Apostles of Rock

The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music

Jay R. Howard,John M. Streck

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813183961
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Apostles of Rock is the first objective, comprehensive examination of the contemporary Christian music phenomenon. Some see CCM performers as ministers or musical missionaries, while others define them as entertainers or artists. This popular musical movement clearly evokes a variety of responses concerning the relationship between Christ and culture. The resulting tensions have splintered the genre and given rise to misunderstanding, conflict, and an obsessive focus on self-examination. As Christian stars Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, DC Talk, and Sixpence None the Richer climb the mainstream charts, Jay Howard and John Streck talk about CCM as an important movement and show how this musical genre relates to a larger popular culture. They map the world of CCM by bringing together the perspectives of the people who perform, study, market, and listen to this music. By examining CCM lyrics, interviews, performances, web sites, and chat rooms, Howard and Streck uncover the religious and aesthetic tensions within the CCM community. Ultimately, the conflict centered around Christian music reflects the modern religious community's understanding of evangelicalism and the community's complex relationship with American popular culture.

1 Origins and Oppositions: The Founding of CCM

It is not my view that the Gospel should cause all the arts to be struck down and disappear; on the contrary, I should like to see all the arts, and especially music, used in the service of Him who gave and created them.

Martin Luther

In his history of popular music and the emergence of rock and roll, Philip Ennis opens with a metaphor drawn from the schoolyard. Describing the game Rock-Paper-Scissors, Ennis argues that in the realm of popular music “the relations among art, commerce, and politics are something like that game; each has some strong power over one other, but, at the same time, is vulnerable to a third.”¹ But while power in the children’s game is absolute and unidirectional—paper covers rock, rock smashes scissors, scissors cut paper—power in the music world, as in real life, varies in both magnitude and direction. Thus, while asserting the general case that “in American society, art validates money, money regulates politics, and politics defines art,” Ennis suggests that there are exceptions to these rules and ways in which contradictory relationships can also be argued.² Ultimately, then, the history of rock and roll Ennis proposes is the tale of a “stormy relationship” between art, commerce and politics. “Rocknroll,” Ennis argues, “. . . provoked trouble right from the start in all three of these areas, and it still does.”³

Art, commerce, politics. There can be little doubt that the three are necessary for an understanding of the history and development of rock and roll. However, unless one assigns the broadest of meanings to these concepts, one can question their sufficiency. In particular, as we move from the grand narrative of rock and roll’s broad history—its emergence from earlier music forms, the development of new recording technologies, the battle between ASCAP and BMI over performance rights, the payola hearings, etc.—to a more focused examination of the particular moments and forms that constitute both major and minor aspects of that history, it becomes obvious that other considerations must be brought to bear on our understanding of rock and roll as a musical form. Our case in point is contemporary Christian music, a musical genre that merges rock and roll with evangelical Protestantism. With CCM, therefore, one must add to the already convoluted mix of art, commerce, and politics the equally problematic tensions that characterize twentieth-century Christianity. Stormy relationships, indeed.

The Origins of CCM

In attempting to understand the history and development of contemporary Christian music (or any music for that matter), one must first ask a basic question: Revolution or evolution? Are we to understand the historical development of the music as a series of revolutions, with the meaningful distinctions emerging from the innovations of particularly creative individuals, or are we to understand musical history as a slow evolution from style to style? Was rock and roll born “when Elvis recorded rhythm and blues songs as a white country boy with the voice of a black gospel singer” or was rock and roll the outcome of the slow merging of various established genres of music—“pop, black pop, country pop, jazz, folk, and gospel,” and/or “rhythm and blues, . . . gospel, country and urban blues, pop crooning, Anglo-American balladry and Nashville country music”?⁴ Given a particular style of music, does it make any sense to ask who invented it?

Popular discourse would suggest that it certainly does make sense. There is no shortage of people who would assert that rock and roll was indeed invented by Elvis Presley, and, as we will see here, there are those who actively argue this or that artist to be the “father” (rarely “mother”) of contemporary Christian music. That said, however, there are reasons to move away from this revolutionary approach. Simply put, music, like any cultural form, cannot exist in a vacuum, and, if it is to communicate at all, music must draw from an established set of symbols and signs. Thus, while the popular discourse of music suggests each new genre to be the result of the lone artist creating something completely new, this discourse masks the communal nature of artistic production. As Jane Gaines writes in her discussion of entertainment law, “the very concept of authorship overrides the generic and conventional indebtedness that would mark . . . works as the product not so much of individuals as of societies.”⁵ This is as true of the genre as it is of the particular work. Music is evolution.

