In the approach to Christmas 2022 several rock memoirs and other explorations of the genre were published that explored the place and influence of religion in rock music. These included Surrender, a memoir by Bono, the lead singer of U2, Faith, Hope and Carnage, a conversation between Nick Cave and the journalist Sean O’Hagan, a memoir entitled Walking Back Home by the lead singer of Deacon Blue, Ricky Ross, and Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song. Greg Clarke, writing about the former two books summed up their themes as being, “Submit, surrender, let God be God, recognise a higher power.” He wrote, “These are the concluding observations of two of the most famous musicians of the past forty years. It’s not very rock and roll.”
In this talk, I want to argue the reverse; that these themes of “Submit, surrender, let God be God, recognise a higher power” are actually very rock and roll. That’s because the roots of rock and soul music are to be found in Gospel music and because a variety of approaches to combining rock and religion have been practised since the birth of rock and roll in the 1950’s with a key distinction being whether one sings primarily about the light of Christ or about the way the world looks in the light of Christ.
In the early days of rock ‘n’ roll a unique event occurred; four of the biggest stars at the time happened to all be in the same recording studio at the very same time. They were Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee-Lewis, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. Although they were not there to record but they did start a jam session. Someone left the tapes rolling, recorded their jamming and later released it under the title of the Million Dollar Quartet.
So, what did these four rock ‘n’ rollers sing when they got together for this impromptu jam session? The answer is that they sang hymns and country gospel songs. Because they all grew up in Southern Pentecostal Churches they drew on a shared background of Spirituals, Gospel and the charismata of Southern Pentecostalism. In creating rock ‘n’ roll each substituted what they deemed as secular words and movements for sacred songs and mannerisms. For example, Elvis’ first musical inspirations came at his Pentecostal church services at the Assembly of God in Tupelo. He later reflected that the more reserved singers didn't seem to inspire much fervor, but others did. They would be "jumpin' on the piano, movin' every which way. The audience liked 'em. I guess I learned from them singers."
As Bill Flanagan wrote in his book ‘Written In My Soul’, 'Rock & roll was born in the American South … The whole history of rock & roll could be told in Southern accents, from the delta bluesmen and country troubadours to the Baptist gospel singers and Okie folkies.' Blues singers included ministers and evangelists, such as Revd Gary Davies and Blind Willie Johnson. Paul Ackerman, a scholar of poetry and songs, wrote the following about Country singer Hank Williams: ‘A country songwriter without a highly developed sense of religious values is rare, so it is natural that Hank wrote many songs with spiritual themes.’ The tradition of Christian socialism in the US is epitomized particularly in the life and music of the folk singer Woody Guthrie.
Something similar occurred as Soul music developed out of Black Gospel. Ray Charles began a trend which was later successfully followed by the like of Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin, among many others, when he introduced gospel-singing techniques and the exhortatory style of Pentecostal preachers into his vocal style and adapted church-based songs into R&B hits. Tony Cummings wrote that: 'From James Brown to Diana Ross, black singers consistently show their origins to be a storefront church in Harlem or Macon or Detroit ... it’s a cliché. Every soul artist interviewed seems to have an identikit story – “I was always interested in music. I sang in a church choir.'
All of which means that rock and soul music has a spirit that derives from the exuberance and ecstasy of Gospel music (songs like Every time I feel the Spirit and Up Above My Head). This inspirational spirit informs the music regardless of its often-secularized content. Gayle Wald wrote that: ‘Like rock music, Pentecostalism tapped into something -- a Holy Spirit -- or human spirit? Whatever it was, it was deep and it seems to embody the sacred-secular tensions that run throughout the amazing story of rock.’ The entire purpose of Pentecostalism was to play music that most let its adherents feel the Holy Spirit in their bodies. It is that spirit that is transposed into the feel and flow of rock and soul and it is this that gives rock and soul its affective nature. As James Cosby writes this is where ‘the heart, joy and sheer exhilaration of rock 'n' roll comes from.’
