Christian Rock Research Articles

Less Power to Ya: Materiality and Sublation in Early Christian Rock Music

In studies of the important contemporary Christian music (CCM) subculture within American evangelicalism, scholars have developed an increasingly robust body of sociological analysis; this article bridges from that scholarship to offer a cultural history of how a decentralized group of ex-hippies coalesced to establish a multimillion-dollar industry. Centring the concept of sublation as used by David Morgan, the article adopts a multimethod approach to study how More Power to Ya by Petra—one of the most popular albums from one of the industry’s most influential bands—exemplified the strategy Christian rock artists employed to move from a place of marginalization within evangelical Christianity to one of acceptance.

Russian rock music: “Orthodox art”, new religion or “lovely paganism”?

This article is dedicated to examination of the art of several famous Russian rock bands, which leaders have repeatedly declared their religiosity and to some extent are engaged in missionary activity of the Russian Orthodox Church. The author covers the questions whether it is appropriate to attribute the art of such rock bands to the genre of “Christian rock”, and do the rock musicians contribute to popularization of Orthodox doctrine and churching of their fans, or rather to desecration of religious values and ideals. For solution of the set tasks, the author analyzed song lyrics of the prominent Russian rock bands, as well as interviews of their leaders and other publications in mass media and scientific periodicals that touch upon a religious aspect in rock music. The art of various Russian rock bands often attracted the attention of researchers, who noticed religious (primarily Christian) symbolism in the song lyrics. However, there has not been previously raised a question of whether it is possible to define the art of such rock bands as “Christian rock” or “Orthodox art” based on existence of references to Christian symbolism. It is demonstrated that leaning on the comprehensive analysis of the art of several Russian rock bands that use religious symbols and allusions in their lyrics, there are no grounds to attribute them to the genre of “Christian rock”. Despite the fact that the majority of leaders of these bands and the authors of texts are Orthodox, the lyrics, visual arrangements and videos often have the elements of Neo-Paganism.

“As For Me and My House”

Research Article| March 01 2020 “As For Me and My House”: Christian Music Executives Roundtable Andrew Mall Andrew Mall Northeastern University Email: a.mall@northeastern.edu Andrew Mall (Ph.D. ethnomusicology, University of Chicago) is assistant professor of music at Northeastern University in Boston, where he teaches courses in ethnomusicology, popular music, and music industry. His current book project, under contract with University of California Press, is Music on the Margins: Niche Markets, Christian Rock, and Popular Music. He is co-editor (with Jeffers Engelhardt and Monique Ingalls) of the forthcoming Routledge volume Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Popular Music Studies (2020) 32 (1): 10–25. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2020.32.1.10 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Andrew Mall; “As For Me and My House”: Christian Music Executives Roundtable. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 March 2020; 32 (1): 10–25. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2020.32.1.10 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search Joshua 24:15: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” At the 2018 IASPM-US conference in Nashville, I organized a roundtable of Christian music executives. Many popular music scholars know Nashville as home to country music and a hub for professional songwriters; tacitly absent from this identity is Nashville's importance to evangelical Christianity in the United States. The city and its surrounding suburbs in middle Tennessee—referred to colloquially as the “buckle of the Bible Belt” and (sometimes derisively) as the “Protestant Vatican”—hosts the executive offices of several evangelical Christian denominations. The region provides religious training at many Christian colleges, universities, and seminaries. Thomas Nelson, one of the world's... © 2020 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions.2020 You do not currently have access to this content.

Music Festivals, Ephemeral Places, and Scenes: Interdependence at Cornerstone Festival

AbstractCornerstone was an annual four-day-long Christian rock festival in Illinois that ran from 1984 until 2012, first in Chicago's northern suburbs and then on a former farm in the rural western part of the state. Most attendees camped on-site, and many arrived one or two days early when the campgrounds opened before official programming started. Like many contemporary multi-day festivals in relatively rural or remote locations, Cornerstone's festival grounds and campsites functioned as a temporary village. For many attendees, music festivals have supplanted local scenes as loci of face-to-face musical life. Outside Cornerstone, participants’ musical lives might be curbed by family, professional obligations, geographic separateness, or cultural stratification. Inside the festival's physical, social, and cultural spaces, however, a cohesive music scene manifested for a brief time every year. This article examines the production of space and place at Cornerstone. In doing so, it contributes a vital link between scene theory and the growing ethnomusicological literature on festivals.