Turning, then, to the specific evolutionary history of contemporary Christian music, one faces the complication of three sometimes distinct histories—one in the music itself and two more in the musics from which it developed. To employ a frequently used metaphor, contemporary Christian music can be seen as the merging of two distinct musical streams: the safe, acceptable church musics of the evangelical church on the one hand and rock and roll on the other. This bucolic imagery, however, is somewhat misleading. For one thing, it implies a distinction between church music and rock and roll that is more imagined than real. As discussed above, music evolves; included in the ancestors of rock and roll were the very church musics that would later recombine with their secular progeny to produce CCM. This, then, points to a second issue. While the development of CCM is frequently discussed as a simple, linear progression—first there was church music, then there was rock, and then church music and rock combined to form CCM—the fact of the matter is that these “streams” twist, turn, merge, separate, dive underground, change names, and merge yet again. Metaphorically speaking, then, the history of CCM is not a history of merging streams but of woven threads. When CCM was born, church music and rock and roll did not cease to exist but rather continued on their own evolutionary paths. These paths continue to intersect with contemporary Christian music, with innovations in rock and roll being absorbed directly into CCM and innovations in CCM altering the landscape of church music. To write the history of CCM is, at least to some extent, to write the histories of rock and roll and of church music as well.

The religious roots of rock and roll are by now well documented. Ennis argues that Elvis Presley was “religiously soaked,” and Curtis suggests that both his vocal style and his stage presence were modeled after the southern gospel groups that Presley heard as a young man growing up in a Pentecostal church. Curtis claims that the Blackwood Brothers, a pioneering southern gospel group, were a particularly strong influence on Presley and a “harbinger for musical trends.”⁶ And Elvis Presley was not the only early rocker connected to religious traditions. Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard both came from Pentecostal backgrounds similar to Presley’s, and both brought the energy of the Pentecostal church service to the performances of rock music.⁷ Similarly, Chuck Berry (the son of a Baptist preacher), Buddy Holly (“a devout Baptist to the end of his life”), Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and Aretha Franklin had all started out as church or gospel singers.⁸ Clearly, more than a few of rock’s pioneers had ties to the Christian church.

The ties between early rock and roll and American religion, however, went well beyond the personal faith of particular musicians. In some cases, gospel songs became hits on the pop charts, either in their original form—“Oh Happy Day” (said to have originally been played as a joke) or “Amazing Grace”⁹—or with a few judicial changes that would translate “lyrics that sang of the mystical love of God into lyrics that celebrated the earthly love of woman.”¹⁰ Ray Charles made use of this latter approach in his songs “This Little Girl of Mine” and “Talking about You,” which as gospel songs had been “This Little Light of Mine” and “Talking about Jesus.” More generally, it is claimed that gospel “showed rock how to sing,” with groups like The Beatles, who “echoed one another’s phrases, dragged out words across several beats, shouted ‘yeah’ and went into falsetto cries,” mimicking classic gospel style.¹¹ Indeed, the quintessential vocals of a rock band—a male quartet, one singing lead and the remaining three backup—is said to be “a gospel form by origin.”¹² According to Anderson, “Black gospel provided white rock with the style, songs, and artists to imitate.” Taking this to its logical conclusion, Richard Stanislaw, music columnist for Eternity magazine and professor of music at Taylor University (a prominent Evangelical liberal arts college), argued, “Rock was first Christian music, then appropriated by the popular secular culture.”¹³ Religious roots, however, do not necessarily make for a religious medium, and, though there were numerous ways in which the various forms of gospel music had influenced rock and roll, religious leaders nevertheless found an abundance of reasons to condemn this new musical form.

Despite its gospel roots, rock and roll was quickly distanced from religion, with each side antagonistic toward the other. For their part, the teenagers who constituted the music’s intended audience began to react “against everything they perceived as aligned with the stuffy, restrictive adult world,” including the church.¹⁴ Rock and roll provided the soundtrack to this rebellion. In reaction, church leaders quickly attacked the new music. But with Southern fundamentalists leading the way, these early attacks on rock music focused on racial as much as religious concerns.¹⁵ So, for example, it was claimed that the interracial nature of early rock and roll presented a “new outbreak of cultural miscegenation” that “could only spell trouble for white America.”¹⁶ With the coming of the sixties, however, the opposition between rock and religion moved past the issue of race to that of lifestyle—specifically, the “permissive attitude toward sex, drugs and revolution” critics found embodied in rock and roll music.¹⁷ “‘Rock and roll,’” evangelist Bob Larson would later claim, “actually means ‘promiscuous sexual relationship music.’”¹⁸ So, while the hippies who now defined rock and roll were able to justify their cultural ménage à trois of sex, drugs, and rock and roll “as some sort of epic journey,” to the adult world it was little more than degeneracy and hedonism.¹⁹ Degeneracy has never been a church-approved lifestyle.

