the Hoppers, would you be interested in it?” And so that’s around the time that we did the switch there and I went to Down East.
Daniel Mount (28:59)
Cool. I do want to talk about Down East, but one more question on The Hoppers before moving on to the Down East portion.
I had the chance to meet Claude and Connie just at the product table here and there. I didn’t get to know them that well. But there are definitely some newer fans to the genre who’ve come into it in the last few years who’ve never met them. My kids, for instance – part of the reason I’m recording these episodes for is for my kids to listen to someday, you know?
Greg Bentley (29:17)
Yeah.
Daniel Mount (29:24)
So for the sake of newer fans, people who are just now coming into the music or even come in a few years from now and come back and see this conversation, what was it like to travel with Claude and Connie? Can you describe their personalities and maybe some memorable or funny moments with them on the road also?
Greg Bentley (29:38)
Yeah, it’s interesting the dynamic there. Of course, you know, everybody thinks of Claude as the ultimate businessman, which he truly is. His business way of doing things is incredible. And so he was very much, “Let’s make sure we’ve got this.” He would give everybody their own job that they were supposed to do.
And so my position was the product table. And so I had to make sure we had all the product that we needed for the bus for the weekend, and all that kind of stuff. And he was very, very much a stickler of, “You do this, you make sure it’s here. If you don’t, it’s your fault.”
But at the same time, you know, he was, he was a great guy to travel with. He wasn’t just a a slave driver or something like that. But he was very business-oriented with all of his employees.
Connie, on the other hand, was – “road mom” is the best way that I can explain Connie. And to this day, I’ll text Connie and I’ll say, “Hey, mom, how you doing?” And she’ll text back, “Doing good son, good to hear from you.” So she was very much “road mom” to all of us. And so, you know, that’s kind of made the whole thing just very easy to work there. I’ll cherish those days forever.
Daniel Mount (30:53)
Wonderful. So when you joined the Down East Boys, what was the transition like just vocally from singing almost in a soprano register (as far as what you find in the hymnal) to – in a quartet tenor, you’re kind of more in the alto region of where you find in a hymnal. What was that transition like vocally? Was it easier, harder to shift into quartet tenor role?
Greg Bentley (31:17)
Even though I had sung with a quartet right before the Hoppers, that quartet was kind of built around where I sang. We sang as a quartet pretty high. Down East Boys were not that way. They were a, the lead singer was not a high lead singer. And so their range was really low. And when I first started, it was a struggle.
In fact, we ended up kind of rearranging some songs because they just were not in a key for me at all. And when I joined them, their song “Beautiful Valley” had just hit the charts. And of course it was with the previous tenor singer, which really was in, if you figure, Gold City or the Singing Americans or some of those quartets, their tenor singer was in the lead singer range. And so he was quite a bit lower and it was too low for me to really sing and be effective. And so we ended up having to rearrange that song. Thankfully, we had a live band and not singing with tracks so we could change keys and stuff like that.
But it was quite a transition the first year there. But it wasn’t long after that to where the lead singer – he owned a huge florist company, greenhouses and stuff like that, down there in Eastern North Carolina. And it was just too much for him to try to do both because the Down East Boys were traveling more and more and more.
And so we ended up – actually, I brought Ricky Carden to the Down East Boys because I had met Ricky through the Hoppers. He had filled in for Dean when Dean got sick one time. And so I asked Ricky if he would be interested, and he said, “Yeah, I’d love to go do it.” So that’s how Ricky ended up at the Down East Boys. And, of course, now he owns the Down East Boys.
Daniel Mount (32:53)
Okay, Okay.
Yeah. Now, so he was not the lead singer you were mentioning at the time because he can get up to fairly high. He’s a pretty high lead singer. Yeah. So when he came on, that kind of probably suited your range a little better. That makes sense.
Greg Bentley (33:13)
Yeah, Ricky’s a good high lead singer. When we hired Ricky and were starting on the first album that way, actually we never did an album before Ricky came with me with the Down East Boys. And so when Ricky came in, we arranged things for that lineup and where it was comfort vocally for everybody.
