Jesus Music

In September of last year Cherry Red Records released ‘All God’s Children: Songs From The British Jesus Rock Revolution 1967-1974’, a 3CD Box set providing the first-ever overview of the UK element of the late 60s/early 70s “Jesus movement”.

Introducing the collection, they wrote:

‘During the late 60s and early 70s, the restless, questing nature of the Woodstock generation and the horrors of Vietnam saw the pop scene add a new spiritual element. Many young people embraced Christianity, viewing Jesus as the prototypal long-haired hippie, persecuted by the establishment of the day while dispensing peace and love to a troubled, cynical world.

The American branch of the Jesus movement effectively started in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, but there was also a parallel development in the UK that slowly evolved from beat groups performing in church coffee-bars. By 1971, leading British Xian rock band Out Of Darkness were appearing at notorious countercultural gathering Phun City, while Glastonbury introduced a “Jesus tent” that offered Christian revellers mass and holy communion twice a day.

‘All God’s Children’ assembles the best of the British Christian acts, including such respected names as Out Of Darkness (and their earlier incarnation, garage R&B act The Pilgrims), Parchment, Whispers Of Truth and Judy MacKenzie. It also features the secular alongside the sacred, including the likes of Strawbs, Moody Blues, Amazing Blondel, John Kongos and Medicine Head – bands who, though theologically shyer than their more overtly Christian contemporaries, all wrote songs with a strong spiritual message.

A 3CD, four-hour set, ‘All God’s Children’ – which takes its name from the gorgeous Kinks’ ballad which is included in the set – is a fascinating look at an under-documented phenomenon and unexpected by-product of the hippie era.’

In an excellent review for International Times, Rupert Loydell explains why, in the main, this collection is not an anthology of Jesus Rock, but more a compilation of music from the period that includes references to Jesus. Loydell also shares memories from that time and summarises the development of British Jesus Music. For more of Loydell’s reflections and memories of this period see ‘Looking down the wrong end of a telescope’ where the writer and poet looks back to the collaborations and collisions between church culture and the wider culture in the 1970s and 80s, with a cast including Jesus Rock Music, the Greenbelt festival, Mary Whitehouse and musicians such as Larry Norman and Steve Fairnie of Writz.

‘All God’s Children’ can also usefully be set alongside ‘Lysergic Saviours (A Psychedelic Prophecy! The Holy Grail Of Xian Acid Fuzz 1968–1974)’ and ‘The Rock Revival’, the latter of which documents the early Jesus Movement in the US while the former includes rare tracks from both sides of the Atlantic. 'Lysergic Saviours' includes tracks by Our Generation, The New Folk, The New Dawn, The Search Party, Whispers Of Truth, Concrete Rubber Band, Mind Garage, Earthen Vessel, Out Of Darkness, Exkursions, The Sheep, Azitis, Koinonia, Eden, The Accompany, The Search Party, and Agape. There is a small amount of overlap with 'All God's Children' but the collection mainly expands our knowledge of the bands playing in this period. To these can be added, among others, Joshua with God Spoke...And Said 'Lead My People' and Moon Blood by Fraction.  

So, these collections provide an introduction to the Jesus Music of this period, both that which derived from the Church and that which was part of mainstream popular music. They also open up a debate about which influenced the other or the extent to which they were synergistic developments. 

When it emerged, 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 this meant that rock music, despite its secular stereotype, always possessed a spiritual strand.

The Hippie movement expanded the spirituality already inherent in rock music through the visionary aspect of drug culture and a wider engagement with religion which included significant connections with Eastern religions but also, in part through the Jesus Movement, was with Christianity. This was the period in which songs such as 'Presence of the Lord' by Blind Faith, 'My Sweet Lord' by George Harrison, 'Fire and Rain' by James Taylor, 'Sweet Cherry Wine' and 'Crystal Blue Persuasion' by Tommy James and the Shondells, 'Let it Be' by The Beatles, 'That's the Way God Planned It' by Billy Preston, 'Hymn' by Barclay James Harvest, 'Jesus is A Soul Man' by Laurence Reynolds, 'Are You Ready?' by Pacific Gas & Electric, 'Spirit in the Sky' by Norman Greenbaum, 'Put Your Hand in the Hand' by Ocean, and 'Jesus Is Just Alright' by the Doobie Brothers, as well as albums like Marvin Gaye's What's Goin On, Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace, Al Green's Belle Album and The Staple Singers' Be What You Are became popular. This was also the period of musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell and, from the Jesus Movement, Lonesome Stone and Yesterday, Today, Forever. 'All God's Children' collects many other similar songs by well-known artistes such as The Hollies, Manfred Mann's Earth Band, Richard Thompson, Gordon Giltrap. Roy Wood, The Incredible String Band and the more obscure including Magna Carta, Quintessence, Unicorn, Heron, and Phillip Goodhand-Tait, among others. 

