The Holliman sisters have voices like angels. In 1972, when their father, Garland, hears the girls’ beautiful harmonies, he decides to start a family gospel group with his wife Big Jean and four teenage children: the twins, Jeannie and Junior, and their younger sisters, Debbie and Patty. The Gospelettes become a popular act, traveling throughout Kentucky and the surrounding states spreading the gospel in song. But as society outgrows their way of life, changes are encroaching even on their small town and the sheltered Holliman children.

The Evolution of the Gospelettes follows the family and their transformation from old-time gospel singers in the 1970s to performers on a televangelist program in the 1980s to founding members of a megachurch in the 1990s. As the new millennium approaches, Jeannie, whose beliefs have evolved and irreversibly departed from her family’s, fears what will happen the more entrenched they become in fundamentalist thinking and finds herself in a fight to save the people she loves from self-destruction.

This debut novel is a compelling exploration of family ties and rifts, faith and doubt, and holiness and hypocrisy in a changing world.

2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze Winner

Praise:

I can’t remember when I’ve enjoyed reading a new novel so much! Filled with music, food, and love, The Evolution of the Gospelettes is an absolutely irresistible novel–so smart, so warm and wise and knowledgeable. Through the universal metaphor of music, it tells more about our changing region than any book I have read in years. I literally couldn’t put it down. I couldn’t stop reading to cook supper!

~Lee Smith, author of Dimestore: A Writer’s Life

Nuanced, funny, and hugely entertaining look at faith, doubt, hypocrisy, and holiness. . . . A remarkable debut.

~Silas House, author of Lark Ascending: A Novel

Oberhausen writes with such fierce, tender regard for her characters, even for—especially for—the broken ones. At turns sweeping and intimate, ambitious and unassuming, The Evolution of the Gospelettes is a brilliant debut.

~Holly Goddard Jones, author of The Salt Line

The litmus test for a great novel is this: the reader who begins its first page is different from the person who finishes its last page. Tammy Oberhausen achieves exactly that in The Evolution of the Gospelettes. Like the Holliman family of musicians, especially Jeannie Holliman—singer, songwriter, and bandleader—readers will be profoundly changed for the better by this unforgettable and irresistible story.

~Lorraine M. López, author of Homicide Survivors Picnic and Other Stories

Your heart will raise to the sky a psalm of thanksgiving for this gift of a book, a heart-gripping chronicle of a family’s fraught journey through time, travail, faith, and enduring love, on a river of song.

~Jeff Zentner, award-winning author of Colton Gentry’s Third Act

A piercing, entertaining historical novel . . . humorous [and] poignant.

~Foreword Reviews

Oberhausen depicts a vivid and disarming portrait [and] shines an acute lens on the inner workings of the church, finding duplicity, insincerity, and doubt along with spirituality, faith, and holiness, and asks us to examine the true meaning of religious beliefs.

~Booklist

Deep South Magazine Selection for Fall-Winter Reading List 2024-25