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:

Our Great Pantheist Epic

Paul Harvey

Here's a belated 4th of July post -- little power outage around here cut off my internet access so we're a little behind on posting. Anyway, in honor of the 4th, what better than Bruce Springsteen doing "This Land Is Your Land," the-song-that-should-be-our-national-anthem. "America the Beautiful" would also be a great national anthem, especially since it was inspired by my local landmark Pike's Peak, honors land, and the latter verses hail both "liberty" and "law." Either one of those would be great, and I'd put my hand over heart every time -- just ANYTHING but the unsingable, militaristic, bombast/drinking song we're stuck with presently.

In case you don't know, "This Land Is Your Land" was written as Woody Guthrie's angry response to the treacly patriotism of "God Bless America." Even Carl Lewis, who famously butchered our hideous national anthem, can sing "This Land."

And this one's for you too, Professor Fea. And for our national parks, under significant threats according to a just-released report which also recommends a number of actions to forestall their possible decline.

Hard Times Ain't Gonna Rule My Mind

Paul Harvey

What do Reinhold Niebuhr and Gillian Welch/David Rawlings have to do with each other? Nothing, you say, and that would be correct; everything, I say, and that's probably a stretch to say the least, but it's a reflection that came this morning reading/listening to two entirely unrelated pieces (update: now, three pieces, see the update below).

In "Religious Realism," over at The Book, Alan Wolfe reviews Why Niebuhr Now?, a posthumuously published work by the intellectual historian John Patrick Diggins. Wolfe provides a thoughtful review both of the book's strengths and weaknesses, as well as a nice short examination of Niebuhr himself, including a couple of sentences related to the subject to come shortly: "Niebuhr was of course serious, at times ponderous, himself. Yet he consistently warned against the kind of seriousness that dismisses the ironies inherent in human existence."

I happened to be reading that while listening to The Harrow and the Harvest, the new and long-awaited recording by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings -- you can listen to it in full (for the next couple of weeks or so, I think), here, courtesy of NPR Music (big HT to Deg for pointing me there).

Welch's musical persona always has been inspired by the kinds of struggles, personal journeys, dreams, and frustrated longings of characters that seem to step from the interwar years, updated a bit sometimes but carrying the kind of message and leading the kinds of lives of people that Reinhold Niebuhr's southern-born students (including Howard Kester and many others) and their comrades and co-workers (including Claude Williams and Owen Whitefield, discussed at full length in Jarod Roll and Erik Gellman's new book The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America) worked and lived among during some of the tougher years of the twentieth century. Heath will be posting a full-length interview with the authors of that book soon, so stay tuned for that.

"Hard times ain't gonna rule my mind," Gillian Welch sings, reflecting the characteristic determination of her song-characters to survive the vicissitudes that befall them, both those dictated by fate and those they bring on themselves. These are stories of American religious realism, in this case perhaps more personal and less archetypical or self-consciously mythical than in some of her previous records. At their best, the songs poignantly reflect on the ironies inherent in human existence.

UPDATE: Jim Sleeper of Yale University sent me his review of the same book by Diggins, about Niebuhr, which just confirmed the conclusions I reached above about Niebuhr's theology as lived out in the characters in Welch's songs. More than a simple review, Sleeper's short piece aptly summarizes some of the most important conclusions Niebuhr reached in his work, and how they apply today. As Sleeper explains:

The faith, although Christic and biblical, turned paradoxically on humans’ experience not of God’s presence, but of his absence. Niebuhr’s “religious vocation was to doubt religious certainty,” as Diggins puts it: “Genuine religion is always a struggle between belief and unbelief.”

That struggle is inevitable, Niebuhr held, because, on the one hand, our individual finitude and mortality make us experience the wonder, love, and yearning that generate religion, art, and compassion. On the other hand, because we’re limited and doomed as creatures, we’re also willfully or wistfully doomed as creators, with no external vantage points or leverage on history. That predicament generates incessant flights into illusory self-importance, power, omniscience, and material security—and therefore into idolatries of rugged individualism, liberal universal nationalism, the invisible hand, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the global village, and techno-nirvana.

As Welch sings, "the Great Destroyer sleeps in every man."

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.

Lady Godga's Judas, Just in Time for Easter

What better than a little Lady Gaga for Easter? Welcome below our first contribution from new contributor David Stowe, whose new book No Sympathy for the Devil has received quite a bit of blogging attention here. Here, David analyzes Lady Gaga's new single and its place in the history of Christian pop and religious-themed musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar.

Lady Gaga's Judas

by David Stowe

At this time forty years ago Jesus Christ Superstar the double album was near the top of the charts, with the musical slated to open on Broadway in the fall. Godspell was about to open off-Broadway, and Marvin Gaye's spiritually-infused What's Going On was being shipped to record stores.