Gram Parsons, both as a solo artist and with the Flying Burrito Brothers, drew on the Gospel music tradition in Country Music, also taking The Bryds in the same direction. Christian of the World by Tommy James was a mixture of serious religious themes encased in James' well known pop style and featuring many of the studio players and singers he had used successfully on earlier recordings. David Axelrod wrote Mass in F Minor and Release of an Oath for the Electric Prunes, albums which combined religious and classical elements with psychedelic rock in a rock-opera concept. As a solo artist Axelrod recorded two albums based on William Blake's poetry and ssued a rock version of Handel's oratorio Messiah. The songs of Judee Sill 'dealt with Christian spirituality, metaphysics, rapture and redemption, and were laden with classical music overtones': 'Her spiritual quest informed much of her writing. Heavenly and temporal love were constant themes. She had been through many relationships, and lust, rapture, and redemption intermingled ... Her interest in Christianity was far more than intellectual curiosity – she was baptized by Pat Boone in his swimming pool, and once described Christ as an elusive lover – “My vision of my animus.”'

Turning back to the Jesus Movement, Electric Liturgy by Mind Garage pre-dated the Mass in F Minor and gave a basis for later rock versions of the Mass/Eucharist such as the Rock Communion by Fresh Claim and U2charists. 

Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music is an acclaimed history of the evolution of British folk music which also expands our knowledge of Jesus Music in the UK. Author Rob Young has a fascination with the roots of English folk music and its ties to the British countryside. The book is in some ways a search for the national psyche which Young notes has been shaped by a "wrestling for possession between competing religious doctrines, heathen, pagan and Christian." 

Young finds more of interest in folk-rock which is heathen or pagan but, interestingly, he does value the work of Bill Fay, the Biblical references which abound in C.O.B's Moyshe McStiff and the Tartan Lancers of the Sacred Heart, and also includes a brief survey of '70's Jesus Music noting that "there were a few groups - After the Fire, Caedmon, Canaan, Cloud, Bryn Haworth, Meet Jesus Music, Narnia, Nutshell, Parchment, Presence, Reynard, Trinity Folk, Water into Wine Band and 11:59 - which managed to make a music that has lasting value, a kind of Eucharistic-progressive sound that sits comfortably with the better acid folk of the period." He highlights, as being of particular interest, Caedmon's self-titled 1978 album, the Water into Wine band's Hill Climbing for Beginners, Bob and Carole Pegg's And Now It Is So Early with Sydney Carter, A Folk Passion, and the Reflection Records compilation Sounds of Salvation.

So, there is much to explore here in relation to the early days of Jesus Music and, of course, what happens in this period lays the foundation for later developments both within mainstream popular music and Contemporary Christian Music. Check out the following to explore further:

•  God Gave Rock 'N' Roll To You
•  The Jesus Rock Revolution and the Jesus Movement
• When Jesus Met Hippies
• A Rough Guide to Christian Art
• Looking down the wrong end of a telescope
• Pop's holy rollers
• Tryin' to throw your arms around the world - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
• Perhaps the most underrated band ever
• Rock gets Religion
• Ed Kowalczyk and Scott Stapp: Angels on a razor
• Hidden Gems - Bill Fay & Michael Morley
• Salt and Sweetners
• The mystery at the heart of music - 1 and 2

Read also my dialogues with musician and poet Steve Scott here, here, here, here, and here, plus my other posts on CCM. For more of my writing on music, see my co-authored book with Peter Banks of After the Fire, ‘The Secret Chord’, which has been described as an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life written through the prism of Christian belief.

While there was a particular focus around in the period of Jesus Music, Jesus has consistently been referenced in Rock and Pop music from early days of Rock ‘n’ Roll onwards as the ‘Rock of Ages: Jesus in Popular Songs’ website demonstrates. This is a constantly-updated, searchable database of 500+ secular songs in which Jesus shows up by rock stars, rappers, singer-songwriters, country stars, and hardcore punks.

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The Electric Prunes - Holy Are You.

Making the world a Eucharist

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Sunday 14 November 2021 by Revd Jonathan Evens. 

