America: God's Chosen Country After All?

Paul Harvey

Maybe the Protestant Providentialists have it right after all: after England threw away yet another sure victory (see "Revolution, American") in today's World Cup match, evidence that God created America as an exceptionally blessed nation is clearer than ever. I guess David Barton is right after all. (Update: after the referee took away our victory against Slovenia, one may reasonably infer that God is not all that omnipotent after all).

More seriously (but still fun), I was about to post about religion and the World Cup, when Bradley Onishi, a grad. student at UC Santa Barbara, beat me to it (HT: John Fea). And his piece is a hell of a lot more interesting than what I was going to say, which was basically to repeat a variant of my quadrennial complaint about how basketball is a far superior sport to any other, including soccer, and inspires religious devotion from me, but seemingly from no one else. A taste of Onishi's piece:

If it is not about religion, it seems that the only means of explaining the phenomenon of the World Cup is through categories and concepts that we usually reserve for the religious and the sacred. In a strange way, the World Cup is about none of the forces that overshadow the day-to-day concerns of human life. The Cup is a very elaborate ritual, played out on the largest global scale possible. It transcends politics, economics, and religion by incorporating all of them. It does so by juxtaposing people, groups, national identities, particular belief systems, and political circumstances in manners that simply do not happen in any other setting. In 2006, the small African country of Ghana handed the USA a humbling and hope-crushing defeat. Where and how else in the world does that happen? In the first week of the 2010 Cup alone, Cameroon meets Japan, Argentina confronts Korea, and the freed colonies of the USA revisit mother England. You might tell me that the Olympics do the same thing. True, the Olympics provide a panoply of countries competing against one another in various games. But the World Cup does so in a concentrated setting vis-à-vis the one sport that throughout the world -- from Ghana to Germany to Senegal to Korea to Mexico to Chile to Slovenia -- creates overwhelming obsession, unbridled devotion, and, sadly, violent fanaticism. Starting to sound like religion yet?

By contrast, basketball is the most secular of the major sports that I know, even when there is a deep Protestant versus Catholic (Lakers versus Celtics) contest as there is going on now. I can't think of a sport with less religious ritual than the hardwood game; a little crossing of one' s self on the free throw line, LeBron throwing the chalk in the air, and that's about it, and virtually nothing from the stands -- distinct contrast to baseball (with its endless rituals), and football (with its players kneeling in prayer after crossing the goal line, and the whole ambiance of religion-nationalism surrounding the Super Bowl), and of course soccer, as Onishi explains here. And, for the World Cup, it's not just religion as nationalism, either, because then it would just be the Olympics, as opposed to something different.

My complaints about the superior aesthetic and visceral qualities of basketball aside, I got to see firsthand the religious frenzy induced by the "beautiful game" in Italy in 1982, when Italia won the World Cup semifinals when I was in Florence, and the finals when I was in Rome, whereupon I got to spend an evening riding around in some Italian stranger's VW Bug, shouting "Rossi! Rossi!" (the name of Italy's star striker). Oh what a night. That was a religion I could believe in.

Rock and Roll Sermon; or, the Raw and the Cooked

Paul Harvey

One summer evening in 1992, I spent an evening hanging out at the Corner Grocery (I think it was called) in Oxford, Mississippi. I can’t remember what got me there, and there were just a few people present, sucking down beverages to fend off the stifling heat, but during the evening a solo guitarist set up and began playing. At first I paid just intermittent attention, but as the evening progressed I found myself hypnotized by his solo version of hard-driving, rhythmically intense blues of a kind I had never heard before (later, his son joined him on drums, and someone else played bass, not always in tune but full of enthusiasm –“TUNE THE BASS!” another patron kept yelling at the stage, reminding me of when I saw the great jazz singer Betty Carter start pounding on the piano of her accompanist in an angry show of what tempo she was wanting in the middle of a particular number). By the end of the evening, I was exhilarated. Another younger fellow from Poland happened to be sitting nearby, and I asked him what I thought. “The raw and the cooked," he said. He preferred the “cooked,” blues with more melody and studied technique, but as long as I was in Mississippi I figured it was a good time to eat the raw, blues tartare.

The guitarist was from the Clarksdale area, not too far away, and he introduced himself as R. L. Burnside. The name meant nothing to me then; little did I know that during these late years of his life he was about to go from being a local working man on a meteoric rise to cult figure status among younger blues-seeking hipsters, thanks in part to the efforts of Arhoolie Records and Fat Possum Records (the latter being the producer also of The Mountain by the Heartless Bastards, my current favorite rock-n-roll sermon about unfulfilled desire and our deep need for others to prop us up sometimes; thanks to the power of their lead singer's voice, they manage to make the cooked seem raw).

Some years after hearing him in Oxford, I walked by the House of Blues on Decatur Street in New Orleans, and saw that he was the headliner act that night. The show was already sold out – fine with me, I thought, for in 1992 I paid no cover and got a whole evening of music from him, just at the cost of a beer (or two, or five, or whatever it was).For once in my life, I didn't arrive at the party after all the cool people had left.