The Devil's Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock 'n' Roll by Randall J. Stephens

Reviewed by: The Devil's Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock 'n' Roll by Randall J. Stephens Amanda Martinez (bio) The Devil's Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock 'n' Roll. By Randall J. Stephens. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 344. $29.95 cloth) Throughout the course of the twentieth-century United States, few cultural outlets proved more influential than Christianity and rock 'n' roll. And yet, rarely are the two linked in the popular imagination. Randall J. Stephens corrects this omission in historical memory with The Devil's Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock 'n' Roll by revealing the often complicated but nevertheless inherent relationship between Christianity and rock 'n' roll. From the early influences of the music found in Pentecostal churches, to the ensuing push and pull relationship between the two, to Christian rock's dominance by the end of the century, Stephens shows how Christianity and rock evolved with and adapted to one another. The Devil's Music begins its analysis with the early days of rock 'n' roll's national popularity, when "The rebellious, loud anthems of Black and white teenagers threatened the good order of the white Christian South and stirred the leadership and laity in Black churches as well" (p. 47). Though the music and religion appeared antithetical, Stephens shows how many early rock 'n' rollers were in fact directly influenced by the energetic, music-filled Pentecostalism they had grown up with. Throughout the 1960s, the Beatles and the growth of the counterculture continued to represent a perceived threat to [End Page 382] Christianity, stemming from fears the music distracted from or even replaced religious devotion, and beliefs rock encouraged gender deviance. By the early 1970s, however, many Christian leaders began to recognize how popular culture and its music held an unavoidable influence in the lives of young, baby boomer Americans. As growing numbers of churches began to adopt rock music and stylistic elements of the counterculture, even Billy Graham, a fierce opponent in the 1950s and 1960s, grew to embrace the music under the proper circumstances. Not all Christians, however, welcomed rock. From the 1970s onward, fundamentalists in particular continued to attack the music and its influence. Despite such criticism, Stephens shows how Christian rock grew into a powerhouse industry by the end of the century. Impressively researched, Stephens draws from a broad range of both religious and secular, mainstream sources to round out his study. Particularly refreshing were the chapters on the 1960s and 1970s, when growing numbers of younger Americans grew to embrace Christianity. Though this period is often correctly remembered for its cultural divisiveness, historical memory often oversimplifies these divisions into a youthful counterculture on the one hand, and the aging silent majority, on the other. Stephens complicates this over-simplification of generational tensions, showing how the younger and older generation compromised to create a version of conservative Christianity that was palatable to both. At times, however, this work could have benefited from more historical context and interpretation. For instance, Stephens does not provide an interpretation to the question the mainstream media posed by the early 1970s: "Why had not America become less, not more, religious?" (p. 195). What was it about the 1960s and 1970s that made Christianity increasingly attractive? Stephens does not go beyond superficial explanations of Christians simply adopting the sonic and stylistic markers of the counterculture to explain what about this period made religion grow. Though he adequately shows how Christians adopted and rejected rock, at times he could have been more forthcoming about why, and [End Page 383] under what broader historical circumstances Christianity grew. Still, this shortcoming does not distract from the overall merits of The Devil's Music, and this work should be of interest to not only those interested in popular music and religion, but conservatism and rise of the New Right, Southern history, and race. Amanda Martinez AMANDA MARTINEZ is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation, "Gone Country: White, Urban, and Affluent America's Appropriation of Southern Rural Identity, 1964-1996," looks at the growth of the country music audience and analyzes the social, economic, and...