Daniel Mount (33:31)
Cool! So I’m pretty familiar with the Down East Boys over the last 20 years, but it’s just it’s hard to find out much about their early days anywhere online. You just can’t find their songs on YouTube, streaming, anywhere else. So I like I think you did three albums with the Down East Boys. Sounds about right somewhere that vicinity, maybe three main lines at least.
Greg Bentley (33:44)
That sounds right. Yeah, yeah, I was actually just pulling up the SG History thing to refresh my memory. So when I joined them, the Miles of Smiles album was the one that had “Beautiful Valley” on it. And then our first album, when I came there, came out in 1990 called Musical Cheers. And then we did that one Yesterday, Today, and Forever, and Vital Information were the three albums that I did there. Yeah.
Daniel Mount (34:26)
And all the years of checking thrift stores and whatnot, Yesterday, Today, and Forever is the only one I ever found of those three. Never found the other two.
But I don’t have a good feel. Were they touring nationally, or were they full-time at the time you joined them? Or were they starting to work in that direction?
Greg Bentley (34:43)
They were working in that direction. Sherril Futral owned the group and he was a contractor down near the east coast of North Carolina. Charles Howard was the lead singer. He was the one that owned the greenhouses and the florist company. So he could kind of work his schedule how he needed it to until it just got too busy. The tenor singer, I don’t know what kind of a job he had, because obviously I filled his position when he left. And then Jeff Davis was the baritone singer at that time and he owned his own company. And so they were pretty flexible to be able to travel and they were trying to get to do more dates and stuff like that. And so, really, when I came on was when they really started stretching out their dates more. And just after I came was when they actually started going into the full time position there.
Daniel Mount (35:33)
Okay. Something I still smile whenever I listen to from that middle album, “The Singing News Song.”
Greg Bentley (35:38)
Yeah, yes.
Daniel Mount (35:39)
Novelty songs are always a risk
Did that one catch on live before we said people love it or was it something you only did like as a lark and didn’t do too many times thereafter?
Greg Bentley (35:47)
We did that because of course we were recording for Sonlite Records and Chris White and Kevin McManus owned Sunlight Records. Well, they had big connections with Ronnie Henson. Ronnie Henson wrote “The Singing News Song,” and the whole idea was that if we do “The Singing News Song,” it’s gonna get played everywhere that the Singing News charts radio stations. So that was kind of their thought pattern behind that. So “Let’s do that and it could become a theme song for Singing News magazine.” They used it some but it never did what what they had really planned that it would do. It truly was a novelty song. We actually used it kind of as a way to pitch subscriptions for the Singing News. We would sing the song and then do our Singing News subscription pitch.
Daniel Mount (36:34)
Okay, cool! So what were some of the other songs from those other albums? What were the songs from that era that people just loved hearing y’all do live?
Greg Bentley (36:45)
“Worthy Is the Lamb”, which was from the Yesterday, Today and Forever album. That was a Joyce and Colbert Croft song. And that was probably one of our bigger songs. It was a radio single and people just always would request that one.
“Shadow of the Cross” was from the Musical Cheers album, the very first album that I did with them. Joyce Martin actually wrote that song. And a lot of people really love that one.
“He Kept Loving Me” was another song that a lot of people came up and requested. That was a Carol McGruder song because we had a connection there through the record label.
“The Finish Line” from the Musical Cheers album was a very popular one.
Trying to think off the top of my head and looking at some of these song titles here, which other ones were. Of course, the classic “Family Bible”, that’s one of those that everybody just loves. “I Will Glory in the Cross”, we covered that, the Dottie Rambo song. So, we had some that people kind of gravitated to.
Daniel Mount (37:32)
Cool. So I have some questions regarding your time. I think you wrote a column for Singing News for a while, right?
Greg Bentley (37:55)
Yeah, yeah.
