Worldly ways

Say, let’s have another ramble drawn from recent Facebook conversation, shall we? — this occasion an exchange with my sister. My sister is a good deal younger than I; I’m the oldest of four, she the youngest, born the year before I graduated high school. The other day she re-posted the post below, from American Christian country star Steven Curtis Chapman, on her FB page and tagged me, expecting I would like it. She knows me, and of course she was right. In fact, I’ve been kind of stuck on it.

Yesterday I returned to the post and said as much, that I’d been repeat listening. ‘Man, I’m a complete fool for this sound.’ Which would have been the end of it, except that in her brief reply she referred to the ‘sound’ as bluegrass. This and a terrible tendency in me to something even I frequently find difficult to distinguish from mansplaininess led me to a string of comments that I’ll reproduce here. I answered:

Not bluegrass, though. This is just a kind of small-chorus-group thing that came about from the 30s on [edit: actually from the earliest days of American radio, in the 20s], with the radio gospel hours, alongside mainstream radio-&-tv country. It never depended on accompaniment (and goes with piano first, or as much anything).

To that I felt it necessary to add a follow-up, by way of illustration:

These guys defined it in the 40s and especially the 50s.

An illustration which I’m afraid I couldn’t leave undeveloped.

Those guys were a big personal & musical influence on Elvis, by the way. This is where he comes from (and never left).

But now, I saw, I’d set myself up to make a larger sort of cultural history point. What could I do? I plunged further:

Bill Gaither wrote ‘He Touched Me’ in that environment in 1964. But by then the church-music groups and the teenage-market sound Elvis (and very quickly the Beatles &c.) is most associated with were going in fully distinct directions, pushed by the record industry.

Then, just to hammer the original thought home:

A rendition like the Chapman family’s there owes a lot to Elvis’ own recording of the song in the early 70s, undoubtedly.

A handy place to quit. But I guess I was still feeling for a bookend of some kind.

And yes, most of this stuff is musical (not to mention theological) trash. But I still love it.

That I was loving it is clear enough. If I’d found my bookend, by this point I was too much into sharing mode, as I think you’ll understand. So, compulsively:

The Blackwood Brothers in the 60s — because I can’t get enough, evidently.

At last, though, I hit on a fitting finish, an example to bring it back around to my start with and to impart a little twist with at the same time:

Not the chorus group sound, but listen to Willie Nelson’s gorgeous version of It Is No Secret sometime. See if you can keep a dry eye.
 

(I don’t keep a dry eye, I should say, if I lean back and listen to him sing, here. When he gets to ‘Do not be disheartened,’ I already just want to be held.)

My sister has a toddler and a newborn and can’t be on Facebook all morning, so I’d been left, through this above, to carry on uninterrupted. When she did have a few minutes (while nursing, I imagine), she hearted a bunch of my YouTube offerings, gratifyingly, but objected to my ‘trash’ comment — to the parenthesis about theological sense, specifically. I wrote back:

Well, there’s a long discussion there. But I don’t mean to say that any of these few songs in particular is bad, just that the genre as a whole is trashy. And you can understand that in more than one way — it’s not necessarily to disparage.

She seemed satisfied with that. A good thing, too, because there in responding to her I was moved by listening to the music, really, rather than the big culture thoughts. Having listened to some tunes and delivered my little lesson, I was ready to stop.

⋆  ⋆  ⋆

Over here on the blog, however, I’m moved by something other than the sounds. I have been wanting to return to questions I began noodling around some months ago, where I was referring not to my own FB chatter but to what a friend posted as a sort of public defense of decisions made regarding conflict in his family. ‘I want to talk a little about cultural complexity and dividedness,’ I say there. In the present post’s context I again have in mind drawing of lines between the domain of the World and the domain of the Spirit. With time, possibly, I could show how the lines he’s drawing there are related to the ones conversation with my sister about this familiar musical genre and its slightly less familiar backstory has me thinking about. For this post — you’ll be grateful to know if you’ve read this far — I’m not quite that ambitious. Anyway, we can always come back to that angle another time.