Book Review: Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, & Other Essays on American Belief, by Jeff Sharlet, ed

Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, & Other Essays on American Belief. Jeff Sharlet, ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. 424 pp. $30 hbk.It is hard to think of a writer better suited to editing an anthology on American religion than Jeff Sharlet. The Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College is also a talented journalist especially known for The Family and C Street, investigative works chronicling the ways in which Christian fundamentalism has permeated the political power structure in Washington, D.C. His latest offering is subtler-less expose than meandering meditation. But it offers equally valuable insight into the role of religion in America's politics, communities, and in the private lives of its citizens.More precisely, Radiant Truths concerns itself with American belief, which Sharlet defines as a subset of religion. In practice, focusing on this supposed subset has produced a nonfiction collection that's broader than what one might expect to find in a book about faith. Sharlet begins with Walt Whitman on a Civil War battlefield in 1863 and proceeds chronologically to end in 2011 with a fragment from Francine Prose in which she recounts bursting into tears on seeing the poet's verses at an Occupy Wall Street camp. In between, there are stories that face religion head-on, such as John Jeremiah Sullivan's hilarious and ultimately humane portrayal of Christian rock fans in Upon This Rock (2004) and Zora Neale Hurston's mesmerizing immersion into the Voodoo traditions of New Orleans in Hoodoo (1935). In others, such as the selection from Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night (1968), readers could debate whether the fervor being explored is religious or something else-a manifestation of culture, say, or of a powerful but not necessarily divine political ideology.Unsurprisingly, Sharlet's fascination with the intersection between religion and politics holds. This is good for readers. Without it, he might not have included Garry Wills's incisive Whittier: First Day (1970), which connects Nixon's Quaker roots to a destructive, uniquely American myth of self-improvement. The piece manages to feel fresh despite the fact that Nixon is long gone. His reign may be over, but our national obsession with the self-made man persists to this day, affecting social and political progress in myriad ways. Likewise, Sharlet includes communist writer Meridel Le Sueur's 1934 account of a labor strike, I Was Marching. The piece is another that is not strictly about religion, but the prose is sharp and surprisingly current, offering lines like this to readers fresh off a year of headlines about racism, inequality, and police brutality:Our life seems to be marked with a curious and muffled violence over America, but this action has always been in the dark, men and women dying obscurely, poor and povertymarked lives, but now from city to city runs this violence, into the open, and colossal happenings stand bare before our eyes. …

Salsa and Santeria: to the Problem of Desacralization of a Ritual

Salsa and Santeria: to the Problem of Desacralization of a Ritual (by Olesia Platonova) is dedicated to the dialogue between a popular genre (salsa) and a religion (Santeria) in the context of desacralization of a ritual. Comparing salsa and other genres, like gospel, spiritual, Christian rock, the author notes a profound connection between a song and a personal spiritual experience of the musician, analyses some examples of the genre: subject symbolism, color symbolism, bilingualism of texts (the Spanish and Yoruba languages), music quotations of Santeria’s hymns.

Heart Rate Response of Professional Musicians When Playing Music.

The primary aim was to determine the level of physiological stress evoked while playing music in a standing position as indicated by heart rate (HR) response. A secondary aim was to analyze the effect of music genre (classic rock, western, contemporary Christian, and metal rock) on the relative HR response. Lastly, we considered potential physiological initiators of the music-playing-induced HR response. HR response was monitored in 27 professional musicians (3 women, 24 men) between the ages of 21 and 67 yrs old during rehearsal and public performances. The percent maximal HR (%MHR) evoked was determined by taking a percentage of the age-predicted maximal HR for each musician and comparing the average %MHR in each genre during public and rehearsal events. The role of the potential initiators of these responses (e.g., number of years playing in public, event type, instrument type, tempo, etc.) was determined using multiple regression analyses. The overall average %MHR responses were 52 ± 5% and 59 ± 5% during rehearsal and public performances, respectively, with genre type having a significant effect on the HR response (p=0.01). Body mass index and tempo were each found to be significant contributors to the HR response while playing music (r²=0.506, p=0.001). Playing music professionally evokes considerable increases in HR response, with music genre influencing the level of the physiological response. We concluded that 50% of the HR response while playing music was associated with body mass index, music tempo, and instrument type.