Daniel Mount (38:16)
Okay, that, and your time with Horizon and Crossroads and pitching songs, and A&R. But I think if it’s all right, we’ll save these for another conversation and I’ll just move on to, you know, on the stage things in this conversation.
So something I actually didn’t know until a couple days ago, or somehow I had totally forgotten: SG History lists you as a member of Singing Americans in 1994, and I somehow had not known that till the other day.
So were you with them as they were winding down? And I don’t know if you recorded anything with them?
Greg Bentley (38:30)
Yeah, interesting story here. When the Singing Americans had Danny Funderburk, Ivan Parker, Duane Burke, and Ed Hill – when it was that lineup, Danny Funderburk came down with pneumonia one weekend.
Daniel Mount (38:32)
Okay.
Greg Bentley (38:51)
And Charlie Burke called me and he said, “Can you fill in for Danny this weekend?” And I said, “Sure, I don’t have anything going on this weekend. I’ll jump on the bus and go.” So I went down to Maiden, jumped on the bus. We took off to Georgia. And that just happened to be the weekend that they had their big bus wreck that basically almost took Ed Hill’s leg off.
Daniel Mount (38:57)
I’m not familiar with that, was he driving?
Greg Bentley (39:16)
Yes.
It was, I want to say it was before I joined the Hoppers that I went that weekend to fill in.
Daniel Mount (39:21)
If it was Ivan, was before 83. That’s when he joined Gold City. That makes sense.
Greg Bentley (39:38)
We were going to Georgia for the first date and going down a two-lane road. There was a log truck in front of us hauling big long logs. And he was getting ready to turn left and we were coming up behind him in the bus. Well the log truck moved across the lane so that he wasn’t in our way and we could go on through. The problem was when he started turning, the logs off the back of the trailer came into our lane, and Ed was driving and he hit those logs.
And one of the logs came through the front of the bus into the driver’s section. And of course the bus veered off. We went across a ditch and out into a plowed field. So terrible wreck. Of course, you know, it really messed Ed’s leg up really bad. And well, the rest of his life, he had a limp because of that.
Some people that we were working with down there in Georgia – there was a family down there called the Hall Sisters. In fact, they still sing. And so we were singing with them that weekend.
Daniel Mount (40:33)
I’ve heard of them.
Greg Bentley (40:48)
So they came and picked us up in vans. And their brother actually filled Ed’s part for that weekend so we could go ahead and do the dates. So that was an interesting way of introduction into the Singing Americans.
Danny keeps saying, Danny apologizes about every time for me being on the bus the weekend they have a bus wreck. I said, “Danny, you didn’t have anything to do with that.”
So after I came off the road with the Down East Boys and I started working at what became Crossroads / Horizon Records, Singing Americans were recording for the label Dawn Records, which was one of our labels. And that was about the time that David Sutton left Singing Americans and went to the Kingdom Heirs.
And so Charlie called me and he said, he’s gone. We are planning on closing the group down, but we’ve got like four months of dates left that we want to cover. He said, could you do those dates? And I said, sure, I’ll do those dates. So the last three or four months of the Singing Americans, I was the tenor singer for. So we never recorded or anything.
Daniel Mount (41:44)
Okay.
The Singing Americans had so many great songs through the years. What were some of your favorites to sing in those last few months with them?
Greg Bentley (42:01)
Wow. Obviously, “I Bowed On My Knees” was a big one. Honestly, off top of my head, I can’t think, because we just kind of learned stuff that we could put together for a set for a length of time there. But we had a great time. That was a lot of fun.
Daniel Mount (42:04)
No problem, cool.
Yeah. So then your next time on the road would be – you spent, I think, a decade or more with Squire, Squire Parsons. How’d that come about?
Greg Bentley (42:25)
Yeah, I traveled with Squire from 95 through 2005. And it actually came about because – I knew Squire from my Hopper days. It’s kind of where I really got to know Squire. And of course, the record label being here in Asheville, and I had moved here to Asheville, and of course, Squire is from here in Asheville, the Kingsmen days and all that kind of stuff.
