Yesterday's Independent had a feature on the Million Dollar Quartet, in the light of the new musical of that name which opens at the Noel Coward Theatre on 28th February.
The musical is inspired by the fabled Million Dollar Quartet of 4 December 1956, when Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, all enjoying the first flushes of success, found themselves in the same studio. The show imagines these fathers of rock'n'roll and country bashing out hits including "Blue Suede Shoes", "Folsom Prison Blues", "That's All Right", "I Walk the Line", "Great Balls of Fire", "Hound Dog", "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and many more.
But as the article points out that wasn't what happened at all. The truth is less immediately satisfying but much more interesting. There is no evidence that they played any of these songs – none are on the tapes. Instead, there are fragments of gospel and standards, with a smattering of rock'n'roll.
What this demonstrates is the extent to which rock and pop music emerged out of the Church. The early stars of Rock 'n' Roll, like Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, drew on a shared background of Spirituals, Gospel, the charismata of Southern Pentecostalism and all faced anxiety over their decision to substitute secular words and movements for sacred songs and mannerisms.
This influence formed the centrepiece of Mick Csaky's BBC biopic, The Godmother of Rock & Roll: Sister Rosetta Tharpe. During the 40s, 50s and 60s Sister Rosetta Tharpe played a highly significant role in the creation of rock and roll, inspiring musicians like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. She may not be a household name, but this flamboyant African-American gospel singing superstar, with her spectacular virtuosity on the newly-electrified guitar, was one of the most influential popular musicians of the 20th century.
Tharpe was born in 1915, close to the Mississippi in Cotton Plant, Arkansas. At the age of six she was taken by her evangelist mother Katie Bell to Chicago to join Roberts Temple, Church of God in Christ, where she developed her distinctive style of singing and guitar playing. At the age of 23 she left the church and went to New York to join the world of show business, signing with Decca Records. For the following 30 years she performed extensively to packed houses in the USA and subsequently Europe, before her death in 1973.
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The Million Dollar Quartet - Just A Little Talk With Jesus.
Showing posts with label lee lewis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lee lewis. Show all posts
Saturday, 22 January 2011
Wednesday, 21 May 2008
God Gave Rock 'N' Roll To You (4)
As Robert Beckford pointed out the history of rock & roll is shot through with divides or splits between sacred and secular, flesh and Spirit but the artists we have thinking about in this series are saying that there are no splits and are bringing these unneccesarily divided concepts back together. They look towards the reconciliation of opposites, towards wholeness and affirmation, but recognise that, although we know of the existence of wholeness because of Christ, we are not yet whole ourselves. Like the characters in Flannery O’Connor’s novels we are, at best, incomplete – even the good, she felt, has a grotesque face, because “in us the good is something under construction.” One band who exemplify this approach to raising issues of faith in their music are U2.
In their songs, U2 celebrate the possibility of becoming one, of building a bridge between the sea and land, of coming home, of going where the streets have no name and, of believing in the Kingdom Come when all the colours will bleed into one. Theirs is a spirituality in which everything can be affirmed because everything can be transformed by grace. But they also affirm the ugliness and failure in our world, and in people like themselves. So, they sing of falling down, of being out of control, of losing their way in the shadows where boy meets man, of falling from the sheer face of love like a fly from a wall. In common with the Psalms, they mourn and rail at the pain and division experienced in the world - Ireland’s bloody Sunday, El Salvador’s bullets in the blue sky and Argentina’s Mother’s of the Disappeared.
In their hands these two poles are not opposed instead, both are embraced. The Edge has said that: "We never did resolve the contradictions … And probably never will. There's even more contradictions now ... but it's a contradiction I'm able to live with". Contradictions that you are able to live with. This is where U2 take us - to an affirmation of both the goodness and fallen-ness of human beings. Into the still centre at the heart of the storm of contradiction to give a different take on reconciliation. Bono echoed the same theme in talking about their albums Achtung Baby and Zooropa: "I decided that the only way was, instead of running away from the contradictions, I should run into them and wrap my arms around them and give 'em a big kiss".
Their song The Fly was written as a phone call from Hell, a description of the world as we know it - in darkness, the stars falling from the sky, the Universe exploded because of one man’s lie. In this dark world we live in the middle of contradictions with much that we’d like to rearrange although often all we achieve is to kill our inspiration and sing about the grief. In performance on the ZooTV tours these contradictions were magnified through the projection of aphorisms onto monitors symbolising the overload of information we receive in an IT age.
This embrace of contradiction reflects our age and challenges it, at one and the same time. U2’s idea is to use the energy of what's going against us - and by that they mean popular culture, commerce, science - to defend ourselves. Rather than resistance in the hippie or punk sense of the word, we try to walk through it, rather than walk away from it. To describe the age can be to challenge it. The job of artists is to describe the problem, the contradictions, "to describe what's going on, describe the attraction, and be generous enough not to wave your finger at it as it’s going by". U2 look for 'diamonds in the dirt', shining, transcendent moments; sex and music as places where you glimpse God. They trawl through the state of confusion that is the contemporary moment - reflecting, mocking, embracing, describing, describing your attraction to it - in order to glimpse God, resist or mock the devil and be a harbinger of grace. To cling to the face of love and shine like a burning star.