Rock ‘n’ Roll merged blues (with its spiritual strand) and Country music (tapping its white gospel) while Soul music adapted much of its sound and content from Black Gospel. For both, their gestures and movements were adopted from Pentecostalism. Some, such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Cooke, felt guilt at secularising Gospel while others, like Johnny Cash, arrived at a hard-earned integration of faith and music.
All experienced opposition from a Church angry at its songs and influence being appropriated for secular ends. This opposition fed a narrative that, on both sides, equated rock and pop with hedonism and rebellion, with the born-again Cliff Richard often perceived (both positively and negatively) as the only alternative. Rock music was called ‘The Devil’s Music’ as it emerged from the secular culture of the 1950s. 'Conservative Christians in the United States were by turns hostile to the transgressive race-mixing early-1950s rock ’n’ roll and Elvis Presley’s hip-grinding sexuality, relieved by the early-1960s white-boy surf and hot-rod bands, and subsequently horrified by the Beatles.' Despite this, the roots of rock and roll uncover the first way in which rock and religion have been fused, with the early rock and soul artists such as Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Sam Cooke all secularising Gospel music.
Each of these faced anxiety over their decision to substitute secular words and movements for sacred songs and mannerisms and that anxiety leads to two related strands within the interweaving of rock and religion. The first is that of rock stars who give up their rock star life in order to practice their religion or who oscillate between the two. Examples include Little Richard, who became, for a time, an evangelist of the Universal Church of the Remnant of God, and Al Green, who continues to lead his own church. An example from Islam is that of Cat Stevens, who has later returned to performance as Yusuf.
In the early and mid-1970s, the release of songs like “Let’s Stay Together,” “Love and Happiness,” “Tired of Being Alone,” and “Take Me to The River” made Al Green one of the most successful soul and pop singers in the world. However, as the decade progressed, Green suffered an existential crisis, prompted by a questioning of his own increasingly decadent lifestyle, as well as by the death of a girlfriend who scalded him with hot grits before shooting and killing herself. He also claims to have had a religious reawakening after performing a concert at Disneyland, as well as periodic meltdowns on stage. All of this led to his abandonment of popular music, his purchase of a Memphis church building, his installation of himself as the pastor of that church, and the start of a part-time career as gospel artist. The 1984 film GOSPEL ACCORDING TO AL GREEN tells Green’s story and shows the continuing power of his performances and the intimacy of his storytelling.
A less drastic alternative was to record Gospel albums alongside secular albums, a strategy used by many from Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard to Aretha Franklin. Ron Wynn writes of Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace that ‘Franklin disproved the notion that once you leave the church, you can't go back. She returned in triumph on this 1972 double album, making what might be her greatest release ever in any style. Her voice was chilling, making it seem as if God and the angels were conducting a service alongside Franklin, Rev. James Cleveland, the Southern California Community Choir, and everyone else in attendance. Her versions of "How I Got Over" and "You've Got a Friend" are legendary.’
With the majority of Soul stars having begun singing in Church, many of the most effective integrations of faith and music were found there with Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and the Gospel-folk of the Staple Singers being among the best and most socially committed examples. Gospel featured directly with Billy Preston, Edwin Hawkins Singers and with Aretha Franklin’s gospel albums. Mainstream use of Christian themes or imagery in rock were initially either unsustained (e.g. Blind Faith’s ‘Presence of the Lord’ and Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit in the Sky’) or obscure (e.g. C.O.B.’s Moyshe McStiff and the Tartan Lancers of the Sacred Heart and Bill Fay’s Time of the Last Persecution).
This is where Russ Ballard’s song ‘God gave Rock and Roll to You’, written for Argent but made famous by Kiss, fits in this story. ‘God Gave Rock And Roll To You represented the end of his own dark night of the soul. “I felt blissful when I started writing God Gave Rock And Roll To You,” he reflects, “and that was the opposite of how I’d felt the year before. My parents had both been really ill; my dad had prostate cancer, my mum had bowel cancer, at the same time. I’d felt so low.’
