Worship Across the Racial Divide

Paul Harvey

A little preview of a coming attraction from one of our blog contributors. Our friend and contributor Gerardo Marti's book Worship Across the Racial Divide: Religious Music and the Multiracial Congregation will be coming out soon (January, I believe) with Oxford University Press.

While I haven't read this text yet, I've heard Gerardo give talks based on it, and we've had a number of conversations about the book, and I eagerly anticipate getting into the whole text. One portion of this text which should prove particularly interesting deals with how African American church music, more specifically gospel, comes to be a stand-in for "authenticity" in church, as well as an emblem of diversity, both for good and for ill. This is a subject that I take up in a slightly different way in the latter part of my book Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity.

Here's a preview of Gerardo's book from Oxford:

Many scholars and church leaders believe that music and worship style are essential in stimulating diversity in congregations. Gerardo Marti draws on interviews with more than 170 congregational leaders and parishioners, as well as his experiences participating in worship services in a wide variety of Protestant, multiracial Southern Californian churches, to present this insightful study of the role of music in creating congregational diversity.

Worship across the Racial Divide offers a surprising conclusion: that there is no single style of worship or music that determines the likelihood of achieving a multiracial church. Far more important are the complex of practices of the worshipping community in the production and absorption of music. Multiracial churches successfully diversify by stimulating unobtrusive means of interracial and interethnic relations; in fact, preparation for music apart from worship gatherings proves to be just as important as its performance during services. Marti shows that aside from and even in spite of the varying beliefs of attendees and church leaders, diversity happens because music and worship create practical spaces where cross-racial bonds are formed.

This groundbreaking book sheds light on how race affects worship in multiracial churches. It will allow a new understanding of the dynamics of such churches, and provide crucial aid to church leaders for avoiding the pitfalls that inadvertently widen the racial divide.

Reviews

"This is a brave book that dares to challenge conventional wisdom regarding the intersections of race, worship and music. It is a model of engaged scholarship and will be essential reading for pastors, worship leaders, and students of congregations. Gerardo Marti is emerging as one of the leading sociologists of religion in the United States with a distinctive methodological approach in the field of Congregational Studies."
---William McKinney, President Emeritus, Pacific School of Religion

"Dr. Marti makes a unique and important contribution to our understanding of multi-racial churches as worshiping communities. His central focus on the worship ritual helps us to understand the meaning and lived experience of multiculturalism for participants. For social scientists and other scholars, he helps us to understand the social processes which forge commitment and identification across the most divisive of social barriers. A smart, interesting, and humane book."
---Penny Edgell, author of Congregations in Conflict: Cultural Models of Local Religious Life

"Marti is a master at unpacking the culture of a congregation. Music, he shows us, is never just about sound. It's about who and how, feelings and bodies and ethnic identities. What he tells us about how music works is far more interesting and complicated than the how-to books would have us think."
---Nancy Ammerman, author of Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners

Blessed with a Dark Turn of Mind: Gillian Welch's Spiritual Strivings

Paul Harvey

A few days ago I blogged a bit about Reinhold

Niebuhr and Gillian Welch, an unlikely but (in my view) apt combination of theologian and performing artist. In this short essay for Religion Dispatches, I develop my thoughts about her newest recording (and some of her previous recordings) at greater length, focusing especially on her musical relationship to the "hard religion" of the rural South whose music she recreates, rejuvenates, and reinterprets. We here at the blog await word from her publicist about the possibility of an email interview, but suffice to say if that happens (big if there) it will be awesome!!!! Scroll down a bit for a live performance of one of the tunes from the record.

Update! Alec Wilkinson for the New Yorker makes many similar points about the record, in this piece just out for the magazine. Cool, but I wrote mine early last week, so feeling ahead of the curve, even if I do live in a flyover state and famously conservative city!

A brief excerpt from the piece, and then follow the rest at the link:

“It is the best kind of record: one that lures you in and soothes you with harmonies and banjo, only to leave you wondering what the hell just happened.”
—Kitty Empire, review of The Harrow & the Harvest in The Observer, June 26, 2011

That’s a good question to ask of someone who sings of spending seven years with her companion

on the burning shore, with Gatling guns and paint,
working the lowlands door to door, like a Latter-day Saint.