Disruptive Voices: The Minor Characters of Musical Narrative

Arthur Phillips's 2009 novel, The Song Is You, begins with the following passage:Billie counted offf the tune and started the pre-refrain verse, with only the piano accompanying . . . and the soldier hoped that Holiday, having sensed that was diffferent from all the others, was perhaps granting him more than she allowed lesser supplicants. . . . In the lyrics, she was waiting by the water, longing for her lover's ship to return. She was singing the music had ached to hear, was singing it to him as if he, soon to head offf by sea to war, was that lover for whom she pined, and this thought vibrated in him like a recently arrived arrow. . . . The applause ebbed away, into foam and then nothing. The tone arm bobbed over the deep black space as it skated toward the label with the two blackbirds perched on telephone lines that become a musical stafff. The whispering ended, the tone arm flew home, the LP stopped turning, and wept like a child. (1)This kind of experience, in which listeners feel themselves either to be spoken to or speaking through popular songs, seems to be a common one. It is itself the subject of quite a few pop songs, perhaps most famously Roberta Flack's 1973 Killing Me Softly with His Song. In the lines he sang as if knew me in all my dark despair and felt found my letters and read each one out loud, the narrator describes sensations first of being spoken to and then being spoken for. In the present work, I explore one axis of musical detail by which such listener experiences are informed and facilitated.I's and EarsI should begin with the observation-made by many others before me-that popular songs are full of unassigned (or at least ambiguous) pronouns: I's, you's, he's, she's, we's, they's, and it's. (Not to mention the indeterminate deictics here, now, then, there).1 Tim Murphey and Simon Frith are among the scholars of popular music who have discussed the ways in which this indeterminacy makes possible a range of narrative identifications for listeners. In some cases and for some listeners, this absence of proper names for people or places can generate a sort of pronominal vertigo, described by Gerard Genette (234) as a sense of disorientation resulting from the copresence of competing interpretations of indeterminate pronouns.One example of this in the pop music world is the 2000 hit Hanging by a Moment, by the Christian rock band Lifehouse. Like many others, the song is addressed in second person to an unnamed you. Fans of the band have vigorously debated the identity of that you, with as many listeners contending that the song is about a romantic partner as those who hear the song as about having a personal relationship-of a diffferent kind, presumably-with Jesus Christ. The following are exemplary quotes, from fans writing openly on an unoffficial blog.2 On one side of the debate, a self-identified longtime listener writes:If you're familiar with Christianity, this song is chalk [sic] full of religious subtleties.I don't even have the time or inclination to list them all. -alexfromfresnoOn the other hand, just as many listeners hear the song as a love ballad. Another poster writes (somewhat puzzlingly, given his screen name):My wife and I love this song. I'm always hanging by a moment with her.-thelonelyheart55Fans seem to feel strongly either way, and the debate occasionally becomes heated. Interestingly, partisans on both sides describe transportative or interpellative listening experiences that seem to take them away or to speak to their own most meaningful relationships, whether earthly or spiritual. This suggests that the song's unattached you can be experienced in a variety of ways, independently of stable identification with a particular subject.Likewise, and more to the point for my purposes, popular song lyrics including unassigned or indeterminate I's can be understood, sometimes simultaneously, in multiple or even conflicting ways. …