The Polish guy’s response has never left me, for some reason, and I often think of it when assessing my responses to musical CDs that come my way. And I was thinking of it again after blogging recently about the just-released CD and DVD set How Sweet It Was: The Sights and Sounds of Gospel's Golden Age. This CD compilation represents the best of “cooked” post-war gospel – with the astoundingly beautiful, sophisticated quartet harmonies, and subtle musical transformations throughout the songs. This is the cooked -- raw gospel processed through the voices of skilled performers with consummate technique, who produce great art in the process.

If Anthony Heilbut’s collection is the cooked, Fire in My Bones is the raw. From the website for this 3-CD collection:

The majority of this music has never been reissued on CD, or in any other form (most tracks were originally released on regional independent labels). Most post-WWII compilations of African-American gospel music naturally concentrate on the astounding quartet and solo vocalist sounds made during the music's Golden Age. Fire In My Bones attempts to address and collect more neglected sounds from that era (and on to the present day). Dozens of traditions are represented. Some go back hundreds of years while others seem to have been arrived at as soon as the tape began to roll. Field recordings and studio tracks are all mashed together, with solo performances next to congregational recordings, hellfire sermons next to afterlife laments. Leon Pinson, Elder & Sister Brinson & the Brinson Brothers, Grant & Ella, Straight Street Holiness Group, Theotis Taylor, Brother & Sister W B Grate -- these artists will now be just a little less obscure.

A few of the cuts here have been anthologized frequently, including Madam Ira Mae Littlejohn’s “Go Devil Go,” from 1947. But most of the cuts feature individual singers who put down very few tracks on record; in some cases, they made just one recording.

On the first disc, for example, is “Better Get Ready,” by the Elder Roma Wilson and family, from 1948. You have to love liner notes like this: “This recording of four interweaving harp players with Wilson’s vocals on top was made as a ‘test’ by a record shop owner in Detroit. It was then released as a Gotham label 78 without the awareness of Roma or his three young sons (who all backed up their father on harmonica on the record). Mike Seeger called it the ‘single most important selection by multi-harp players in existence.’”

The second cut, “rock and Roll Sermon,” features a hard-rocking Elder Beck from 1956 castigating rock and roll music with a musical fury that would put most rock and roll to shame. Another strange selection, "The Very Last Mile," by John Boswell and the True Sounding Boswellettes, features a "flanged-out" guitar that sounds like it should have been on the soundtrack for Pulp Fiction. Other cuts features fife-and drum corps, some women in a senior home singing some old standards, and lined-out congregational singing. All of the music dates from the post-World War II era, meaning it's much clearer and easier to hear (with much less fuzz and static to fight through) than the compilations of music from the 1920s-1930s such as the all-time classic anthology Goodbye Babylon.

The Village Voice has an excellent review of the compilation here; a brief taste:

As Fire in my Bones came together, the original intent—to thoroughly document and classify the fervent religious music lurking beyond the resplendent harmonies of the vocal quartets that typify gospel's Golden Age (which historically falls between the end of World War II and the rise of "rock 'n' roll")—was completely overwhelmed. Not only was there a lot of great music from that era, but it continued right on through the '60s and '70s and into the present age—the box goes as late as 2007. The set gives in abundance, beyond classification. The keening, traditional-blues slide guitar of Willie Mae Williams's "When the Sun Goes Down" stands alongside the nimble country shuffle of Reverend Lonnie Farris's "Peace in the Valley." Reverend Louis Overstreet's "Working on the Building" slowly turns into congregational ecstasy, while the reverberated stomp of the Abraham Brothers' "Spirit of the Lord" could pass for a garage-rock revival number without setting off any atheist alarms. And then there's "Rock 'n' Roll Sermon," which is too delicious to simply give away here.

So, by all means, eat the delicious haute cuisine offered for you in gospel compilations such as How Sweet It Was. But on some Tuesday night when your senses need some awakening, put on Fire in my Bones. It's the closest gospel equivalent to the evening with R. L. Burnside that I've found.

Addendum: Other short, fun reviews of the compilation are here, here, and here. An excerpt from the first one, which hits it exactly right:

Every unjustly maligned genre deserves a three-disc savior, and for modern gospel music—often considered the exclusive terrain of bright-eyed church choirs wrapped in matching robes, swaying on risers—the redeemer is Fire In My Bones, a collection of scrappy, distorted, burning good news.

Cancer Cannot Kill Doggerel

Paul Harvey

I spent a lot of time growing up waiting in the hospital waiting room. This wasn't because I was ever ill when younger, or because I sustained any injuries more grievous than spraining my ankle about 10,000 times playing basketball for the last 40 years. Rather, my father, a family physician in a small town and one of just two doctors for one entire county in the Oklahoma Panhandle, got called in a lot -- and if my mother wasn't around, the hospital waiting room was my babysitter. For years, I stared down the mysterious hallway which had a sign reading something like (to the best of my recollection) "No One Under 13 admitted," waiting for the day I could walk freely down the ward and glimpse at the effects of the exotic diseases that must be lurking there.