And that’s before she’s turned out at the top of the stairs, by someone who took all the glory,that you just couldn’t share. Welch and her partner David Rawlings sing in haunting union:

I’ve never been so disabused, never been so mad
I’ve never been served anything that tasted so bad.

Listening to this song, “The Way It Will Be,” I too don’t know what the hell just happened, but it’s impossible not to complete the story, to fill in those gaps. We’ve all eaten that bitterness at some point. And that urge to figure out the details in the mysteriously unsettling story comes wrapped here in religiously-tinged narratives and imagery that historically have received their richest expression in the musical culture of the American South.

Welch’s Southern characters, though, emerge not from some imaginary version of God, country, and family, but from the spiritual strivings of folk who have seen plenty of hard times.

Continue . . . .

Here's a clip from one tune, "The Way It Goes," performed recently:

Rock around the Pew

Randall Stephens

For those of you who work at the intersection of southern history, religion, and music, the H-Southern Music email list just might be for you. I recently posted a question to list members and got some great feedback.

I asked about the work I'm doing for a chapter/article on the interconnections of early rock music and revivalistic religion/hot protestantism/pentecostalism . . . etc. (I wrote a little about this in the last chapter of my book The Fire Spreads, but I'll be exploring this in much greater detail now.) I asked list members about sources--primary or secondary . . . interviews, archives, what have you--that they could suggest. Here are a few of the items that I have found useful mixed in with those that I only learned about through the suggestions of list members (in no particular order). Anything else to add?

Walt Trott and Bill Carlisle, Sister Sunshine: The Martha Carson Story (1st Books Library, 2000)

Macel Ely II, Ain't No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Brother Claude Ely (Dust to Digital, 2010)

Lynn Abbott, I've Got Two Wings (Casequarter, 2009)

Rodney Crowell, Chinaberry Sidewalks (Knopf 2011)

Russ Cheatam, Bad Boy of Gospel Music: The Calvin Newton Story (University Press of Mississippi 2003)

Joe Moscheo, The Gospel Side of Elvis (Center Street, 2007)

Vestal Goodman with Ken Abraham, Vestal!: "Lord, I Wouldn't Take Nothin' for My Journey Now" (WaterBrook Press, 1999)

Bob Terrell, The Life and Times of J.D. Sumner: The World's Lowest Bass Singer (Daywind, 2009)

David Stowe, No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (UNC Press, 2011)

Gayle Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Beacon, 2007)

Jamie Buckingham, O Happy Day: The Happy Goodman Story (Word Press, 1973)

Jerma Jackson, “Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Evolution of Gospel Music,” Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture, eds. Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)

Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)

Stephen R. Tucker, “Pentecostalism and Popular Culture in the South: A Study of Four Musicians,” Journal of Popular Culture 16 (Winter 1982)

Jimmy Wayne Jones, Jr., “Modern American Pentecostalism: The Significance of Race, Class, and Culture in Charismatic Growth, 1900-2000” (Ph.D. diss., University of Arkansas, 2002)

Johnny Cash, Man in Black (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1975)

Tammy Wynette with Joan Dew, Stand by Your Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979)

Charles Sawyer, The Arrival of B. B. King (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1980)

Myra Lewis with Murray Silver, Great Balls of Fire: The Uncensored Story of Jerry Lee Lewis (New York: William Murrow and Company, Inc., 1982)

Charles White, The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock (New York: De Capo Press, 1994)

Vince Staten, The Real Elvis: Good Old Boy (Dayton, Oh.: Media Ventures, 1978)

Van K. Brock, “Assemblies of God: Elvis and Pentecostalism,” Bulletin of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and Religion 3 (June 1979)

James R. Goff, Jr., Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994)

Nick Tosches, Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (New York: Grove Press, 1998. I'm using this one for my fall 2011 course on the history of rock)

