Page:The Evangelical Roots of Rock n’ Roll.pdf/4

Religions 2016, 7, 24 Despite—or perhaps because of—Southern Protestantism’s intense mistrust “worldly” sensuality, a unique strain of Southern hedonism emerged. In the seminal The Mind of the South (1941), W. J. Cash describes this streak of Southern hedonism as a “hell of a fellow”, which was to “stand on his head in a bar, to toss down a pint of raw whisky at a gulp, to fiddle and dance all night...to fight harder and love harder than the next man” (, p. 50). Historian Ted Ownby writes of the divided soul of God-fearing Southerners drawn towards hedonistic pleasures: “The two forces operated against each other in an emotionally charged dialectic, the intensity of each reinforcing the other” (, p. 17). Historian Paul Harvey points to evidence of this Southern religious tension by noting that the states that compose the evangelical “Bible Belt “ also have “the highest rates of violence, incarceration, divorce, alcoholism, obesity, and infant mortality” in America (, p. 6). To put it another way, if drinking one beer damns your soul as much as twelve beers, and you have decided you are going to drink beer, then why stop at one and limit your forbidden fun?

Most significantly, this streak of “sinful” Southern hedonism does not typically function as a rebellion against the church—it is not a rival set of moral values or a challenge to God’s authority. Rather, “sinful” behavior is fully recognized as such by the “sinner”. Rock n’ Roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis alludes to Luke 16:13 when he declared, “I’m draggin’ the audience to hell with me. How am I gonna git ‘em to heaven with [the song] ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’? You can’t serve two masters; you’ll hate one an’ love the other” (, p. 245). Lewis is affirming his belief in the strict religious system that sharply divides the world into “saved” and “damned”, “secular” and “sacred”. He manages to keep his faith in this religious system despite believing he will wind up on the “wrong” side of it. Lewis knows who is “master”; he also believes he is a bad “servant”. W.J. Cash speaks to this when describing the religious burden of the “hell of a fellow”: “But even as he danced, and even though he had sloughed off all formal religion, his thoughts were with the piper and his fee” (, p. 55).

Many of the most influential blues, country, and Rock n’ Roll musicians in the first half of the twentieth century grew up in the religious culture of evangelical Protestantism, with the church often being where they first learned to play and love music. However, as they moved away from playing overtly Christian “gospel” music, evangelical Protestantism held that they were participating in secular, sinful activities that were part of a Fallen world. The dominant religious culture held that God and the Devil, salvation and damnation, are at war with one another; each human soul is a battlefield, and the stakes could not be higher. In this harsh, all-or-nothing religious culture, the entire burden for salvation or damnation is on the individual, causing Georgia’s Flannery O’Connor to state, “while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted” (, p. 818). The South’s prolific production of Gospel music—music often performed in church with explicit Christian themes, exemplified the South as “Christ-centered”, but many blues, country, and Rock n’ Roll musicians were examples of the South at its most “Christ-haunted”.

3. The Blues and Southern Soul

Much of Rock n’ Roll’s rebellious spirit is inherited from in its primary musical precursor, the blues. Blues music developed as the music of Saturday night, performed in the free time and place when African Americans in the Jim Crow South could express themselves in ways discouraged or impossible in other spaces. Adam Gussow argues that “black southerners evolved blues song as a way of speaking back to, and maintaining psychic health in the face of, an ongoing threat of lynching (, p. xii). Being a blues musician was in itself an act of resisting the neo-slavery labor system in the South, since blues musicians could avoid the hard physical labor that was the lot of most African Americans during this period. Mississippi bluesman David “Honeyboy” Edwards describes this when remarking, “When the white man sees you with that guitar he thinks, ‘You got that machine so I know you ain’t goin’ to do no work” (, p. 125).

In a society that defined “secular” pleasures of the flesh as sinful, the blues often reveled in the pleasures of this world, in terms of its lyrics, the lives of blues musicians, and the sensuous atmosphere