Page:The Evangelical Roots of Rock n’ Roll.pdf/9

Religions 2016, 7, 24 many musicians from continuing their careers, which they believed risked the damnation of their soul, but rather this conflict between “secular” and “sacred” became part of their music, and thus is at the foundation of the blues. While the blues helped African Americans in the Jim Crow South cope with and resist social injustices, many blues musicians did not rebel against their own religious faith or a belief in their own sinfulness.

4. Christ-Haunted Country Music

At approximately the same time the blues was emerging from African-American folk culture, “country” music was forming as a commercially popular musical genre largely from the South’s working class white culture. Paul Harvey points out that although Southern churches were racially segregated, “they shared common cultural frames of reference, expressed especially through music. Visions of Jesus among working class and rural southerners, too, ran parallel in the segregated institutions” (, p. 123). As detailed above, black and white Southerners in the early twentieth century shared many similar theological perspectives, rooted in their evangelical Protestant beliefs, including an adversarial stance toward the “secular” world and a mistrust of sensual pleasures. Therefore, like the blues, there is a strong Christ-haunted tension at the core of country music, although it is exhibited significantly differently than in the blues for reasons that will be explored below.

Country music’s preeminent historian, Bill C. Malone, identifies religion as the greatest influence on the formation of country music, writing that southern religious life “affected both the nature of songs and the manner in which they were performed” (, p. 10). The primary religious difference between blues and country music is that the blues mainly operated in opposition to the dominant religious culture; however, country music during the same period normally celebrated Christian piety and reinforced the dominant religious values of its audience, either explicitly or implicitly.

For example, The Carter Family, country music’s first popular performing group, commonly wrote and recorded such gospel songs as “No Depression in Heaven” (1936) alongside secular songs, creating a music that collectively supported, “the sanctity of home, hearth, and mother’s love, sexual innocence, the necessity of a firm religion, the purity of the grave, and the durable hope of a better world beyond it, whose earthly colony was the church” (, p. 55). The Carter Family set the template country music would follow for the next two decades. Many country artists comfortably interweaved sacred music in with their more secular tunes; for example, twenty percent of the songs Hank Williams wrote are gospel (, p. 111), and he frequently played Southern gospel standards during his radio performances.

The “sacred” and “secular” existed so comfortably in many country musicians’ repertoires because even their secular songs easily fit within the larger religious/moral framework of evangelical Protestantism. When early country music depicted drunkenness or violence it did so in a context that almost always reinforced the church’s morality, such as in Roy Acuff’s “Wreck on the Highway” (1942) that links a lack of religious faith with a whiskey soaked highway crash, and Hank Williams’ “Honky Tonk Blues” (1952), where a prodigal youth experiences the vanity fair of urban honky tonks, only to return to his parents’ farm and the moral order of his home and family. Blues music, as we have seen, does not have a similar tradition of supporting the dominant religious culture; instead, hedonistic subjects like drunkenness, sexuality, and violence were typically celebrated, rather than used as a morality tale.

Despite its confident declarations of Christian piety, country music during the first half of the twentieth century had a dark undercurrent closely related to W.J. Cash’s concept of the “hell of a fellow” (, p. 50) and O’Connor’s “Christ-haunted South” (, p. 818). As Greil Marcus writes, “All that hedonism was dragged down in country music; a deep sense of fear and resignation confined it, as perhaps it almost had to, in a land overshadowed by fundamentalist religion. . . ” (, p. 133). Life as a touring professional musician was rife with fleshly temptations not endorsed by the rural churches most country musicians grew up in, and in whose tenets most believed throughout their lives, despite their frequent falls from grace. To use Hank Williams as an example, Charles Reagan