Page:The Evangelical Roots of Rock n’ Roll.pdf/11

Religions 2016, 7, 24 “calling” to be a preacher and his frequent lapses into alcoholism and marital infidelity. In fact, one undoubtedly strengthened the other in a dangerous dialectic, described by a former band mate as Ira “having a split personality like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (, p. 84).

Another, more famous, example of Christ-haunted country music is found in the life, songs, and death of country music’s greatest icon, Hank Williams. Williams was the most successful and significant practitioner of honky tonk, the country music genre whose heyday lasted from the mid-40s to the mid-50s. Honky tonk’s amplification allowed it to be heard above the din of the blue-collar barrooms that were its home, and its pronounced beat encouraged dancing. Its lyrics focused more on the economic struggles, heartaches, and beer-filled good times of the Southern working class, and accordingly the lives of honky tonk musicians often bore little resemblance to the rural, religious background of their typical upbringing. Not only has Williams’ music come to epitomize honky tonk, but his alcohol-fueled personal life, filled with marital strife, infidelity, violence, and failure, most fully represents honky tonk’s hard-scrabble ethos, permanently symbolized by Williams being banned from the family oriented Grand Ole Opry—the bastion of traditional country music values—in 1952 due to his drunkenness and unpredictability.

Although Williams has become more famous for his drinking than his piety, his lifelong religious faith was a major component of his career. In addition to the dozens of sacred songs he wrote: “even in beer joints he would sometimes throw everyone off guard with a hymn. Knowing himself to be a backslider, and knowing that he had been weighed in the balance and found wanting in so many ways, he seemed to find rare peace in the hymns of his childhood” (, p. 9). Hank preached more than many people were even aware, as he recorded a series of syrupy homilies set to organ music under the pseudonym “Luke the Drifter”, which were eerily similar to some of the in-song sermonizing that Ira Louvin would include in songs like “Satan Lied to Me”. Paul Hemphill writes, “Luke the Drifter was the flip side of Hank’s split personality: the penitent, moralizing about the bad things the other Hank had done” (, p. 118).

Although Hank’s religious songs and sermonizing undoubtedly comforted him, serving as a reminder of his childhood faith, and perhaps steeled him on occasion to resist temptation, they also served as a punishment, a penance for his sinfulness that drove the sense of guilt deeper into himself. If, as famous country songwriter Harlan Howard asserts, Hank’s theology boils down to “good is good, bad gets your ass kicked”, Hank suffered grievously for always eventually giving in to the “bad” (, p. 35). Paul Hemphill writes, “In the bible Belt South of Hank Williams’ time, a propensity for drink was not something to be handled with hope and forgiveness; it was, rather, the Lord’s business in the eternal struggle with Satan. . . ” (, p. 50). More times than not, particularly in the last few years of his life, Hank felt that Satan had won in his struggle against drink, painkillers, and infidelity. Once on tour, fellow entertainer Minnie Pearl tried to keep Hank sober in between sets by driving around with him and singing songs. As they sang his gospel hit “I Saw the Light”, surely calculated by Pearl to help Williams resist his urge to drink, he turned to Minnie and said: “Minnie, I don’t see no light. There ain’t no light” (, p. 156).

5. Conclusions

By the mid-1950s, blues, country, and the postwar youth culture were coalescing into the new musical genre that came to be known as Rock n’ Roll. “[Rock n’ Roll] was a genre in its own right, associated with a new matrix of musical sounds, and a new cluster of emblematic cultural values” (, p. 97). As noted at the start of this essay, Rock n’ Roll from its inception had a strong rebellious tendency. Even when Rock n’ Roll was at its most “conservative” in the 1950s, it was, “denounced by the over-thirty generation, ridiculed by self-proclaimed arbiters of musical taste, deplored by guardians of sexual morality, attacked by whites who feared its breaking of racial barriers, [and] blamed by the media for juvenile delinquency” (, p. xi). However, the first-generation of Rock n’ Roll musicians, most with rural Southern roots, did not rebel against their own evangelical religious faith.