Squire just came into the studio one day, he was actually recording at the studio here in Asheville and he said, “I’m thinking about putting the group back together. My oldest son Seth is wanting to sing, and would you be interested in doing it?” And so I talked to the, Mickey and Eddie, the ones that owned the studio. And of course, at that time, Eldridge Fox was part of the ownership of the studio.
And I said, “Can we work this out to where I’m working here at the studio, what days we’re not on the road? And then I travel with Squire the other days.”
And they said, “Yeah, sure, we can do that.”
So I traveled with Squire for 10 years. So I tell people all the time, especially after Squire’s passing, I said, I feel more blessed than anybody in the industry because I’ve got to travel with Squire Parsons and Connie Hopper. And not many people could say that.
Daniel Mount (43:40)
Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. I don’t guess anybody else who can say that? I can’t think of anybody else.
Greg Bentley (43:46)
No, no one else can has, yeah.
Daniel Mount (43:55)
Okay. Yeah. So you kind of didn’t get any downtime. How did you do that for more than a decade?
Greg Bentley (43:56)
No, I think that’s actually why at the end of the decade it was like, “Okay, you can’t do this forever.” Because, basically, we would leave either Wednesday night at midnight or Thursday morning, do our trip with Squire. We would come in, you know, Sunday night late or early Monday morning. I would run home, take a shower, get cleaned up, go straight to the office, work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, nine to five, and then pack up, head back out again. And I did that for 10 years.
I enjoyed it because I really got to learn a lot of stuff while still doing what I love of the singing side of it. But physically, of course as I got older It made it a lot harder to do it.
So finally, Squire always said “I want to make sure that you’re where you feel is in the will of God.” And he said, “If you’re ever thinking about it, this is my suggestion. My way of doing things when I have to make a big decision on things,” he said, “I put out fleece before the Lord and make three things that I could not change the outcome of and don’t tell anybody what they are. And then if the Lord answers those things, then you’ll know that that’s where you’re supposed to be going.”
And so I did that. I thought that sounds like a great way to make life decisions and so I did that. The last part of the fleece was that the company here, Crossroads, would want me to come back on full-time. And other two things had happened. That was the final piece of the puzzle. And I came in one day and Vicki said, “We really want to bring you back on full time. Would you be interested in doing that?”
And I was like, “Yep, that was the third answer.”
Of course she looked at me like, “What?”
Daniel Mount (45:46)
Wow. I could see, I could imagine the look on her face. Knowing her well enough, I could just imagine!
Greg Bentley (45:50)
Yeah. So that’s how I knew that the time was ready to come on full time here at the studio and hold off on the travel time.
Daniel Mount (46:02)
So you didn’t have to audition with Squire then? If he just walks in and asks you to join, you didn’t have to sing anything with him. He just knew what you could do vocally and you were the guy he wanted.
Greg Bentley (46:05)
Yeah, really, when I go back and I think about it, and I hadn’t thought about this until you just said that, I never actually auditioned for the Hoppers because they knew what I could do from singing, winning their talent contest – and then of course singing with the Christianaires, which we sang with them a couple times. So I didn’t ever try out there.
I didn’t try out for the Down East Boys. They just offered me the position because they knew what I could do from the Hopper days.
And then I never tried out for Squire because he knew what I could do. So really, I hadn’t tried out a whole lot.
Daniel Mount (46:42)
Yeah. That’s pretty cool. That’s pretty cool.
Okay, a couple questions about the Squire years. What were your favorite songs to sing with him or your favorite songs to hear him sing?
Greg Bentley (46:59)
Boy, Barbara Huffman, who writes for Singing News, asked me. She was doing an article after Squire passed and I said, “Obviously, everybody remembers ‘I Call It Home,’ ‘The Broken Rose,’ ‘He Came to Me,’ ‘Sweet Beulah Land,’ of course.” And those were always favorites. Out of the favorite favorites of Squire songs, probably one of my favorite songs was “He Came to Me.”