“Rock & roll was born in the American South,” writes Bill Flanagan, in his book Written On My Soul: “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.” The contradictions between sacred and secular, flesh and Spirit that Jerry Lee Lewis and Al Green felt and which U2 embrace derive from the American South because, as Flannery O’Connor wrote, the South “is Christ-haunted.” To see the extent to which this is true watch the film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus in which alt. country singer-songwriter Jim White takes you on a tour of the South as he knows it.
Jim White shows us desperate people with a hell-fire religion and a God who will whup the ass of those prefer the sinful flesh over the Holy Spirit. But here, he claims, you also feel the presence of the Spirit – it’s alive and awake and in the blood of those who live in the South. The musicians that we have thought about in this series have taken this understanding of Christianity, with its divide between flesh and Spirit, secular and sacred, and instead of falling into that divide, as people like Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley did, have used its strengths to speak powerfully about the reality of sin, the holiness of the ordinary and the partial reconciliation of contradictions. In doing so, they have taken the route that T. Bone Burnett signposted of writing more about what you can see by the Light of Christ than about the Light itself.
How have the musicians mentioned in this series made use of the cultural understanding of Christianity that they gained from the American South in their music?
Do you think they have used that cultural heritage to present a more nuanced understanding of Christianity than that that is commonly found in the American South?
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U2 - The Fly.
In their songs, U2 celebrate the possibility of becoming one, of building a bridge between the sea and land, of coming home, of going where the streets have no name and, of believing in the Kingdom Come when all the colours will bleed into one. Theirs is a spirituality in which everything can be affirmed because everything can be transformed by grace. But they also affirm the ugliness and failure in our world, and in people like themselves. So, they sing of falling down, of being out of control, of losing their way in the shadows where boy meets man, of falling from the sheer face of love like a fly from a wall. In common with the Psalms, they mourn and rail at the pain and division experienced in the world - Ireland’s bloody Sunday, El Salvador’s bullets in the blue sky and Argentina’s Mother’s of the Disappeared.
In their hands these two poles are not opposed instead, both are embraced. The Edge has said that: "We never did resolve the contradictions … And probably never will. There's even more contradictions now ... but it's a contradiction I'm able to live with". Contradictions that you are able to live with. This is where U2 take us - to an affirmation of both the goodness and fallen-ness of human beings. Into the still centre at the heart of the storm of contradiction to give a different take on reconciliation. Bono echoed the same theme in talking about their albums Achtung Baby and Zooropa: "I decided that the only way was, instead of running away from the contradictions, I should run into them and wrap my arms around them and give 'em a big kiss".
Their song The Fly was written as a phone call from Hell, a description of the world as we know it - in darkness, the stars falling from the sky, the Universe exploded because of one man’s lie. In this dark world we live in the middle of contradictions with much that we’d like to rearrange although often all we achieve is to kill our inspiration and sing about the grief. In performance on the ZooTV tours these contradictions were magnified through the projection of aphorisms onto monitors symbolising the overload of information we receive in an IT age.
This embrace of contradiction reflects our age and challenges it, at one and the same time. U2’s idea is to use the energy of what's going against us - and by that they mean popular culture, commerce, science - to defend ourselves. Rather than resistance in the hippie or punk sense of the word, we try to walk through it, rather than walk away from it. To describe the age can be to challenge it. The job of artists is to describe the problem, the contradictions, "to describe what's going on, describe the attraction, and be generous enough not to wave your finger at it as it’s going by". U2 look for 'diamonds in the dirt', shining, transcendent moments; sex and music as places where you glimpse God. They trawl through the state of confusion that is the contemporary moment - reflecting, mocking, embracing, describing, describing your attraction to it - in order to glimpse God, resist or mock the devil and be a harbinger of grace. To cling to the face of love and shine like a burning star.
“Rock & roll was born in the American South,” writes Bill Flanagan, in his book Written On My Soul: “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.” The contradictions between sacred and secular, flesh and Spirit that Jerry Lee Lewis and Al Green felt and which U2 embrace derive from the American South because, as Flannery O’Connor wrote, the South “is Christ-haunted.” To see the extent to which this is true watch the film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus in which alt. country singer-songwriter Jim White takes you on a tour of the South as he knows it.
Jim White shows us desperate people with a hell-fire religion and a God who will whup the ass of those prefer the sinful flesh over the Holy Spirit. But here, he claims, you also feel the presence of the Spirit – it’s alive and awake and in the blood of those who live in the South. The musicians that we have thought about in this series have taken this understanding of Christianity, with its divide between flesh and Spirit, secular and sacred, and instead of falling into that divide, as people like Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley did, have used its strengths to speak powerfully about the reality of sin, the holiness of the ordinary and the partial reconciliation of contradictions. In doing so, they have taken the route that T. Bone Burnett signposted of writing more about what you can see by the Light of Christ than about the Light itself.
How have the musicians mentioned in this series made use of the cultural understanding of Christianity that they gained from the American South in their music?