Ann Rowe Seaman, Swaggart: The Unauthorized Biography of an American Evangelist (New York: Continuum, 1999)

Jimmy Swaggart, To Cross a River (Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1977)

Rejoice and Shout: A Journey through Gospel Music History

Paul Harvey

The new documentary Rejoice and Shout premieres this week. It’s a documentary featuring black gospel performances over a full century, from the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet in 1902 to some contemporary stars. The film has gotten a lot of nice write-ups; the link takes you to the film's website, where you can learn more about it. Here in flyover land probably will have to wait until it moves from the “save” to the “queue” part of my Netflix list. A little bit from the NPR segment on the documentary:

Director Don McGlynn, a veteran of the music documentary genre, wanted to trace gospel from its earliest roots to its current incarnation in the music world. The film even plays the first known recording of gospel music, a record made in 1902 by the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet.

The New York Times published a substantial review of the film here; a little excerpt:

This historical survey of the genre draws heavily on the extensive archives of its producer, Joe Lauro, and is grounded in the work of two experts: Anthony Heilbut, who wrote the classic book “The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times,” and Bil Carpenter, whose “Uncloudy Days: The Gospel Music Encyclopedia” chronicles the lives and careers of more than 650 gospel figures. Their analyses are supplemented by the observations of Jacquie Gales Webb, the host of a popular radio program. Mr. Heilbut’s approach is primarily scholarly and historical, and Mr. Carpenter’s is more sociological and political. Smokey Robinson, who introduces the film and offers its closing observations, sets its praiseworthy tone

If anyone wants to read the whole review but is shout out by the Times firewall, let me know and I’ll send to you.

I will be interested to see how it compares to my recent favorite in the genre of gospel documentaries, How Sweet It Was: The Sights and Sounds of Gospel’s Golden Age. This one comes as a documentary and a CD, and it features some astounding older clips; the DVD is basically a strung-together version of those full clips, so not really a “documentary” but more of a compilation. Anyway, I’m looking forward to Rejoice and Shout; if anyone reading this living around a real city gets a chance to watch it, feel free to post your thoughts here.

While you're waiting to see Rejoice and Shout, here's a great clip on Youtube that can be seen in its entirety on How Sweet it Was, for your enjoyment: The Meditation Singers doing "Sanctified Lord."

Ain't No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Claude Ely

Paul Harvey

Here's a great radio story, courtesy of Radio Diaries and NPR, about the Rev. Claude Ely, Holiness/Pentecostal exhorter and singer from Kentucky and author of the classic "Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down." Johnny Cash's recording of the song just before he died, and a huge internet mashup done to that recording, was the subject of a post of mine some time ago. A brief excerpt from the transcript of the radio show:

People would show up to revivals because they had heard about this country singer who sang like a black man. Brother Claude Ely would thrash his guitar, shake and gyrate from one part of the stage to the other. Young men would run up to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

Gladys Presley, Elvis' mother, was a fan of Brother Claude Ely's ministry, and some people remember Gladys and Elvis getting blessed at Brother Claude Ely tent revivals while Brother Claude Ely laid hands on them and prayed for them.

This story comes from the efforts of Macel Ely, Brother Claude's nephew, who encountered his uncle's music while traveling in Europe, and wondered how it found its way there. Evidently he is producing a full-length documentary on the subject. You can hear Ely's rendition of his song along with some photos here, and a CD compilation of Claude can be found here.

A final note: somehow those who prattle on about NPR's "liberal bias" somehow never get around to talking about stories like these, which took up most of the last segment of yesterday's show from that dreaded bastion of left-wing propaganda, All Things Considered -- never mind all the locally produced reporting such as the programs about Colorado which I have written about here, and the programs about the Ozarks which John Schmalzbauer has written about for Immanent Frame here.

Here's some more information on Macel Ely's book which came from his efforts to find out about his uncle's widespread influence, Ain't No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Brother Claude Ely (published by the wonderful Atlanta outfit Dust-to-Digital, compiler and publisher of the peerless six-CD set Goodbye, Babylon, and many other musical classics).

