NEW song

Evie, the Christian music singing star from the ’70s, retuned her ‘instrument’ in 2006 and began touring again.

Posted: November 26, 2009 at 7:50 a.m.

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LITTLE ROCK — She was once one of the biggest names in contemporary Christian music - so popular among evangelicals that she needed no last name.

Evie.

In the 1970s, her angelic voice and covergirl good looks drew multitudes to the Sydney Opera House in Australia and Carnegie Hall in New York. Her albums topped the Christian music charts. She sang at Billy Graham crusades in Seattle and Anaheim, Calif.

In 1977 and 1978, she was the Gospel Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year.

But in 1979, the Christian music pioneer married Swedish minister Pelle Karlsson.

And in 1981, at age 25, she announced her retirement. She raised two children in Florida and shied away from the spotlight as the decades slipped by.

Today, Evie’s albums are out of print. Her accomplishments are largely forgotten.

“The younger kids don’t know who in the world I am,” Evie Tornquist Karlsson said, laughing a bit.

There’s no bitterness in her voice. No disbelief. Her smile is warm and wide. And her voice is still glorious.

Inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2005, Evie returned to the road in 2006, accepting second billing on a tour with Grammy winner Rebecca St. James. They’ve been traveling together, off and on, ever since.

Instead of Carnegie Hall, Evie’s new itinerary takes her to places such as First Baptist Church in Cabot, where she appeared recently. She is 53 years old.

During Karlsson’s interview in Cabot, St.

James grabs a cup of coffee and then claims a chair beside her mentor and friend.

St. James knows about the glory days, back in the 1970s. “You still have the same dimples, the same light in your eyes,” St. James says to Karlsson.

Evie smiles in response and the dimples reappear.

The music industry has changed dramatically since Evie dominated the industry. Back then, her albums were sold primarily at mom-and-pop Christian bookstores, not at Target or Wal-Mart. Christian music’s mecca, way back then, was Waco, Texas, not Nashville, Tenn. Billboard magazine didn’t track Christian music sales. Artists like Evie flew completely under the mainstream media’s radar.

She was a regular on Christian television, appearing on The PTL Club “hundreds of times,” she says, exaggerating only slightly. “Jim and Tammy. And The 700 Club. Those were good days.”

Once, she says, Johnny Carson wanted her to be on The Tonight Show. But there was just one catch. The King of Late Night didn’t want her to sing about Jesus. Or God. It was a compromise Evie refused to make.

Asked what it was like being the most popular Christian woman singer of the 1970s, Evie equivocates. She’s not sure she was the most beloved, the most famous, the most popular.

Finally, Evie says that she and St. James are amazed by it all. “It’s that sense of awe that the Lord would choose to use us. It’s that understanding from the very get-go that anything we’re experiencing is because of God’s grace.”

Evie says she can’t take any “personal glory” for what she has accomplished, comparing herself to a piano that never makes music on its own.

“I’m the instrument that the virtuoso Creator plays and I just have to make sure that I stay in tune and realize my part,” she says. “But unless He plays me, I’m just a piece of furniture in the corner of the room.”

Religion, Pages 40 on 11/26/2009

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