Readings of address: Daniel 12.1-3; Hebrews 10.11-14 [15-18]19-25; Mark 13.1-8 

View the service at https://www.facebook.com/stmartininthefields/videos/456468419203039 

In 1917 Private David Jones of the Welsh Fusiliers was out searching for firewood. He was in the Ypres section of the Western Front. ‘As I was always cold, one of my main occupations was to hunt for any wood that was dry and could be used to make a decent fire.’ ‘Just a little way back, between our support trench and the reserve line, I noticed that a byre or outhouse … still stood and its roofing appeared to be intact … I thought that looks to be the most likely place where there might wooden objects or, with a bit of luck, a wood-store perfectly dry and cut ready for use. So I went to investigate, but there was no door on that side. I found a crack against which I put my eye expecting to see empty darkness.’[i]

Instead, he saw something that changed his life. He could make out an altar constructed from of ammunition boxes. On it were two candles. As his eye adjusted to the light, he could see half a dozen infantrymen kneeling on the floor. And in front of them, a robed Catholic priest celebrated Mass. The tinkling of a bell broke the silence, followed by Latin words, gently spoken. He realised he recognised some of the men. He felt the oneness between the priest and those tough soldiers gathered round him in the half-darkness; a unity of spirit beyond anything he had previously experienced. He was amazed, too, that this Mass was happening so close to the frontline.

In this sight a saving and redeeming God emerged from the devastating brutality and squalor of the trenches. David Jones found Christ in the darkest of places. As he witnessed his first Mass in an outhouse amid the wasteland of the western front, he started to seek for hope among the ruins.[ii] This hope was found in the unity of spirit he observed because, as he later wrote, ‘the Mass makes sense of everything.’[iii]

After the war he became both a painter of sacramental images and a poet who wrote two epic poems. The first is about his experience of being wounded during the attack on Mametz Wood in July 1916, when about 4,000 Welsh soldiers died. It has been described as ‘a book about how, even in the most appalling circumstances,’ we ‘can still discern beneath the surface of experience an ultimate significance in life.’[iv] The second is a long meditation on a man attending Mass sometime during the Second World War which encompasses the entire history of humankind because the Mass makes sense of everything.

His work is about remembrance and the ways in which remembrance transforms us in the present. It takes the shattered fragments of wartime experiences putting them together with the key stories of humanity to form poems that were bigger and more beautiful that their fragmented parts. In doing so, he mirrors the action of Christ in the incarnation and crucifixion as he goes down into the depths of destruction in order then to bring together the fragments of our broken lives.

Some years ago, Fiona MacMillan created a wonderful image of that incarnational activity in a photograph of a broken host to publicise the 2018 disability conference Something Worth Sharing. In this image: ‘seven contrasting hands belong to members of St Martin's community aged 7 to 90, of diverse gender, ethnicity, disability and experience. Each have a piece of the host: Each has something worth sharing without which some part would be missing.’ Fiona concludes, ‘The broken host is a reminder of Jesus, his life broken and shared. For me, it echoes the words of Donald Eadie, Methodist theologian whose life changed with a disabling spinal condition: 'My world cracked open and life broke through'. Being broken is sometimes the way new life begins’.’

As today’s reading from Hebrews reminds us, Christ’s was a once-for-all action that is then re-presented and re-membered in and through the Eucharist. The Eucharist being the most significant and meaningful form of Remembrance. We bring the broken fragments of our lives, including the shattering destruction of wartime experiences throughout the centuries, to the one whose own body was broken on the cross but who endured that experience out of love for us to bring us through brokenness into reconciliation and resurrection. In return we receive his body and blood into our lives through a fragment of bread and a sip of wine. Our life is joined to his. The broken fragments of our lives are gathered up and incorporated into the story of God’s saving work with humanity. The fragments of our lives are accepted – overaccepted – and unified as we are brought together to form a new body - the body of Christ – in which all things find their place and where all shall be well and all manner of thing be well.

God takes us and our offerings and places them in a far larger story than we ever could have imagined by giving them a sacred story and making them sacred actions. As we retell and re-enact what Jesus did at the Last Supper, we also remember what God did to Israel in ‘taking one special people, blessing them, then breaking them in the Exile before giving them as a light to the nations to bring the Gentiles to God.’ ‘In the telling of those stories and the performance of those actions we are transformed into God’s holy people.’ That’s what the regular celebration of the Eucharist is about. When the Eucharist is served, each of us offers all that we uniquely are at the altar and we receive from God everything we need to follow him by being a blessing to others in our daily lives. In this way, as David Jones claimed, the Mass makes sense of everything, even the destruction and damage of war. Not by explaining it away or even explaining it at all but by plumbing its depths to find a way through to renewal and restoration.

We remember that story, not simply by recalling it to mind but by re-enacting and re-inhabiting it. We join our story to that of God’s activity in the world by playing a part within that story because we are, as David Jones once wrote, ‘creatures with bodies, whose nature it is to do this, or that, rather than think it.’[v] This is what it means to live sacramentally and to truly remember. So, in the Eucharist we see, we touch, we hear, we taste our God. As Sam Wells has said: ‘The Eucharist is a whole-body experience of truthful living in a new society as God’s companions together forever.’ Only one thing more remains. We must ask, as have all those who, like David Jones, experienced war and survived, what do we need to remake the whole world like this? What do we need to do to make the whole world a Eucharist?