Ain’t No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Brother Claude Ely is written as an oral, biographical history taken from the recorded interviews of more than 1,000 people in the Appalachian Mountains who knew Brother Claude Ely. Coined as the King Recording Label’s “Gospel Ranger,” Brother Claude Ely was well-known and loved by many in the earlier part of the 20th century as both a religious singer-songwriter and a Pentecostal-Holiness preacher. Few people, however, knew the personal details of his childhood, military service, and years of hard work in the coal fields of southwestern Virginia.

Now, decades after his legendary death, many fans still seem mesmerized and touched by this humble man’s quick wit and sincere desire to share the Gospel’s “Good News” with everyone who would listen to his message of hope and love. Having received popularity for his song, “There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down,” Brother Claude Ely passed along a musical and spiritual influence which can still be heard today like a mountain echo in those long, winding hollows and impoverished coal fields. Hollywood and the “King of Rock and Roll” also later acknowledged their admiration for and fascination with the late Brother Claude Ely. This book chronicles the life of one man who made an eternal impact on thousands of Appalachian dwellers. His simple sermons and folkloric songs are still providing assurance, hope, and faith to many mountain people

New York Rock Star Jesus Christ Opens Gates to Heaven

Paul Harvey

Today's NY Times features a cornucopia of religion for your Easter

Sunday. To start, our new contributor David Stowe's "Jesus Christ, Rock Star," looks at why religion was once part of popular music, how the divide between "rock" and "Christian" music happened, and why that divide may be in the process of lessening (plus just for fun a link accompanying the article takes you to Barry McGuire's Eve of Destruction, a song that opens Todd Gitlin's capacious survey The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage):

Despite being a rare bright spot in an industry facing difficulties, music with explicit religious content has been largely segregated from non-religious pop music, both in terms of radio stations and audiences — so much so that it even has a name, contemporary Christian music.

This wasn’t always the case. For much of pop music history, religious themes had an uncontroversial place at the top of the charts, a presence most clearly felt in the late ’60s and early ’70s. But over the next decades, the politicization of faith, relying in part on the surge of youth into the country’s churches, turned religious themes into a forbidden zone for secular musicians.

Then you can hop over to John Leland (great name!), "The Evangelical Squad," which looks at evangelical entrepreneurs in some unlikely places in the NYC area, including the East Village. A brief excerpt, with a nod to Tony Carnes's Journey through NYC Religions which we blogged about here before:

But the church and its expansion into the East Village highlight a concerted groundswell of middle-class, professional evangelicals in Manhattan, an area many churches once shunned as an epicenter of sin. It is the place, many now believe, to reach the people who influence the world.

Though much attention has been paid to New York’s boom in immigrant churches, in recent decades the number of English-speaking evangelical churches south of Harlem has grown tenfold, to more than 100, said Tony Carnes, a researcher and founder of the online journal A Journey Through NYC Religions, who has studied New York churches since the 1970s. Without fanfare, the newcomers have created networks to pay for new churches and to form church-planting incubators, treating the city as a mission field.

"Because the institutions are new, Mr Carnes added, the city has become “like a Silicon Valley of church-planting. “You can come here, try new ideas, fail and start again,” he said. “It’s a hot area where failure isn’t a disgrace.”

Finally, our good friend Lauren Winner appears in the Book Review section, reflecting on all the recent brouhaha over Rob Bell's Love Wins. She writes of the long-lived yin-and-yang of exclusivity versus universalism in evangelical thought, including in the nineteenth century with Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar.

Lauren concludes:

So, too, Rob Bell is articulating the concerns of a generation of Christians schooled in toleration, whose neighbors and coworkers and siblings are Muslim or Buddhist or agnostic, a generation whose pluralist social commitments are at odds with theological commitments to limited salvation. Bell speaks for those Christians who take the Bible seriously but can’t imagine their secular friends aren’t going to heaven, too. He speaks for that woman in the pew who can’t bear the thought of spending eternity apart from her atheist brother. The tweeting gatekeepers of conservative evangelicalism may also share these concerns, but for them, the solution is to convert the unbelieving neighbor.