But “He is the “King of Kings.” Amazing big ballad, power ballad song. That was always one that anytime Squire said, “I’m gonna do that,” and that kicked off, you knew where it was going. It was just gonna be big.
Trio wise, my favorite song is a song that Squire wrote called “My Lord Sent a Ship.” We did this on a trio album that’s called The Millennial Collection, the Squire Parsons Trio. And that song was never a really popular song, no other groups that I know of ever picked it up, but it’s a great group song and just great lyrically.
Squire’s oldest son, Seth, sang it on the recording and did a great job of that. So that’s always been one that has stood out to me.
Obviously, pretty much so, unless it was a classic, everything we sang was a Squire song. So when you’ve written that many songs, know, you’re pretty much still going to sing Squire songs.
Daniel Mount (48:21)
Mm-hmm.
Do you know how many songs he wrote and roughly how many of those you had to be ready for him to call at any moment?
Greg Bentley (48:35)
That was the key part right there. What was he gonna call?
Squire knew what his first two or three songs were each night. He would let us know, because when I was doing sound, he would let me fire these tracks. These are gonna be my first two or three songs. And then from there, he just called. He never had a list. He followed where he thought the Lord was taking him and where the audience seemed to be wanting to go.
And so we often, on the trio set – Normally what Squire would do is he would go in and he would do the first half of a concert solo and then we would come back on the second half and we would do all trio stuff on the second half.
Daniel Mount (49:16)
Do know why he would do that?
Greg Bentley (49:20)
He had so many solo songs that people wanted. And of course, a lot of the dates that we did were just Squire dates. They weren’t dates with the Kingsmen and the Hoppers and a bunch of other groups. If we were on a concert tour type of date, he would still normally start solo, but he would bring the trio in on the first half with those. But on the dates that were just us, he did the first half. We came in, did the second half.
And we just had to be ready because we had no clue what he was going to say. Part of the time, he would just go to the piano and start playing, and whatever came to him, that’s where we went. And there were times when he would play something, thinking that we would grab the introduction to it, and we had no clue what he was playing.
I’m actually working with the Parsons family trying to help them with the publishing side. I had actually started working with Squire before his passing trying to help him with licensing and stuff like that on his catalog. We know it’s over 2,000 songs but we don’t know exactly how many. Of course there’s the old Squire Parsons hymnal.
Daniel Mount (50:33)
I have that. But that’s about, what, four or five hundred?
Greg Bentley (50:36)
Yeah, it’s got, well, there’s over 400 in here. So, yeah, that’s the old Squire Parsons hymnal. And that’s nowhere near the number of songs that… There’s a lot of songs. He would be on the bus, and the bus that we had built had a room for Squire right in the middle of the bus that had a keyboard in it, recording equipment, and he would sit and write songs all the time. So, of course, we would hear him going up and down the hall, you know, past his room on the bus, we’d hear him working on stuff.
And there was a lot of songs, I’d say, “Squire, what that song you’re working on? I want to hear the rest of that.” And he goes, “No, that one’s just between me and God.” And so he wrote a lot of stuff that never saw the light of day that he really just wrote for himself or as something to the Lord. Yeah.
Daniel Mount (51:19)
That’s really cool.
So are there plans then to maybe make more of those songs available to the public in the future, or is that just for their internal records you’re helping them?
Greg Bentley (51:32)
We’re trying to do both. We’re finding there’s a lot of catalog that actually never got registered correctly or fully. And so we’re trying to make sure all of that stuff gets through. Thankfully Squire had spent a lot of the last couple years actually putting demos, work tape demos down to a lot of stuff. And so we’re trying to go through that and be able to have that stuff, where artists can say, “I want a Squire song. This is what I’m looking for. Can you help me with it?”
Daniel Mount (52:02)
Yeah, neat.
Just a random thing I was wondering: Would Squire sing any of his songs live, or were there any songs he wrote that he viewed as being so associated with another group that he just didn’t do them?