While the antagonism between rock and roll and the church that developed concomitant with the music made it difficult to imagine Christian forms of the genre, the evolution of gospel music itself paved the way for this connection. As far back as the late nineteenth century, the Fisk Jubilee Singers were credited with providing a “refined and wholesome entertainment” suitable for Christians.²⁰ Cusic credits evangelist Billy Sunday’s singer, Homer Rodeheaver, with revolutionizing the musical portion of revival meetings with his mixture of ministry and entertainment. Rodeheaver was, according to Cusic, gospel music’s first sex symbol.²¹ In the more recent past (and with no small measure of irony), televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who continues to condemn both rock and roll and contemporary Christian music, also established openings for a merging of rock and religion with his own “honky-tonk style” of gospel playing and singing. Indeed, Swaggart himself commented, “There seemed to be more rhythm in” his music “than the four walls of the church could stand.”²² While artists like Elvis Presley combined rhythm and blues, country music, and southern gospel to make rock and roll, Swaggart combined these same elements with Pentecostalism, pushing gospel music out of its hymn-oriented style toward more contemporary forms.²³

Throughout the sixties and seventies, vocal groups such as the Bill Gaither Trio and The Imperials, choral composers such as Ralph Carmichael, and black gospel artists including André Crouch and the Disciples gradually began to incorporate more pop- and rock-oriented styles into their music. And even though they were not the most daring of artists, this gentle pushing at the borders of what the evangelical church considered acceptable would have significant impact on the music of the church. In fact, the hymnals and projector slides of most evangelical churches today include numerous songs written by Gaither (“There’s Something about That Name” and “He Touched Me”) and Carmichael (“He’s Everything to Me”) as well as an abundance of “praise and worship” choruses from the early history of CCM. Although unwilling to adopt “secular” rock music wholesale, the evangelical church in the late 1960s and early 1970s was willing to gradually incorporate rock-like innovations into gospel music, provided they were saturated in religious rhetoric. Consequently, the success of Carmichael, Gaither, and the like arguably had as much to do with their willingness to imbue these new musical forms (or “watered down” versions of them) with overtly religious lyrics as it did with their talents as songwriters; whatever their musical abilities, a key talent for these artists was the command of the religious cliché. As long as the lyrics showed the artists to be unequivocally “gospel” in their approach, a limited amount of musical innovation could be tolerated and occasionally embraced.

By the late 1960s, rock and roll and the evangelical church were beginning to come back into contact. As the sixties ended and the church moved into the 1970s and the so-called Jesus Movement, the tentative incorporation of new sounds into the gospel canon would give way to the formulation of a new genre of music: Jesus Rock, or, as it would later be called, contemporary Christian music.²⁴ The groundwork for this genre had been slowly laid throughout the 1960s. At the same time that gospel musicians working in the sixties had begun to incorporate contemporary musical forms into the music of the church, rock and roll musicians had begun to connect their own music with a quasi-religious spirituality, if not organized religion. As suggested by music critics Robert Hilburn and Chris Willman, The Beatles’ 1966 pilgrimage to the Maharishi in India had been only the beginning: “Guitarist John McLaughlin amended his name to Mahavishnu John McLaughlin after meeting up with Sri Chinmoy; Carlos Santana billed himself as Devadip Santana for a number of years. Pete Townsend and Ronnie Lane became devotees of Meher Baba; Seals and Crofts advocated the Bahai faith; Richard Thompson became a strict Sufi; and Rastafarianism . . . became a household word with most American rockers thanks to the emergence of reggae music.” Soon, the writers note, “albums with blatant Eastern mystical overtones became commonplace.”²⁵ Off the beaten path of America’s traditional religions, this spiritualization of rock and roll nevertheless created opportunities for Judeo-Christian beliefs to influence rock. Though hardly expressions of Christian doctrine, many songs following this trend (Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky,” James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain”) drew freely from Christian culture, if not Christian belief. Indeed, this same period saw the production of Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell, two extraordinarily successful “rock operas” that blended popular music, rock and roll included, with Christian myths and ideas. Given this environment, Christian rock and roll—Jesus Rock—began to seem less and less a contradiction in terms.

It should be emphasized here, however, that the importance of songs such as “Spirit in the Sky” as well as the Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar rock operas lies more in what they suggest about mainstream culture at the time than their impact on evangelicals. While such material revealed an openness on the part of mainstream culture to religious and, more specifically, Christian material, such material was generally viewed with suspicion, if not open hostility, in the evangelical community because of its perceived irreverence and the lack of emphasis on the resurrection and atonement of Christ. As James Huffman explains, “Works like Jesus Christ Superstar, which ‘ask the right questions’ but allow each individual to provide his own a...