Coming Out in the Jesus Movement

Paul Harvey

Recently we've blogged about David Stowe's new book No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Rock Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism, a history of the rise of Christian rock and pop that will interest many of you. David has a a new piece up (well, a couple of weeks old, sorry it took me a while to get to it) that tells us more about his subjects. On the UNC Press blog he has posted "Coming Out of the Jesus Movement: A Conversation with Marsha Stevens-Pino," about one particularly controversial musician he covers in the book. A brief taste:

Larry Norman, whom I wrote about last month, could aptly be called the Bad Boy of Christian Rock, Marsha Stevens might be deemed the Problem Child—even “evangelical Christianity’s worst nightmare.” Yet it would be hard to find a figure who better reflects the continuities and contradictions of the Jesus Movement. Stevens cut her born-again teeth at age sixteen on the beaches of Orange County just when Calvary Chapel was attracting hordes of young people (and more than a few reporters). Like thousands of teenagers from across Southern California she was baptized in the Pacific at Corona del Mar.

Marsha, her sister Wendy, and their significant others formed Children of the Day, a classic Jesus music group that played gentle, folksy songs of faith. One of her songs, “For Those Tears I Died,” became a movement classic. Children of the Day created perhaps the first albums of what’s come to be called praise music, those easy-to-sing, sometimes-maligned anthems that have crowded traditional hymns out of a majority of American evangelical churches, mega- or otherwise.

Over the course of the Seventies, Marsha went from an icon of the Jesus Movement to a pariah. The constant demands of touring and recording took a toll on the Stevens’s marriage. Then she announced she was in love – with a woman. Divorce carried enough stigma in evangelical circles, but leaving one’s husband to take up with another woman—a different order of scandal altogether.

Continue reading here < < < <

Friday Jesus on the Mainline Blogging

Paul Harvey

Thanks to blog reader Chip Callahan, a little musical joy for your Friday, via Ry Cooder and David Lindley, some live "Jesus on the Mainline," from the New Orleans Jazz Festival in 1994. Maybe it will restore a bit of your spirit as it has mine. When I call Jesus up to tell him what I want, I think it would be to have the House Republicans not shut down the government just because they want to deny health care to women. Is that too much to ask? (And, don't miss Heather Cox Richardson's narrative of a similar governmental shutdown debacle in 1879, again due to pet project riders, an unwelcome bipartisan tradition in Congress).

Musical Monday: Larry Norman and Repurposing the Gospel Aura

Paul Harvey

A couple of musical posts to liven up your Monday. First, blog friend David Stowe, author of the very-soon-to-forthcome No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (which we blogged about a few weeks ago), has a guest post at the UNC Press blog based on a conversation in 2007 with Christian rock pioneer Larry Norman, shortly before he (Norman, that is) passed. The stories, full of musical celebrities, are fun. And he continues:

Were all these stories credible? Who knows. He told me he’d chatted in an airport lounge with a woman in a beautiful jacket who claimed that her husband was Bob Dylan. Andraé Crouch, who happened to be there with Norman, confirmed the woman’s story. Norman confirmed something that my ears had told me: that Dylan’s Grammy-winning single “Gotta Serve Somebody” was closely modeled on Norman’s song “Righteous Rocker,” released several years earlier.

This is a fun read, highly recommended.

As is Douglas Harrison, Repurposing the Gospel Aura, in today's Religion Dispatches, which takes the use of a gospel choir as a backdrop to Eminem's much-commented-upon Chrysler/Detroit commercial as a way of reflecting on how and why this music invites audiences "to imagine themselves as part of a colorblind fellowship of humanity bound together by the soulful sound of a black gospel choir." Harrison reflects on what is gained, and what is lost/missing, in that process. Black gospel is a "universal language of inspiration and transcendence that cuts across race, class, and history," but in the process, "the very real racial tension surrounding the struggle for equality of opportunity in America isn’t so much resolved or reconciled or even recognized. It is simply ignored in these digestible little pageants of musical and psychosocial harmony."