Greg Bentley (52:14)
No, normally songs like “I’m Not Givin’ Up” or “If God Be For Us” that were big Gold City or Kingsmen songs through the years – He would do those a lot. In fact, “If God Be For Us” and “I’m Not Givin’ Up,” he would do the solo versions of those a whole lot. And then there were some of them that we actually made trio versions.
Actually, “I Go to the Rock” that the Kingdom Heirs cut, and then the Hoppers came back and did a more driving version of it: At church last week we’ve got a little quartet together and so…
Daniel Mount (52:45)
Well, Little Quartet! You got some… [laughter] You’re not the only name people know in that quartet.
Greg Bentley (52:57)
That’s true. Arthur Rice, a lot of people know Arthur Rice from his days with the Kingdom Heirs and of course some know him from the days with the Kingsmen. Arthur traveled with Squire for years, too. And so we were going to do that the other week at church. And I have to remind myself that it’s the Kingdom Heirs version, the real true quartet version.
Because when I was with Squire, when we recorded “I Go to the Rock”, we did a version that was much more towards The Hoppers-leaning. It’s got a lot more drive and some different step outs and stuff like that. And so we’re up there singing along and Arthur’s supposed to have the pickup for the chorus going back into it. Well, on the version that we always did, I had that one. And so I jump in there and thankfully, I had done a high part and it actually harmonized with Arthur. He looked at me and goes, “Wrong version, huh?”
Daniel Mount (53:51)
Yeah. [Laughter]
I think a couple more questions about Squire and then just for the sake of time I’ll wrap up here.
You did a trio called The Message, right?
Greg Bentley (54:01)
Yeah.
And then you did some solo stuff and then all kinds of interesting things behind the scenes that I’d love to revisit in another conversation. So maybe we’ll just wrap up with a couple more things about Squire for today.
Quite often I see just looking through SG History or from my personal collection, I see on his albums he’d record a song maybe even the same year that Gold City or Kingsmen or somebody else cut it. Do you know, chronologically, if he would tend to wait till somebody else cut it and then put it out later that year? Or if he’d put it out and then as soon as it’s out, it’s like a race between the groups so you can put out their version first?
Greg Bentley (54:36)
A lot of times Squire would record it first, and then he would use his album as the pitch tapes for other groups. Now if it happened to be a song that he did not pitch but two or three members of two or three different groups picked up a Squire album and said, “Hey, let’s record that,” then, like you said, it’s whoever grabs it first type of thing with that. But normally, he would actually record first, and then he would use those to pitch to the group.
Daniel Mount (55:07)
Okay.
So he did enough dates that weren’t the big Southern Gospel multi-artist dates, that other artists were comfortable? It wasn’t like all their audiences would have heard this song because Squier was doing enough dates of his own that were church dates or that kind of thing.
Greg Bentley (55:25)
Right. Yeah, we would normally do somewhere around 225 to 250 dates a year with Squire. And probably out of that, I would say…
Daniel Mount (55:39)
Okay.
Greg Bentley (55:45)
Maybe 20 to 30 of those dates were actually with another group, another main, like Kingsmen, Gold City, Hoppers, something like that. Almost the whole time was dates that were just Squire Parsons dates, or it was a date where we were working with a group from the area, local artists, stuff like that.
So it really didn’t affect us. You know, obviously, we would do like Singing at Sea cruise. Squire was a mainstay on that for many, many years. And so those times, then, obviously those groups were on there, but it never came into any kind of any kind of issue.
Daniel Mount (56:22)
Cool. Alright, last Squire question, and then I’ll start moving toward wrapping up this time for this conversation.
Same question as I asked for Claude and Connie. Now that he’s gone on to glory, there’s a new generation of fans who won’t get to know him in person. So can you describe what he was like? Personality, what he was like to travel with? I’ve heard you and others talk about his time in the Word. I’d love to hear you share some of that for people who won’t get to meet him in person.
Greg Bentley (56:46)
Yeah, Squire was a very special guy for sure. Very much grounded in the Word. Very much ministry-oriented. More so ministry-oriented, I would say, than he was business-oriented. You know, he was one of those who could have very easily charged a whole lot more to go sing than what he did.