In that waiting area, I read an awful lot of Boy's Life, Highlights, and pretty much the entire corpus (slight exaggeration, but it seems like it) of Reader's Digest, Field and Stream (weird, since I have always hated fishing, and have gone hunting exactly one time in my life), Guideposts, U. S. News and World Report, and other stuff that I can't even remember. Then there were the dermatology medical journals, my favorite since they showed all sorts of gross and disgusting skin diseases. They didn't stock National Geographic, presumably because those pictures of bare-breasted women out somewhere on the African savanna would shock the church ladies.

The waiting area was also replete with all manner of tracts, posters, and various transitory publications featuring a staggering amount of inspirational doggerel. I used to read that stuff (it was at least amusing, more than I could say for Field and Stream), and wonder who exactly it appealed to. But I was just a boy; who was I to say? Time to get back to the daily prescribed Bible reading, and wonder why exactly I was supposed to read the book of Leviticus, rather than (say) the autobiographies of Jerry Kramer and Bart Starr of my football heroes the Green Bay Packers.

Since then, inspirational doggerel has become a mega-industry. In "Doggerel Fails Me," a terrific piece up at Killing the Buddha, Mary Valle takes up a theme recently explored at fuller length in Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Ehrenreich's subtitle overstates the case, as it seems all subtitles of trade and popular non-fiction books (of the "How such and such Changed the World Forever" variety) do nowadays, but I appreciated the takedown of pink ribbon kitsch and feel-good maxims that seem to signify the death of tragedy.

Valle, a participant in a trial for cancer victims, knows whereof she speaks, and concludes that if doggerel of the "cancer cannot" variety helps some people, then fine. But the inspirational poem is a lie, because of course cancer can; it took my father, about as selfless and positive thinking a person as humanly possible to be. I'm still pissed off about that, and thinking about the words I read in that waiting room make me even angrier. I found Valle's conclusion much more potently comforting:

But I backed down from the ledge: people must like “Cancer Cannot” or you wouldn’t see it so much. It was time to do what I had come for. I took a seat and said a prayer for my new friend, and for the parents who donated the Meditation Room and their daughter, and decided that I’d contribute my own book to the Meditation Room collection, seeing as how there was no poetry on the shelf. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson: not a lie in the bunch.

On Sin, Forgiveness, Redemption, and Senator Kennedy

Paul Harvey

Tenured Radical and John Fea both have moving posts dealing with the complicated legacy of Senator Edward Kennedy -- the personal flaws, resultant appalling mistakes, and subsequent redemptive senatorial career. Just a short addendum: Kennedy represented another era of the Catholic engagement with politics (as John points out at greater length, so I won't repeat here), one coming from the Catholic New Deal tradition. That's a tradition that seems to be in its declining years, as Catholic conservatives seem more in the ascendancy. I miss it already.

In Remembrance of Julia Walsh

Paul Harvey

Some years ago I was fortunate enough to meet Julia Walsh, then a finishing graduate student under Vernon Burton; I read her dissertation concerning religion and working-class politics in Augusta, Georgia in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, enjoyed it, and made much use of it in my own work. I kept in touch with her for several years; the last time I saw her, if I remember correctly, was at a Southern Historical Association meeting in New Orleans, where she, her husband, and myself stood and listened to the youngest Marsalis brother lead a good jazz ensemble at a SHA reception.

I was shocked and saddened today to get the message of Julia's death, reposted below. She was indeed a warm and generous person and a fine scholar. I'll never forget having bbq in Birmingham with Julia, Daniel Stowell, and a few other folks, nor our wonderful conversations about religion and labor in American history.

The editors and board of H-South with heavy hearts convey the death of Julia Walsh (PhD, Illinois, 1999), an editor of this list and a contributor to H-Labor. Julia, who had been suffering from the effects of early-onset Parkinson's Disease for many years, died in her sleep on April 1, 2009. She is grieved by her husband Tom Jordan (Phd, Illinois, 2000), a specialist in Latin American labor history at SIU-Edwardsville, and by her young daughter Norah.

The daughter of Irish immigrants living in England, Julia was a graduate of Cambridge University and attended the University of Illinois for graduate work in Southern and working-class history. Her dissertation, "Horny-Handed Sons of Toil": Workers, Politics, and Religion in Augusta, Georgia, 1880-1910," was directed by Vernon Burton. She had published a number of articles before being disabled by her illness.

Julia taught for many years at Webster University in St. Louis. Julia was, along with Terry Finnegan and Henry Kammerling, part of the original H-South editors from its inception in the early 1990s. A gracious manner and skillful writing were her professional hallmarks. Julia was as warm and generous a person one could hope to meet. She and Tom presented a supportive social center for Illinois graduate students in the late nineties and they carried that goodwill with them to St. Louis where Julia was much loved in her department. Her scholarship was outstanding and added signifi=antly to our understanding of the American South.

A memorial mass for Julia Walsh will be celebrated on Wednesday, April 8th, at 11:00 a.m. at Seven Holy Founders Catholic Church. A reception following the mass will be held at the Jordan residence and is tentatively scheduled from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m.