Thinking of this post at Religion Dispatches, it's a good time to congratulate our blog contributor Gerardo Marti, who has just finished his book manuscript, for Oxford, on a very similar theme: Worship Across the Racial Divide: Notions of Race and Religious Practice in Multiracial Churches, coming out with Oxford next year. Gerardo talks about how African American music comes to stand for authenticity in the churches he studies. And he talks about much else besides -- maybe we can entice him to do a little post here in celebration of mailing off the manuscript, telling us about his work a bit more? Let's hear it, ya'll.

Esperanza Spalding, Arcade Fire, and Why There is a God

Paul Harvey

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Theodore Parker.

He must have been watching the Grammys last night.

Every time I fall into despair about that "bends towards justice" line, something happens to keep hope alive, and put God back on my mental map again. The last couple of weeks have been such a time -- Egypt, the Packers, Glenn Beck's ratings falling off a cliff -- and ending with an actual victory for musical truth and justice last night at the Grammys: the recognition of Esperanza Spalding for "Best New Artist" (keeping in mind that she's already 26 and has a whole stack of recordings already, she's only "new" since popular music only wakes up and recognizes jazz once every 10-20 years), and Arcade Fire for best record for The Suburbs. Spalding gave a nice lesson in grace (listen and learn, Kanye) in complimenting her competition, notably Justin Bieber, whose angry fans were tweeting in furiously and defacing Spalding's Wikipedia page from their teenage wastelands. Oh well, they'll grow up.

Aside from her own records, I wanted to draw your attention to one new collaboration of Spalding's, with the great veteran saxophonist Joe Lovano: Bird Songs, just out from Blue Note Records, featuring Lovano, Spalding on bass, and an all-star lineup reinterpreting Charlie Parker's tunes. Not surprisingly (to me), Lovano finds a spiritual core to classics such as "Yardbird Suite":

"Yardbird Suite" appears on the album in two distinct versions. First as "Birdyard," a piece that Lovano put together to feature the aulochrome. "I took a phrase from 'Yardbird Suite' and turned it into a kind of whirling dervish of sorts through five different keys and improvised on the aulochrome over that. It would have been incredible to hear Charlie Parker play that instrument and develop ideas within the possibilities of this horn."

The version of "Yardbird Suite" that closes the album is the perfect summation of the spirit of adventure with which Lovano approached this project. "It came to me one day, I heard that melody as a hymn, as a spiritual, and I started to play it just by myself unaccompanied saxophone. And then I heard all these parts, added an interlude, and went into a 6/8 kind of a dance, and it turned out to be a really different exploration on that piece of music."

As for Arcade Fire, has there been a major pop group more concerned with exploring religious themes through their music? Most obviously, at times perhaps laying it on a little too thickly, this came in their last CD Neon Bible, but The Suburbs is full, too, of anxious contemplation of uncovering meaning in dispiriting environments. A thoughtful review, which compares the CD to Springsteen's The River (and also likes it more than the heavier-handed Neon Bible, a conclusion with which I beg to differ as I believe the former is a bit more ambitious and interesting musically), is here. An older interview with Arcade Fire's leader Win Butler, including a discussion of some of his formative religious influences, is here.

Esperanza shows us hope, even in the suburbs.

Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold Johnny Cash's Body Down

Paul Harvey

"Want to be part of a new Johnny Cash video?" You can.

I had forgotten that Cash's last recording, in his American Recordings series right before his death, was the southern spiritual classic "Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down" (sometimes done as "Can Hold My Body Down", or with other variations of same), recorded countless times by just about everybody except the Rolling Stones it seems (Keith Richards not wanting to tempt fate, perhaps). Way back in the last century (summer 1998), I once heard a cover of it, completely unexpectedly, performed by the Tarbox Ramblers at The Burren in Somerville, Massachusetts, one of those magical live musical moments one never forgets. A shout out to the Tufts students smart enough to dance in a frenzy to the Ramblers' uptempo version of the tune.