What I will try to do for now is characterize the peculiar sort of rough analysis applied to popular music in my family, church, and early school surroundings from the time I came along (not long before Elvis got around to his recording of ‘He Touched Me’) to when my sister did (about when Steven Curtis Chapman first hit stride as a national ‘CCM’ name). What was acceptable popular music and what wasn’t occupied a lot of bandwidth in my world, to put it briefly. What I knew from very early in life was that there was the Lord’s music and there was the World’s music; I also knew that this itself wasn’t where the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable lay. Not everything that presented itself as Christian expression was clean, obviously, and not everything that didn’t was necessarily unclean. When you think about it, that’s a pretty hefty download for a person in the years from kindergarten to adolescence. For me, even so, the principles did penetrate in some fashion. ‘Rock,’ I understood, was the wrong sort of music by definition. It shouldn’t surprise, I think, if I note also that that definition’s turning out to be something of a perpetual difficulty tended in my young mind, over time, to make this the more, not the less, compelling a basic question of moral interpretation and resolve. In relationships of varying intensity to that categorical, if often distant or obscure, species of wrongness, there were all sorts of cultural markers to be identified and made sense of, there were vast interpretational gray areas to be approached with circumspection, and there were characteristic threats of deception and moral failure to be guarded against — things one learned to deal with, if not to understand, mostly through imitation. I did learn it, and I remained pretty obediently discriminating in some sense up to maybe age twenty. Steven Curtis Chapman, in fact, was at first a borderline case (as Elvis had been for us, with a kind of special, vaguely ironic prominence, when I was a child) — ‘sort of rock, not exactly’ — to be negotiated when I was eighteen or so. That degree of severity in the practices of avoidance of the World of my youth my sister is too young, thankfully, to remember.

Something I couldn’t appreciate so young, of course, was how recently forms of popular music had been recognized, in the particular Christian communities I knew as mine or like mine, as this seemingly essential zone of moral problem. Which isn’t to say that my parents and those around them didn’t frequently frame the issues in significant degree by way of reference to their own pretty recent youthful experiences. When you’re a kid, naturally, it takes a while before anything prior to your own existence doesn’t seem somehow ancient; anyway, musical matters and their associations were packaged with Bible lessons, which indeed were ancient in source.

And I certainly couldn’t appreciate how little I was really being given to go on, considering how important the question was said to be. Ignorance of or deliberate narrowness about music and the extents of its strange withering and flowering, simultaneously, in and through the twentieth-century moment of American emergence went hand-in-hand with elevating some things about music to a matter of moral obsession. It would be wrong here to find fault too easily with willful neglect on its own account; a community might choose with (at least partial) good cause not to make a priority of the pursuit of an understanding of music under its present condition of massive cultural change. It’s not the ignorance we have to notice and criticize, it’s the discrepancy between the ignorance of it and the obsession with it.

But how is it that a community comes to live with such dis-integrity in the habits and methods of judgment it depends on to see itself defended and maintained? Here’s where I begin to get at what I’m interested in. If it wasn’t already clear, I’m not into any mere cataloguing of Bad Things about the religious scene of my upbringing. What’s worth trying to talk about is the connective tissue of hows and whys, both intrinsic and extrinsic and in relation to effects both bad and good. Can we cast that accusation I casually toss in the direction of the record industry, above, in some terms of query about how religious-community identity evolves in the period of that industry’s ascendancy, for instance? Sure, I think we can, if we promise ourselves we won’t get too hung up on it, at least (seeing that after all we don’t perhaps know all that much about that industry). Not that taking a tack like this is necessarily likely to settle anyone’s mind about what’s failed or succeeded in a given community in a given historical period. But then, I don’t know that a settled mind is my goal. For problems continually in motion, I probably want my mind to keep finding paths of attention and adaptation rather than to be settled.

 

5 thoughts on “Worldly ways”

  1. I’m compelled to respond, though it is difficult — your spotlight turns in so many directions. And not only do I have to read all those words, I have to listen to 20 minutes of music as well! Brace yerself, Bowman.