“It was wonderful to feel myself come out of that depression,” Ballard recalls. “I felt so ‘up’. It probably only took twenty minutes to write it. I’d always liked gospel. With the lyric, I was saying that we live on this incredible planet, and when you find a passion, this world makes sense. Whereas, if you settle for a job to pay the bills, it’s very sad.”
‘Russ Ballard believes God Gave Rock And Roll To You’s message lives on, now more than ever. “I think the song will resonate for the next hundred years,” he considers, “whether people want to believe there’s a god or not. For me, music has been my saviour. God gave rock’n’roll to me, basically. That’s what I was trying to say.”’ (https://www.loudersound.com/features/argent-god-gave-rock-and-roll-to-you-the-story-behind-the-song)
This situation changed in three ways, however. First, the Church began to appropriate rock and pop to speak explicitly about Christian faith. This led to the emergence of a new genre, Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), with interaction between CCM and the mainstream. Mainstream artists such as Philip Bailey, David Grant, Al Green, Larry Norman and Candi Staton developed CCM careers while artists originally within CCM such as Delirious?, Martyn Joseph, Julie Miller, Leslie (Sam) Phillips, Sixpence None The Richer and Switchfoot achieved varying levels of mainstream exposure and success. One result was that 'rock music became the musical lingua franca of emerging non-denominational Evangelicalism: the music that the conservative Evangelicals rejected became the cornerstone of Evangelical liturgy.'
Larry Norman is often thought of as one of the founding figures of CCM but actually began his career recording for mainstream record labels and singing songs that named the name of Jesus and critiqued the society in which he lived. As a pioneer in writing Rock music explicitly from the perspective of a Christian, he attracted criticism from the Church and from the record industry with critics claiming that he was “too rock and roll for the Church and too religious for the rock and rollers.” Eventually, the pressure from the record companies became too much and he launched his own record label which played an important role in establishing the separate strand of music that we now know as CCM. However, while he was recording for mainstream labels, he wrote many songs that were not simply about the light of Christ but also about what you can see by that light. An example is the song Nightmare#71 from ‘So Long Ago The Garden’ which uses a dream format to speak a prophetic warning to Western society that is still relevant even though it was first released in 1973.
Second, the biblical language and imagery of stars like Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Nick Cave began to be understood and appreciated (helped to varying degrees by explicitly ‘Christian’ periods in the work of Dylan and Van the Man).
Dylan comes from the tradition of hobo singers (Woody Guthrie) and beat poets (Jack Kerouac) for whom the journey and the documenting of their experience is life itself. Dylan as journeyman, as traveller, is the key insight of the liner notes for ‘Tell Tale Signs’ where Larry Sloman signs off with a paragraph quoting a myriad of Dylan's lyrics:
"He ain't talking, but he's still walking, heart burning, still yearning. He's trampling through the mud, through the blistering sun, getting damp from the misty rain. He's got his top hat on, ambling along with his cane, stopping to watch all the young men and young women in their bright-coloured clothes cavorting in the park. Despite all the grief and devastation he's seen on his odyssey, his heart isn't weary, it's light and free, bursting all over with affection for all those who sailed with him. Deep down he knows that his loyal and much-loved companions approve of him and share his code. And it's dawn now, the sun beginning to shine down on him and his heart is still in the Highlands, over those hills, far away. But there's a way to get there and if anyone can, he'll figure it out. And in the meantime, he's already there in his mind. That mind decidedly out of time. And we're all that much richer for his journey."
Dylan's manifesto for his work is A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall; a song about walking through a world which is surreal and unjust and singing what he sees:
"I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin' ..."
In the song he walks through a surreal and unjust world, ahead of him he sees a gathering apocalyptic storm and he resolves to walk in the shadow of the storm and sing out what he sees:
"... 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten,
Where black is the colour, where none is the number.