Today's Morning edition features Chris Milk's Johnny Cash Project, which I was previously unfamiliar with. Milk is virtually stitching together pieces of digital art together with Cash's recording as a posthumous tribute to the man in black (click on the link to the Johnny Cash project to submit your own entry). Just for fun, here's a Youtube tribute along the same lines, the recording together with photograph highlights of Cash's career. A review of the entire last album is here. Johnny lives.

No Sympathy for the Devil

Paul Harvey

Those of you who know Randall know that one of his hobbies is collecting quotations from evangelicals hysterically opposing the newfound demon of rock-n-roll music in the 1950s and 1960s (maybe Randall will post a few of those here for us), part of his research on the reaction of evangelical to rock in its early days. Going a bit further: I once saw Julian Bond give a great talk about civil rights and popular culture, starting with one of those overwrought quotations, which sounded like a typical screed against rock coming from some straightlaced white evangelical ca. 1957 -- but as it turned out came from Martin Luther King, who could preach the anti-rock message with the best of them.

Obviously a lot has changed in the relationship of evangelicals to popular musical culture since then. And I expect to see that explained thoroughly in this forthcoming text, that I think a lot of you are going to be interested in this one when it comes out (pub. date is listed as April 2011): David Stowe, No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism.

Stowe, who teaches English and religious studies at Michigan State, previously authored a book about big band jazz in the New Deal Era (Swing Changes), and more recently (and relevantly for this blog) the really fine study How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (Harvard Press, 2004), an exploration covering topics from hymns to hip-hop, and from Jewish cantors to Native American chanters.

I look forward to digging into this one soon; information from the book's website is pasted in below.

In this cultural history of evangelical Christianity and popular music, David Stowe demonstrates how mainstream rock of the 1960s and 1970s has influenced conservative evangelical Christianity through the development of Christian pop music. For an earlier generation, the idea of combining conservative Christianity with rock--and its connotations of nonreligious, if not antireligious, attitudes--may have seemed impossible. Today, however, Christian rock and pop comprises the music of worship for millions of Christians in the United States, with recordings outselling classical, jazz, and New Age music combined.

Shining a light on many of the artists and businesspeople key to the development of Christian rock, Stowe shows how evangelicals adapted rock and pop in ways that have significantly affected their religion's identity and practices. The chart-topping, spiritually inflected music created a space in popular culture for talk of Jesus, God, and Christianity, thus lessening for baby boomers and their children the stigma associated with religion while helping to fill churches and create new modes of worship. Stowe argues that, in the four decades since the Rolling Stones first unleashed their hit song, "Sympathy for the Devil," the increasing acceptance of Christian pop music by evangelicals ultimately has reinforced a variety of conservative cultural, economic, theological, and political messages.

When I Stop Dreaming: Charlie Louvin, RIP

Paul Harvey

Grading papers today to the sounds of the Louvin Brothers. The surviving member of the great duo, Charlie Louvin, passed away this week (his brother Ira, of course, died in a car crash in 1965, a victim of his own alcoholism). Charlie's obituary, with a summary of his career, is here. Their all-time great album cover for "Satan is Real" is above, together with the song. The title for this post comes from their country classic "When I Stop Dreaming," of course famously covered by Emmylou Harris and numerous others later.

Charlie's passing also brought to mind an essay I read a long time ago, had forgotten about, but on re-reading find it just about the best thing I've read on the Louvin Brothers, and one of the most insightful pieces that exists on country music and religion: Lorin Stein, "High Lonesome Theology," published originally 2001 and reprinted over at Killing the Buddha. A little excerpt below, but don't miss the rest:

On the face of it, there’s something paradoxical about the Louvin Brothers’ lasting popularity in country rock and hipster circles. Since the sixties, their sacred songs have enjoyed a kind of transgressive chic. Partly this is camp and condescension. But I think it has more to do with the loneliness of their gospel; and Satan Is Real is their loneliest gospel album.

