Preacher’s son finds his roots on cable

“They’ve grown pretty dramatically in number of subscribers,” said Derek Baine, a senior analyst at SNLKagan.

He estimates its income shot up as well. From 2007 to 2008, GMC’s advertising revenue went from $6.5 million to $13.5 million, Baine believes.

The channel, privately owned by investors Humbard spent two years assembling after he walked away from a career at the Discovery Channel, does not release earnings. But it’s no secret that since its earliest days, television has provided a living for the Humbard family.

Humbard’s father was the guitar-strumming, singing preacher Rex Humbard, who started his TV show in 1952. He added his four children as singers and musicians and then his grandchildren by the mid 1960s. At the height of its popularity in the 1970s, more than 1,000 U.S. and foreign stations carried the “Cathedral of Tomorrow” broadcast.

“As Dad said, ‘If you don’t sing, you don’t eat,’” Humbard said. “He said that lightly, but we got it.”

Humbard, now 48, and his sister Elizabeth appeared in their first TV special when he was 7 and she was 10. “Elizabeth and Charley Visit the Holy Land,” he said, was a six-week shoot in Jerusalem and other sites from Jesus’ life.

Humbard left his father’s show before its demise in the 1980s and parlayed backstage skills into a successful career in secular TV. He worked his way to a senior vice president at Discovery Channel before the appeal of music led to Gospel Music Channel.

GMC offers music videos in every style from high church to hip hop, talk shows and insider reports. But music — mostly gospel and Christian — is the channel’s soul and the ingredient that allowed Humbard to put his heart into it.

“It is very deep in all of us,” Humbard said. “You know how a song can do — a song can take you to a place, a time, and make you think about something totally different. It can make you excited, make you angry. It can make you energized. It is a combination of the gift of language and the gift of sound. I think it speaks to us.”

Country-tinged gospel was what he heard first. His dad began playing, singing and telling gospel stories on rural Arkansas radio stations. The family relocated to Ohio, where the ministry operated in the 5,400-seat Cathedral of Tomorrow, designed in the round for broadcasts.

As a kid, young Charley hung around Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, Mahalia Jackson and Andre Crouch. He met Elvis, a family friend. By 7, he was teaching himself guitar.

Peter Geiger, now a retired reporter from the Akron Beacon Journal, covered the ministry. Humbard was a laid-back teenager in a strict religious family who loved strumming songs, he said by phone.

“His mother forbade him from playing secular country-and-western music. But there were occasional moments when his [two] older brothers would get apart from the family and start singing the hits of the day, and Charley knew the words,” Geiger said.

Elizabeth Humbard Darling of Atlanta, his sister, said Humbard also wrote songs the family performed and other gospel singers recorded. Charley “was always really more interested in the behind-the-scenes, the filming, how it worked,” she said.

Mike Privette, the road manager for Rex Humbard’s show, recalls young Humbard asking Privette if he would bang on a piano in a recording studio so Humbard could practice manipulating the slides, dials and switches on a recording board.

Humbard’s love for production and experience with audio technology — which his dad bought to help translate the show into 90 languages — eventually helped land him a job in secular TV. He worked for Turner Broadcasting System and Crawford Communications in the late 1980s in Atlanta, where he met his Ohio-born wife, Jennifer. By the late 1990s, he was helping run Discovery Channel in Washington.

But soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, Humbard resigned and moved his wife and sons, Dillan and Harrison, to Atlanta to be near his parents, who lived here at the time, and near Elizabeth and his cousins while he worked on business ideas, such as melding the growing electronic gaming world with TV.

Privette, who had also moved to Atlanta, mentioned a little Tennessee cable channel for sale that was devoted to gospel music.

“I felt like somebody poured warm oil over my head to my toes,” Humbard said of Privette’s offhand remark. “A light went on and I said, ‘Boy, that just connects my two worlds. There is 20 years in gospel music and 20 years in cable going, Boom! A channel for gospel and Christian music fans. There’s nothing like this.’”

One big thing stood between him and the channel — the average $100 million it would take to start and fund a new cable operation with top-notch production, Humbard said.

Humbard called contacts, seeking advice and potential investors who would view the channel not as a ministry but as a profit-driven business, he said.

“I had to find real venture capitalists for real money ... that would understand the [initial] losses you have in cable,” he said. “I had seen those losses at Discovery Channel when I built their business plans. And I knew as an independent it was going to be even harder.”

He drafted a former co-worker and president at TBS, Brad Siegel. In two years, they had enough investors — Humbard declines to say how much they put up — to start their own channel from scratch and start broadcasting.

Gospel and Christian music has a huge fan base that bought 56 million albums and digital tracks worth $551 million in 2008, according to the Gospel Music Association.

Ed Leonard, the association’s president, said the Gospel Music Channel has helped bring even more exposure for the artists.

“Brad and Charley have made an incredible impact on our industry by launching and developing Gospel Music Channel as a national TV platform for Christian and Gospel music and entertainment,” he said.

When he surveyed viewers of more than 40 channels in 2007 and 2008, media economist Jack Myers at M.E.D.I.Advisory found that Gospel Music Channel viewers registered the highest emotional connections and passionate responses.

For fans, the music on GMC is more than just entertainment, Myers said. “The content of the music has relevance and importance in their lives.”

That is something Humbard understood from the beginning. From the sense of mission of his father, an old-fashioned evangelist calling people to come to Jesus, Humbard has translated his own musical mission.

“I think my role is not necessarily praying sinner’s prayer with the people, but I do have a role in making people think about where their soul is, where they are in relationship with God,” Humbard said. “We are using stories of other people, by other people, to help people reflect on where they are spiritually.”