But his thought is, “I want to take the gospel and the gospel in music to places that can’t afford to have a mainline artist, and I want to deliver the music in a first-class way of doing it.” And so that’s why we worked everything from Dr. Stanley’s church, Dr. Adrian Rogers’ church, Dr. Jim Henry’s church. We did all of the big Baptist churches, especially, back in the day. But it was nothing for us to be at, you know, Mount Zion Church in the middle of, you know, coal country in Kentucky that had 25 members. It never mattered to us. In fact, there was one church we actually did a couple times down near Gastonia in North Carolina where literally, and this is literally speaking, when I pulled the bus in beside the church, the bus was as long as the church building was, literally. Pack the building out, they could probably put 50 people in it. And that’s shoulder to shoulder. But we did it a couple of times, and those people just loved it.
Daniel Mount (58:07)
Wow.
Greg Bentley (58:25)
And I think that’s what people really enjoyed with Squire was the fact that he wanted to go where they needed it. Didn’t matter if they could afford to pay what the expenses were to run the bus and have four employees in his company. He thing was, always, “There’s a date somewhere down the road that’ll make up the difference.” The big Baptist churches, the big Methodist churches, the Church of Gods, you know, all the all the different ones that we went to that could afford to pay and wanted to pay a flat not an offering. They made up the difference for the churches that you know could barely pay in $500 to come. Yeah, just I mean it’s a great thing like that ministry-wise.
Squire was a blast to travel with. Most people didn’t realize he was a bit of a prankster. He loved pranks.
Daniel Mount (59:11)
Okay. Do you have any memorable ones that come to mind?
Greg Bentley (59:15)
With his boys traveling with him off and on through there, he would love to pull pranks on them. And so he would say, “Don’t say anything, but I hid this in Sam’s bed. It’s going to scare him to death when he gets in his bed, you know, but it’s in there.” Or he’d lock somebody in the bathroom on the bus, or you just, you know, you never knew what he was going to do. But he was a lot of fun to travel with, as well as being very ministry-oriented.
Daniel Mount (59:43)
Cool. Very neat.
Well, you’re a man of many talents and we’ve only talked about the onstage portion of them, but I’d love to catch up with you later and talk about more. For now though, how can people keep up with what Crossroads is doing, the latest from your artists, or keep up with what you’re doing if you’d like?
Greg Bentley (59:58)
Yeah, the best way, obviously like everybody else in the world today, the best way to keep up with Crossroads, our labels are Horizon Records and Sonlite Records, the gospel labels. The best way keep up with us is Facebook or Instagram, either one. And so just search out, I think on all the social media platforms, it’s Horizon Sonlite Records. We kind of combine the two, so we’d have two different ones for the labels. There’s really no difference in the two labels, just they started separately and so we kept them separate even though we joined everything together. So that’s the best way to keep up with it.
We’re really excited. Lot of great things going on. We’ve got, for the ones who maybe don’t know, we’ve got Kingsmen, Inspirations, Kingdom Heirs, 11th Hour, Mark Bishop, Lauren Talley.
We’ve got some newer groups: A group called Sound Street that records for us There’s a family group from up in Ohio called the Lore Family that record with us. We just signed a new group that I’m really excited about called the Rogers Family.
Daniel Mount (1:00:46)
Love those guys. Their livestreams of the Wyatt Austin hymn sings are special.
Greg Bentley (1:01:09)
Yes, yes, super talented and just such a sweet family. So we’ve got a lot of groups, a lot of new music that we’ve been working on, getting ready to come out. So keep following Horizon Sonlite Records on social media pages, and that’s kind of the best way to keep up with it.
Daniel Mount (1:01:16)
Perfect. And to the listener, I say thank you for listening to Southern Gospel Journal. Keep up with the latest episodes on YouTube, your favorite podcast platform, or on southerngospeljournal.com. Thanks for listening.
Greg Bentley (1:01:24)
Thanks, Daniel.