You don’t need to have been raised Baptist to be moved by “The Christian Life”: to hear the delicate, sad tone of explanation in Charlie’s voice when he sings, “Others find pleasure in things I despise” or the yearning in Ira’s harmony on the following line: “I like the Christian life.” The words want to tell a story of triumph, but the story they actually tell-and the story that the Louvins Brothers sing-is more complex:

My buddies tell me that I should have waited.
They say I’m missing a whole world of fun.
But I am happy and I sing with pride,
I like the Christian life.

It would be impossible for Billie Holiday, or for that matter Patsy Cline, to sing “world of fun” more mournfully than Charlie does. When he sings “I am happy,” caution and sadness are built into the very notes of the song.

Sacred Steel

Paul Harvey

A while back I blogged a bit about this unusual text: Robert Stone, Sacred Steel: Inside an African American Steel Guitar Tradition. The author also has produced a documentary video for the Arhoolie Foundation, Sacred Steel, which I hope to track down soon. Some wonderful examples of this tradition can be heard also on the 3 CD set Fire in My Bones: Raw + Rare + Otherworldly African American Gospel, 1944-2007 (the link takes you to my former post on that CD set). Here's a short review from Choice on the Sacred Steel book, which I hope will interest some of you:

Stone, Robert L. Sacred steel: inside an African American steel guitar tradition. Illinois, 2010. 280p bibl discography index videography afp; ISBN 9780252035548, $80.00; ISBN9780252077432 pbk, $25.00. Reviewed in 2011feb CHOICE.

In a consideration of African American music, one might not readily encounter the names of Chuck Campbell, Calvin Cooke, Little Willie Eason, Lorenzo Harrison, Glenn Renard Lee, Henry Randolph Nelson, or Robert Randolph. All these musicians were affiliated with music of the indigenous black American Holiness Pentecostal churches, music in which the steel ("Hawaiian") guitar plays an important role. Arcane though this information might seem, Stone (an independent folklorist) shows its importance both in its own right and in its relation to other musical and spiritual aspects of African American culture. This is a tale of personal discovery, a path that started in Florida two decades ago but broadened to California, Canada, Jamaica, Haiti, and the Bahamas as Stone investigated the liturgy and practices of the denomination and specific congregations. The photographs, videography, extensive bibliography, lengthy discography, and register of more 100 interview sessions reveal the implications of this music for those interested in African American culture (musical and religious) and folk and popular music traditions.Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- D.-R. de Lerma, Lawrence University

Battle Hymn of the Palin

Paul Harvey

Ok, enough already with the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother; this one is more interesting. I normally leave this kind of stuff to Randall, our resident analyst of Christian kitsch, but it's mid-week in January, all of my teams are out of the playoffs, and I needed some cheering up. Also, the male singer here has a very nice, resonant George Jones-quality to his voice, and there's no bigger fan of George Jones than me (listen to the second line, "ingrained with common sense"; that's some pure Jones musical intonation there). As for the lyrics, well, this is not Stephen Sondheim, but what can you do?

Country Music Minus the Culture Wars

Paul Harvey

My piece reflecting on Ricky Skaggs' new recording Mosaic, and more generally on white southern country music's relationship with politics, is just up at Religion Dispatches. (For those interested, here is Ken Tucker's review of the record, from Fresh Air).

A brief excerpt of my piece is below, and then read the rest here:

On his newest record, Mosaic, Skaggs has taken a step back into themes familiar in the religious history of the South, and away from the culture wars. As the opening epigraph suggests, he hasn’t gone soft on his religious belief, and the apocalyptic message drawn from the book of Elijah on Mosaic suggests that premillennial imagery still exerts a hold.

But the message is fundamentally personal, not political. And that’s a good thing.

. . . {T]he more recent culture wars tie between country, religious fundamentalism, and a Tea Party civil religion is an invented tradition. Historically, it lacks any deep roots in the white Southern tradition of musical expression. . . . Historically, Southern music at its best—the bluesmen, the Carter family, Charlie Poole, and the corpus of the old, weird America—simply could not be tied down to any particular political message or program. This music was about a world beyond one’s control. Its occasional bromides or homilies were not nearly as convincing as its unforgettable portrayals of the darker difficulties of survival in a harsh and uncertain world.