    As you can surely imagine, my sympathies for the North American evangelical hermaneutics of suspicion, particularly as applied to the mainstream media, are quite acute. As a kid in the 70s I believed the little box in the basement was continually broadcasting an alternate gospel of social cohesion — a moral unified field theory that occasionally affirmed but largely (and quite evidently) ran counter to the principles of Scripture. These Blackwood Bros/Gaither moments were thrown our way not just to reassure us the Industry was aware and even perhaps somewhat supportive of our POV, but to also throw us off the scent just enough to let a little of its corporate depravity entice us off the Straight-and-Narrow.

    Which, in hindsight, is pretty much still the lens through which I view the songs posted. Chapman, I can’t help but note, concludes the exercise with, “That’s how it’s done” — words a cannier video editor would have excised or, better yet, advised Chapman away from in favour of uttering some expression of evident humility, in yet another take.

    And yet this music found its way to the front of our churches. I guess there was no denying its intrinsic appeal and subtle conformity to the innate yearning that stirred as we read and memorised those confusing passages of Scripture.

    I’m afraid I only take ironic pleasure in the performances you post. This songbook was so irrefutably the expected resource for Sunday morning “special numbers” that the advent of Christian Rock was welcomed by Yours Truly with an open and thirsty heart. This wasn’t Sunday morning material, of course — nor even church basement material. I had to leave the church building and go concert halls for this stuff.

    The real surprise occurred when our family followed my father to seminary in Denver, in 1977. Tuning in to the little kitchen radio I discovered — “Holy crap! There are radio stations that play nothing but!”

    Not so in the Hinterlands Up North — not for decades. So off to the concert halls I went, until concert hall appeal usurped church appeal. When I finally returned to gathering of the saints, the songbook had changed to sound like something U2 might produce in the commode.

    Canada has Christian music radio stations now — hardly as prolific as they are down south, but they are indeed a presence. The playlist and patter conform to a hermenuetics of assurance, by and large. The political monologue isn’t quite as prevalent up here, but because we import so much “material” from the US it is still inescapable. I suspect geographic disparity is one reason why the US political monoculture never quite took hold in Canadian evangelical circles. That same disparity confirmed the sense that an evident Christian culture was never, and never would be, in the ascendant in this country. Immigration trends only reaffirm this POV, of course. We can import the US evangelical reaction to that issue as well, but populace numbers assure (if that’s the right word) against its political traction.

    Hm. I can’t seem to intuit a direction that permits a cogent wrap-up — but why should I?

  2. Alright: I’m a sucker for “My Jesus I Love Thee.” But I’m peeved I can’t find a video for it that isn’t at least as old as I am. It’s all coif-and-conversion singers “doin’ their thang.”

    A curiosity: all the singers here are fellas.

  3. Ah, mean to make me work for my social media satisfactions here, do you? Tough to decide what to respond to! Won’t try to take all directions you set my thoughts running in at once, at any rate.

    Just on that self-pleased ebullience at the end of the Chapman video, for the moment: this stood out to me, too, but to me it seems congruent, in fact integral, almost in itself a musical flourish according to idiom. (Sounding pretentious, oy, yes, sorry. This is a bullshit-friendly space, though, as you’re well aware.) After listening to it several times and then going to some of the older stuff in YouTube submissions, I was struck by the similar feeling (albeit in a little bit higher key) at the end of this:

  4. Ah, a Gospel Quartet standard with a lower end I’ve held down, in my youth. The bass gets the “Whoah!” but it’s the tenor – ALWAYS the tenor – who deserves the accolades.

    I’m trying to place the accent: Chastened Alabamian?

  5. Always wanted to be in a quartet, and was never in a situation where it was an interest shared by enough of my musically inclined peers to do it. I’d really have had to be the tenor, in any case, as to voice; and hard to imagine a group in which I’d have made a good lead personality-wise.

    The Blackwood family were from Tennessee. It’s a funny thing, considering what I’ve tried to give an account of above, that there was little love for their style in my family and churches. I didn’t really know how to come by this high-key older southern gospel stuff. We listened to more tepid ensemble fare (Haven of Rest) — and in my teens, increasingly, a great deal of the pretty-faced young power-vocal soloists, Steve Green and so forth — where SCC makes appearance about the time I was finishing high school. Only recently, really, have I been recognizing some of the linkages I essay to educate my sister in there in my FB monologue.

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