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Pentecostalism and Rock ’n’ Roll in the 1950s

I just sing like they do back home.
—ELVIS PRESLEY, 1956
Elvis wore a red jacket, black shirt and pants, a silver belt glittering with rhinestones, and a yellow tie. It was October 1957 and the star was about to take the stage at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles. Thousands of fans waited, screaming. Amid the chaos and noise, Elvis made time for a reporter from a teen magazine called Dig. His loud outfit and gravity-defying coif contrasted with his humble, polite responses. The reporter wondered how “the reputed King of Rock ’n’ Roll” felt about Frank Sinatra’s comments that rock fans were just a bunch of “cretinous goons” and that rock ’n’ roll was “the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth”? “He has a right to his opinion,” Elvis replied, “but I can’t see him knocking it for no good reason. I wouldn’t knock Frank Sinatra. I like him very much.” Then, asked why he gyrated on stage, Elvis said that he didn’t really think about his movements. “I just sing like they do back home,” he commented. “When I was younger, I always liked spiritual quartets and they sing like that.”1 Elvis, like so many other first-generation rock ’n’ rollers, looked back with fondness on his pentecostal upbringing and the gospel quartets that inspired him.
Regardless of such personal associations, in the popular imagination a large gap still separated rock and Christianity. The widespread preaching against rock, which first began in earnest when the music broke onto the national scene in the mid-1950s, sowed the seeds of the idea that the big beat had nothing to do with Christianity in general or evangelicalism and pentecostalism in particular. Although some have paid attention to the impact of gospel music on rock ’n’ roll, the more specific religious and cultural roots of the music remain mostly unexplored.2
The culture of southern pentecostalism helped give birth to the new genre of rock ’n’ roll. That religious stream was one of many that fed into the larger river of rock ’n’ roll, but it was an important tributary. Burning controversies, inside and outside churches, surrounded the new musical hybrid. Through it all pentecostalism continued to shape first-generation performers like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Even before the new music made big news and created a stir, church leaders and laypeople argued about the relationship of popular music to church music. When performers like Ray Charles or Jerry Lee Lewis borrowed from sacred tunes for their recordings and performances, it only confirmed the worst suspicions of black and white believers. The supposed boundaries that existed between religion and nonreligion, sacred and profane were not as formidable as conservative Christians imagined or hoped.3 In the American South, a region that consistently ranked as the most conventionally religious section of the country, musical influences crossed back and forth over the thresholds of church doors.4
In 1960, Flannery O’Connor, the South’s most famous Catholic writer and a keen observer of southern zeal, remarked, “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”5 Indeed, since the early nineteenth century black and white evangelical Christianity had dominated below the Mason-Dixon Line. In the mid-1960s, the Southern Baptist scholar and critic Samuel Hill Jr., summed up southern religion, which he considered “a medley of revivalistic and fundamentalistic strains. On its revivalist side, it conceives of Christian faith in definitively inward terms. Faith is a reality to be experienced at the deepest level of one’s inner life.” For Hill, then, some of southern religion’s most representative traits included “the seriousness with which it takes its business; the subjective orientation of its life; its attitude toward change; its high self-estimate; and the peculiar relation which exists between the church and its culture.”6 Evangelicals in the South and elsewhere tended to emphasize the born-again experience, the workings of God in daily life, the wiles of the devil and the perils of sin, the importance of church attendance, the reality of hell, biblical literalism, and strict moral codes.7 In the first decades of the twentieth century, all the main pentecostal churches in America were headquartered in the South. But even then Baptists and Methodists claimed the largest share of believers. Historically, Catholics, Jews, and nonevangelical Christians had a very small presence. In 1950, two of the country’s largest Protestant denominations, the white Southern Baptist Convention and the black National Baptist Convention, boasted over seven million and four million members, respectively.8 The majority of their adherents resided in the former Confederacy. The South was, and still is, the most homogeneous religious region in the country.9
In the middle decades of the twentieth century, pentecostalism was a relatively new offshoot of evangelicalism. It grew out of the holiness movement of the late nineteenth century. Holiness people, many of them former Methodists, looked to key passages of scripture and the writings of John Wesley and proclaimed that believers could be sanctified, or set apart, living holy lives, unburdened by sin. Holiness shared some of its optimism with other Victorian movements of spiritual abundance or limitless divine potential, including Christian Science, Seventh-day Adventists, and mind cure. Some of what the psychologist and scholar of religion William James said of mind cure in 1902 also applies to perfectionism and holiness. “The fundamental pillar on which it rests,” James observed of mind cure, “is nothing more than the general basis of all religious experience, the fact that man has a dual nature, and is connected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a profounder sphere, in either of which he may learn to live more habitually. The shallower and lower sphere is that of the fleshly sensations, instincts, and desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests.”10 Further, higher spiritual experiences and insights awaited holiness folk who devoted themselves completely to God.