Now we have Lady Gaga, whose just released single, "Judas," already has some eight million hits. It includes lines likes these

When he comes to me, I am ready
I'll wash his feet with my hair if he needs
Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain
Even after three times, he betrays me

I'll bring him down, bring him down, down
A king with no crown, king with no crown

[Chorus]
I'm just a Holy fool, oh baby he's so cruel
But I'm still in love with Judas, baby
I'm just a Holy fool, oh baby he's so cruel

But I'm still in love with Judas, baby

And also:

In the most Biblical sense,
I am beyond repentance
Fame hooker, prostitute wench, vomits her mind
But in the cultural sense
I just speak in future tense
Judas kiss me if offensed,
Or wear ear condom next time

New York magazine has published a detailed Biblical exegesis of the lyrics:

Lady Gaga's "Judas" is more than a pop anthem to loving the wrong guy: It's also the perfect excuse to examine infamous Catholic schoolgirl Lady Gaga's religiosity and the way she appropriates, inverts, and reworks Biblical allusions and images. Here's a serious, line-by-line analysis of the liturgical references in Judas from Luke 7:38 to John 13:27." They don't call her "Godga" for nothing ...

“I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs”
A reference to Luke 7:38, in which Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus’ feet with her tears and dries them with her hair. In John 11:2 (and 12:3), she anoints Jesus’ feet with perfume and then wipes them with her hair. In some Christian traditions, Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene are the same person; in other traditions, they are distinct persons. Either way, though, Gaga's take is slightly off: Hair is for wiping or drying feet, not for washing....

Tim Rice meets Madonna. As Mary Magdalene sung so controversially 40 years ago:

I don't know how to love him

What to do, how to move him....

He's a man

He's just a man

And I've had so many

Men before

In very many ways

He's just one more.

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).

Jonathan Walton Speaking at ENC

Randall Stephens

Jonathan Walton (Assistant Professor of African American Religions, Harvard Divinity School) will give a public lecture on "The Preachers' Blues: Reclaiming Authority on Wax," Wednesday, April 13, 4:00pm, Shrader Lecture Hall, Eastern Nazarene College, Quincy, MA.

Walton, a social ethicist and African American religious studies scholar, is the author of Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of African American Religious Broadcasting (New York University Press, 2009) a groundbreaking study on religion, media, and theology. Cornel West (Princeton University) describes the book as "the best work we have on the complex dynamics of the Black megachurch phenomenon. Walton is a brilliant cultural critic and courageous prophetic voice!" James Cone (Union Theological Seminary) lauds Watch This! as "An important examination of the Black Electronic Church. Jonathan Walton brings new insights into the major TV evangelists in the African American community."

Professor Walton will speak at ENC on the history of the religious "race" record industry and the the cultural ethos and competing ethical values of black Christian communities during the 1920s and 1930s. Like all forms of mass culture, says Walton,

religious records served multiple purposes and were interpreted by listeners at varying registers. For many, religious recordings were spiritually edifying and liberating, just as they were wildly entertaining. Critics have show that these religious recordings contested the aesthetic values of the black middle class even as they reinforced bourgeois behavioral codes. By turning our attention to the shared interests of male preachers and the recording industry, I describe how sermons stressing personal piety and culturally familiar stereotypes shaped cultural debates concerning the style, content, and purpose of evangelical preaching in the 20th century.

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.

More on Arcade Fire and the Suburban Soul (and Self-Promotion)

Paul Harvey

Monday I posted briefly about the Grammys, including surprise winner for Best Album, Arcade Fire. In (as Luke Harlow would say) the best self-promotional RiAH tradition, I draw your attention to Religion Dispatches today, where I develop those thoughts on Arcade Fire at greater length, with a piece about their current record The Suburbs and previous efforts Funeral and Neon Bible. A little excerpt below, and then you can follow the link from there:

Has there been a major pop group more concerned with exploring personal anxieties, aspirations, and narratives through music defined so fundamentally by religious themes? The turmoil and paranoia of the last decade—wars, attacks, economic crashes, myriad color-coded fears—run through Arcade Fire’s three full-length records: Funeral, Neon Bible, and The Suburbs. The newest effort induces a tour of previous decades, when suburbia seemed (but only seemed) to offer placidity and refuge from the wilderness downtown.

Continue reading . . .

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

Going Straight to Hell on a Crazy Train

By Michael J. Altman

Combining Paul's post of a Sarah Palin version of a classic song and Kelly's post about zombies, I bring you the best parody of Ozzy Osbourne ever. This comes courtesy of Westboro Baptist Church, the church that loves Jesus but probably hates you:




That's right, WBC is protesting Ozzy Osborne--a few decades late, if you ask me--making it official: "God hates Ozzy Osborne!"

Jesus is My Friend

Randall Stephens

Hat tip to my co-author Karl Giberson for pointing me to this great video. If this is not already on-line at Christian Nightmares, it should be. The song and video is proof that reggae is not for everyone.

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.