Do you think they have used that cultural heritage to present a more nuanced understanding of Christianity than that that is commonly found in the American South?
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U2 - The Fly.
Thursday, 8 May 2008
God Gave Rock 'N' Roll To You (1)
Rock and pop music, in large part, emerged out of the Church. Its early stars, like the ‘Million Dollar Quartet’ of Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, drew on a shared background of Spirituals, Gospel, the charismata of Southern Pentecostalism and all faced anxiety over their decision to substitute secular words and movements for sacred songs and mannerisms.
This beginning, which was felt as a betrayal of sacred music by those involved and by the Churches that judged them has meant that, for the most part, Christian churches have been hostile to the music that young people choose to listen to, and the music industry has responded with equal hostility, believing that any song with 'Jesus' in the title will sink without trace. Robert Beckford made that argument in a Channel 4 programme shown a couple of Christmasses ago and to ground his argument pointed to the drug culture and Eastern religions that characterised Flower Power in the 60s, the influence of Satanism in Heavy Metal, Black Metal and Shock Rock, the commitment of many hip hop artists to the Nation of Islam and the way in which the Christian Right in the US has sought to censor many such artists since the 1980s.
That programme ended with Beckford giving an impassioned plea for the Church to effectively engage with popular culture. That is something I endorse at the same time as being amazed by the extent to which Beckford’s argument overlooked many significant figures in Rock and Pop who have sought to express their faith through their music. If you watched God Gave Rock And Roll To You you would have come away with the impression that apart from Cliff Richard, Kanye West, and Matisyahu, the Hasidic reggae star, no one else in the history of Rock and Pop has ever dared to challenge the concensus that Religion and Rock and Roll do not mix.
The reality is far more complicated and in this series of posts I'm going to highlight some of the people that Beckford overlooked in order to think about ways in which the good news of Christianity has been expressed in popular culture by musicians drawing on the influence of musical traditions from the American South.
But first, here are two stories that would seem to back up Beckford’s thesis. The soul star Al Green is one of those who has felt the tension between flesh and Spirit, secular and sacred. He left a multi-million dollar career to sing Gospel and, in the film The Gospel According To Al Green, explains that he was moved by the Spirit to do so.
When Al Green is moved by the Spirit it leads him to leave his so-called ‘secular’ recording career to sing Gospel and to pastor a Church. His decision frees him to sing exclusively about the light that he has found in Jesus Christ and to preach the Gospel as he does so. Because of his past career and because he continues to sing his old hits he is able to continue to sing to people outside the church as well as to those in the Church but for many who, like Al Green, want to sing exclusively about the light that they have found in Jesus that opportunity is not extended and they make their living in Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) singing mainly to the already converted.
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 the 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.
Is the sacred/secular divide found in these two stories inevitable? Why/Why not?
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Al Green - I Love You.
This beginning, which was felt as a betrayal of sacred music by those involved and by the Churches that judged them has meant that, for the most part, Christian churches have been hostile to the music that young people choose to listen to, and the music industry has responded with equal hostility, believing that any song with 'Jesus' in the title will sink without trace. Robert Beckford made that argument in a Channel 4 programme shown a couple of Christmasses ago and to ground his argument pointed to the drug culture and Eastern religions that characterised Flower Power in the 60s, the influence of Satanism in Heavy Metal, Black Metal and Shock Rock, the commitment of many hip hop artists to the Nation of Islam and the way in which the Christian Right in the US has sought to censor many such artists since the 1980s.
That programme ended with Beckford giving an impassioned plea for the Church to effectively engage with popular culture. That is something I endorse at the same time as being amazed by the extent to which Beckford’s argument overlooked many significant figures in Rock and Pop who have sought to express their faith through their music. If you watched God Gave Rock And Roll To You you would have come away with the impression that apart from Cliff Richard, Kanye West, and Matisyahu, the Hasidic reggae star, no one else in the history of Rock and Pop has ever dared to challenge the concensus that Religion and Rock and Roll do not mix.
The reality is far more complicated and in this series of posts I'm going to highlight some of the people that Beckford overlooked in order to think about ways in which the good news of Christianity has been expressed in popular culture by musicians drawing on the influence of musical traditions from the American South.
But first, here are two stories that would seem to back up Beckford’s thesis. The soul star Al Green is one of those who has felt the tension between flesh and Spirit, secular and sacred. He left a multi-million dollar career to sing Gospel and, in the film The Gospel According To Al Green, explains that he was moved by the Spirit to do so.
When Al Green is moved by the Spirit it leads him to leave his so-called ‘secular’ recording career to sing Gospel and to pastor a Church. His decision frees him to sing exclusively about the light that he has found in Jesus Christ and to preach the Gospel as he does so. Because of his past career and because he continues to sing his old hits he is able to continue to sing to people outside the church as well as to those in the Church but for many who, like Al Green, want to sing exclusively about the light that they have found in Jesus that opportunity is not extended and they make their living in Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) singing mainly to the already converted.
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 the 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.
Is the sacred/secular divide found in these two stories inevitable? Why/Why not?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Al Green - I Love You.
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