Holiness people stressed heart purity and a strict life of obedience to God. Preachers often targeted lax mainliners for allowing card playing, theater attendance, or even dancing. Such secular amusements, deceptively harmless, led straight to hell, they warned. Critics thought the exuberant, overzealous holiness folk went too far. Mark Twain aimed his satire sights on the most famous southern holiness preacher of the Gilded Age. The Georgia revivalist Sam Jones, wrote Twain in an 1891 short story, unpublished in his lifetime, was an unbearable ignoramus. The story followed the preacher’s trip to heaven aboard a celestial train. Jones hollered “hosannahs like a demon” and was scolded by Saint Peter. The evangelist made a complete nuisance of himself in paradise, “preaching and exhorting and carrying on all the time” until “even the papal Borgias were revolted.”11
Jones and other preachers took it all in stride. The people continued to show up at their revivals and to embrace holiness and Christian perfectionism. Following the mass meetings of Jones and the spread of holiness, pentecostalism first took root in the American West and the American South in the first years of the twentieth century. A protracted interracial revival in Los Angeles, which erupted in April 1906, drew thousands to a former barn and tombstone shop. William J. Seymour, a traveling black preacher from Louisiana, led the devotees. Men and women, young and old, black and white, sang, shouted, spoke in unknown tongues and believed that they were witnessing a new age of the spirit unlike anything since the Holy Ghost descended on the apostles in the second chapter of the New Testament book of Acts. Women ministers played a conspicuous role in both holiness and pentecostalism. The color line, adherents liked to proclaim, was washed away in the blood in these last days before Jesus’s Second Coming.
Stalwarts testified to other signs and wonders. At the Azusa Street revival, the key founding event of American pentecostalism, men and women, touched by the spirit, claimed to be able to take up and play instruments that they had no familiarity with. Observers in the press and pilgrims who ventured across the country to experience this “outpouring of the spirit” marveled at the scene. Blacks and whites sang, clapped, and shouted “Hallelujah!” together.12
Interracial services and prominent woman preachers largely went the way of the horse and buggy. By the 1920s and 1930s, most pentecostals had divided into all-white or all-black fellowships, and fewer and fewer women received ordination. Other peculiarities lasted throughout the century. Energetic worship styles and revved-up music marked pentecostal churches from one generation to the next. From the earliest days, believers liked to compare their spirit-filled churches with the lifeless drudgery of mainline congregations. As one early convert put it, “Compared with [the pentecostal revival], any meeting of Baptists is as the silence of death.”13
Black storefront churches and rundown glory barns, the sites of pentecostal meetings, did not tend to attract members of the Rotary Club or the Chamber of Commerce. Adherents clung to their outsider status with pride. The establishment of Jesus’s or Paul’s day had accepted neither, they pointed out. So-called respectable churches turned away from true Christianity and had a “Bible full of holes,” not a “Holy Bible.” But animosity went both ways. “Holy roller,” “tonguer,” “religious fanatic,” and “bible thumper” were typical epithets hurled at the pentecostals by Baptists and Methodists. Even within evangelical circles pentecostalism was still suspect in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1963, a discontented Louisiana Methodist wrote to Christianity Today, concerning what he thought were proud, boastful pentecostals. “I have found Pentecostalists choosing to dissociate themselves from the major orthodox denominations,” he sneered, “because they claim to offer the Holy Ghost (pronounced HO-lyghost) as a bonus to people already ‘saved.’ ” Was this some kind of “Christian aristocracy”? he asked rhetorically.14
One folklore and religion scholar notes that “Pentecostals are creating distinctive models for members to follow that will differentiate them from others, [and] they are aware that many outsiders consider their behavior extreme.… [But by] creating standards that seem extreme to the outsider,” she writes, “Pentecostals create boundaries between themselves and others. They recognize that in so doing they often create negative images that are difficult to combat. The balance between ‘different’ and ‘freakish’ is not an easy one to maintain.”15
In many ways, however, as pentecostal and holiness churches grew, becoming less “freakish,” even outpacing the mainline, they moved haltingly from the fringe to the American religious mainstream. In June 1958, Life magazine ran a cover story on what its editors called a “third force in Christendom.” That third force—made up of pentecostals, Adventists, holiness groups, and a host of what were derogatorily called fringe sects—seemed likely to outpace Catholicism and Protestantism. One observer in the Life feature cautioned that not all third force Christians were rowdy, barnstorming, chandelier swingers. Still, the reporter ventured, “Swingy hymns and passionate preaching stir up the congregation’s emotions, and worshipers respond with hand clapping, arm-waving, loud singing, dancing in the aisles, shouted ‘amens.’ ”16 This was not like the calm, measured services of most mainline churches. The innovative, dynamic aspects of the self-proclaimed “old-time faith” offered more effective communication to members than dry sermons from a minister.17
Relatively new to the American religious scene, pentecostalism drew the disapproval of mostly outside critics, whether mainline Protestants, journalists, or academics. In the view of typical skeptics, the movement catered t...