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect from the mountain so that all souls can see it ...".
This then is the other key element to Dylan's journey and work; the idea of journeying in face of the coming apocalypse. What we have in the best of Dylan is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century culture.
Third, musicians such as After The Fire, The Alarm, T. Bone Burnett, The Call, Peter Case, Bruce Cockburn, Deacon Blue, Extreme, Galactic Cowboys, Innocence Mission, Kings X, Lone Justice, Buddy & Julie Miller, Over The Rhine, Ricky Ross, 16 Horsepower, The Staple Singers, U2, Violent Femmes, Gillian Welch, Jim White, and Victoria Williams rather than singing about the light (of Christ) instead sang about the world which they saw through the light (of Christ).
As rock and pop fragmented into a myriad of genres, this approach to the expression of faith continues in the work of Eric Bibb, Blessid Union of Souls, Creed, Brandon Flowers, Good Charlotte, Ben Harper, Michael Kiwanuka, Ed Kowalczyk, Lifehouse, Live, Low, Neal Morse, Mumford and Sons, Robert Randolph and the Family Band, Scott Stapp, and Woven Hand.
The Staple Singers have been called “God’s greatest hitmakers.” Steeped in the music of the church, this singing family from Mississippi crossed into the pop mainstream without compromising their gospel roots. The clan’s musical signatures have been patriarch Roebuck “Pops” Staples’ gospel-based songwriting and bluesy guitar, Mavis Staples’ rich, raspy vocals and the supple, ringing harmonies of Cleotha and Yvonne Staples. In the '60s they transitioned from strictly gospel songs to freedom songs and then to message songs like 'Respect Yourself', 'If You Are Ready (Come Go With Me)', 'Reach Out, Touch A Hand' and 'I'll Take You There'. As a result, the Staples Singers have left an imprint of soulful voices, social activism, religious conviction and danceable “message music” across the decades since the release of “Uncloudy Day” in 1956.
T. Bone Burnett is a Southern musician who got his first major break playing in the band for Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour and has gone on to have a successful recording and production career. It is Burnette who said that he “learned early on that if you believe Jesus is the Light of the World there are two kinds of song you can write – you can write songs about the light or about what you might see by the light.” Burnett has written a number of witty, erudite and critically acclaimed songs that address the distortions about which O’Connor wrote. In Hefner & Disney, a short story set to music, Burnette turns our understanding of the stories we tell ourselves on their head and claims that in our sentimentality and sensuality we are all dupes of the wicked King who wants to rob the children of their dreams.
Through his soundtrack to the film ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou’ and the subsequent ‘Down From The Mountain’ concert and film, Burnett played a part in a resurgence of interest in the country and bluegrass music of the American South. One tradition that he has highlighted has been the Appalachian country death songs; gothic backwoods ballads of mortality and disaster. The Violent Femmes are one band that have taken this tradition and who have used it to confront their audience with the reality of sin.
At one point in his career, Burnett found that his songs critiquing society were being misunderstood by people who thought he was simply pointing the finger at others. Because he believed that any discussion of morality has to begin with oneself he switched many of his songs from the second to the first person. So, instead of singing, “He couldn’t help but notice her,” he would now sing, “I couldn’t help but notice her.” To reinforce the point he later wrote a song entitled The Criminal Under My Own Hat. David Eugene Edwards, lead singer with Sixteen Horsepower and later Woven Hand, sums up this approach when he says that his songs are all about the fact that we are all in trouble, that we all need a Saviour.
In talking about his album ‘We walk this Road’, which was produced by T. Bone Burnett, Robert Randolph has said of Burnett:
"T Bone opened a lot of doors for me serving as a link between the past and the present. He knows how to take something from the past and bring it into the present while still allowing the artist to make it his own, in the same way that Hendrix took Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” and made it belong to him.