St Augustine said: ‘You are the Body of Christ. In you and through you the work of the incarnation must go forward. You are to be taken. You are to be blessed, broken and distributed, that you may be the means of grace and vehicles of eternal love.’ Sam has explained that: ‘The elements of bread and wine are taken, blessed, broken and shared just as Jesus was taken, blessed, broken and shared. In a similar way the congregation as a whole is taken out of its ordinary pursuits; blessed with the grace and truth of forgiveness and scripture; broken in the disciplines of intercession, peacemaking and food-sharing; and shared with the world in love and service. As the bread and wine are offered, transformed and received, the congregation, and through it the whole creation, is offered, transformed and received.’

Although he suffered throughout his life from what we know called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, David Jones spent the rest of his life creating poems and paintings that re-call before God events in the past so that they become here and now in their effect on us. He wrote of the Mass as being to do with the re-calling, re-presentation and re-membering of an original act and objects in a form that is different from but connected to the original act or object that is being recalled. Remembering the Lord’s Supper is not simply recalling it to mind; instead, it is remembered by the re-enacting and re-presenting of the original act. He created poems and paintings that mirror the action of the Eucharist and create a world that is a Eucharist.

In this way he discovered the mission statement of the church, which is to make the world a Eucharist. Amazingly, he discovered this in wartime in the depths of destruction and despair when nation had risen against nation and kingdom against kingdom. That was a real demonstration of the reality that we, as the people of God, are often closer to God in adversity, than in times of comfort.

We are not all artists or poets but, whatever our roles and talents, like David Jones, we too can go out from the Eucharist to make the world a Eucharist. Again, Sam has explained well what this looks like in practice. ‘Faithful service,’ he says, ‘means practices that look like worship—those that gather people and form them as one body, that reconcile and open lives to repentance and forgiveness, that proclaim truth and reveal God’s story, that embrace need and unleash gifts, that express thanks and are open to the Holy Spirit, that share food and wash feet.’ As we do such things, we will discover what David Jones discovered at the Western Front in 1917, we will create our equivalents of his sacramental poems and paintings, we will reconcile the broken fragments of our lives, we will restore the torn fabric of society, we will make the world into a Eucharist. This is the most significant and meaningful form of remembrance in which we can engage.

In 1917 David Jones went looking for wood for a fire that would temporarily warm him in the trenches. What he found in an outhouse in the Ypres sector of the Western Front was a glow, a fire which he described as ‘goldenness’, that would inspire him throughout his life. In the Mass all the fragments of his life were held together and recreated, he was connected to the bigger story of God’s work in the world throughout human history, and he was inspired to make his world a Eucharist for others to inhabit and experience.

What will you bring to the altar to be gathered up by Jesus today? Will you come forward today to receive Christ in the form of bread into your life and join your story to his, so you can play your part in the story of God’s work with this world? How will you go from here today to make the world a Eucharist tomorrow? David Jones found his answers to those questions in an outhouse on the Western Front. Will you find your answers at St Martin-in-the-Fields this morning? To do so, will be to truly remember on this Remembrance Sunday.

[i] Rene Hague ed., Dai Greatcoat: a self-portrait of David Jones in his letters, Faber & Faber Ltd, 1980, pp.248-249.
[ii] Jonathan Miles, Backgrounds to David Jones: a Study in Sources and Drafts, University of Wales Press, 1990, p.64.
[iii] Letter to Saunders Lewis 3rd March, 1971, published in Agenda, vol. 11, no..4 - vol. 12, no. 1, 1973/4, "Saunders Lewis introduces two Letters from David Jones", pp.17-29, particularly p. 20.
[iv] Atholl C. C. Murray, "In Perspective: A Study of David Jones's 'In Parenthesis'," in Critical Quarterly, Autumn, 1974, pp. 254-63.
[v] Rene Hague ed., Dai Greatcoat: a self-portrait of David Jones in his letters, Faber & Faber Ltd, 1980, p. 232.

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David Jones - In Parenthesis.

CTiW: Livestreamed Ecumenical Pentecost Mass

As current COVID-19 restrictions do not allow us to hold our usual live CTiW Pentecost Service, Churches Together in Westminster are pleased to announce that instead an ecumenical Pentecost Mass will be livestreamed from Farm Street Church of the Immaculate Conception at 6pm on Sunday, 31st May 2020. It is hoped that the service will include recorded music by Soul Sanctuary Gospel Choir, and the choirs of Farm Street and All Saints, Margaret Street.

All are very welcome from whatever Christian tradition or none, to celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and to pray for our country and world at this time of crisis.

A poster is above, and the link for the livestream is https://www.farmstreet.org.uk/livestream.

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Soul Sanctuary Gospel Choir - The Prayer.