T Bone listens to music that our grandmothers would listen to as children – not even music that our fathers listened to, but songs that go even further back ... some from Gospel and Christian blues, the music that people working in fields across the south likely sang nearly a century ago. Those are the real roots of rock and roll, where everything else comes from ...
Before this record, I didn’t sift through music past the Seventies. I didn’t know about Blind Willie Johnson, or Chess Records. I thank T Bone for being a tour guide into the deepest parts of my musical roots. We connected the last one hundred years of African-American music in the way people used to: You write your own songs, you cover other people’s material, you re-work older songs ...
My goal is to open the door for people, in the same way that musical doors have been opened for me. I want to take this musical history and make it relevant to give people a better idea of who I am and where I came from. I think even though I’m a young guy who was born into the era of hip-hop and contemporary gospel, I can help bridge the cultural gap between people who are seventy-five years old and kids who are fifteen years old by reaching back into this history of music.
‘We Walk This Road’ was done in our belief in what we all need right now: young voices saying something positive without preaching in hopes of inspiring people. When you stick to what you believe in, and with the roots of where you come from, things will always work out."
I end with a final and very contemporary example using a quote from John Thompson, who writes regularly on the history of Jesus Music (or CCM):
“The debut solo album by Natalie Bergman, for instance, absolutely does offer a call back to the roots of “Jesus Music.” Mercy, released earlier this year on Jack White’s Third Man Records, blends elements of West African world music, 60s Motown Soul, psychedelia-tinged Gospel blues, and mercurial folk as a backdrop for Bergman’s mournful yet lovely lyrics. Though songs like “He Will Lift You Up Higher,” “Shine Your Light on Me,” and “Talk To the Lord,” all spring from a place of pain and loss after a shocking death in her family, they are as obviously and unselfconsciously devotional as any of the early tunes by [Jesus Music performers] Larry Norman, Honeytree, or Love Song. In fact, I suspect it is precisely because of Bergman’s posture as a person in need, hands and heart open, and with no awareness of or compulsion to cater to market pressures, labels, or expectations in the faith-based economy, that she has been able to craft an album that is so inviting, innovative, and effective. It’s fascinating to me that this year [2021], with two films [‘The Jesus Music’ and ‘Electric Jesus’] delving into the roots of Christian rock and pop, it is a mainstream artist with no awareness of the evangelical subculture who has dropped the most compelling Roots Gospel, true “Jesus Music” album of the last several years, if not decades. One hopes it might inspire other young artists to re-calibrate their concepts of what Jesus Music can, and even should, be in troubled times.”
For more on these themes, see 'The Secret Chord', my co-authored book which is an accessible exploration of artistic dilemmas from a range of different perspectives seeking to draw the reader into a place of appreciation for what makes a moment in a 'performance' timeless and special.
Other relevant books to read include: ‘The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll’ by Randall J. Stephens; ‘Why should the Devil have all the Good Music? : Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock’ by Gregory Thornbury; ‘Hungry for Heaven: Rock 'N' Roll & the Search for Redemption’ by Steve Turner; ‘The Rock Cries Out: Discovering Eternal Truth in Unlikely Music’ by Steve Stockman; ‘The Rock & Roll Rebellion’, ‘Faith, God and Rock 'n Roll: How People of Faith Are Transforming American Popular Music’ and ‘Rock Gets Religion: The Battle for the Soul of the Devil's Music’, all by Mark Joseph.
Also worth checking out are: the website for ROCK OF AGES: Jesus in Popular Music, a multi-disciplinary research project by Delvyn Case exploring 50 years of secular songs about the Son of God (https://www.delvyncase.com/jesus); and Jesus Is Just Alright, a series of videos exploring the many guises in which Jesus has appeared in pop songs over the past 50 years (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO43Y1gJDjYRhlIaLhyd_ldMyOiZTMa6_).
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Aretha Franklin - Climbing Higher Mountains.
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