A Song of Mary

A Song of Mary Mary Homan The patient was an African–American woman in her sixties. She was “found down” and unresponsive by a friend. The physicians diagnosed her with having an anoxic brain injury. She abused drugs and had tested positive for hepatitis C and HIV. She had a sister and an adult son, with both of whom she shared a strained relationship. Neither knew she was this ill. Her family had been exposed to years of violence, including the son witnessing a homicide of a beloved family member. The sister and son held a firm distrust of the medical community. The son had gone so far to say he didn’t trust the white coats. The sister brought in her Pentecostal pastor to be their spokesperson. The patient was flailing against restraints and it was unclear if her pain was adequately controlled. The attending had requested palliative care come see the patient as no further aggressive measures could benefit this patient. The palliative care team worked to create a relationship with the son and sister but both became further entrenched in “doing everything.” It was a stand–off and the most ill begotten word in medical jargon was flung into the foray—futile. I was contacted, as the ethicist, to “do something.” I gowned up, entered the room and just stood at the bedside, my hand on the patient’s foot, my heart in my throat as the sister’s pastor read from the book of Psalms. As he finished, I was humming and then I began to sing the Psalm he had just been reading; Psalm 34 “I will bless the Lord at all times.” The pastor stepped back and just looked at me. I finished the song and was met with deafening, disquieting silence. The pastor asked if I knew the sparrow song and I nodded. We began and the sister began to slowly hum with us. The son joined her humming at the final refrain. We continued to sing to the patient who had quieted and calmed. I quietly left the room and headed back to my office. Later, the family decided to move the patient to comfort measures. She passed away shortly thereafter surrounded by her pastor and family. She had said yes to Jesus. Ten years ago I would never have imagined singing in a patient’s room that wasn’t a member of my own family. Singing “church” music has been a consistent thread in my life’s story. In high school I attended the Youth Theology Institute (now the Youth Theological Initiative) and learned to sing Gospel with a young woman who I’m sure is gracing her church somewhere in the Mississippi Delta. I sat by my grandfather’s, P–Pops, hospital bed and sang every song I knew as his breathing slowed and he made his way to Heaven. In college, I trained under a vocalist who went on to have her own Christian rock group. In graduate school, I traded babysitting for voice lessons from my parish cantor and her pianist husband. I love to sing and I love church stuff but I did not love being pastoral. When I finished a masters of arts in theology, I told everyone, anyone, loudly and often, that I was never, ever going to do pastoral ministry. I wanted nothing to do with listening to people or talking about religious stuff. Instead, I analyzed data, created maps of healthy/unhealthy areas and [End Page E1] service availability. I even ran for political office. When funding for those endeavors ran out, friends and family encouraged me to apply for a mission integration position out–of–state. I reminded them I was about action and intervention; not the immeasurable, non–quantifiable task of integrating mission. My own Dad convinced me I could do all that stuff and encouraged me to apply. In retrospect, I think his convincing was not entirely altruistic and he was engaged in succession planning. I struggled the first few years to find footing and to interpret what mission is/was/does/should do. I tried to quit once but the system vice–president refused to meet with me. I...

Finding the Sacred in Unexpected Places: Religious Evanescence and Evocation

This address examines the complex processes whereby cultural understandings of the sacred and, consequently, religious identity are negotiated in the contemporary social world. Two key processes of negotiation are delineated, namely, religious evanescence and religious evocation. Religious evanescence reflects efforts to deemphasize or sever connections to the sacred. By contrast, religious evocation consists of activities that emphasize or enhance linkages to sacred things. Groups actively manage their relationship to the sacred, and thus their religious identities, by engaging in evanescent or evocative practices. Moreover, the rejection of sacred things (evanescence) and the affirmation of them (evocation) are not mutually exclusive processes. They can be enlisted strategically, selectively, and even in combination with one another to suit a wide variety of social contexts and normative expectations. Boundaries in relation to the sacred are, therefore, sites for contradictory and innovative social processes. The contested and fluid boundaries that define the genre of “Christian rock” serve to illustrate these processes.

Navigating Religious Expression in Public School: A Case Study

This research presents the dilemma school leaders face in issues of religion in schools, both politically and legally. It describes a case study in which a Christian rock band was denied the right to play at a school assembly. The high school principal initially said yes and then called the superintendent. The superintendent called lawyers who said that the band, based on their website, focused on the message of Jesus Christ, and that it was not a good idea to have them play at the assembly. Three years later, two lawsuits and over $100,00 of legal bills confirmed the lawyers were correct.

Into the Grey: The Left, Progressivism, and Christian Rock in Uptown Chicago

Founded in 1972, Jesus People USA (JPUSA) is an evangelical “intentional community” located in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. Living out of a common purse arrangement, this inner-city commune strives to counter much of what the Right stands for. An expression of the Evangelical Left, the commune’s various expressions of social justice are popularized through the music produced by the community and their annual festival.

“Did you bring new songs?” The role of contemporary catholic music in Hungary

Contemporary Christian music appeared in Hungary in the 1960s. In a unique period of Hungary when religion was suppressed and rock and roll was denounced, the merging of the two, Christian rock music was even more disapproved during the communist regime. For many, contemporary Christian music was more than simply music; it indicated opposition against the political system. Therefore contemporary Christian music was an alternative music not only from a clerical but also from a political point of view. This article tries to analyze the function of contemporary Christian music in listeners’ religious folklife, their experience during listening to contemporary Christian music.1

'What These Cryptic Symbols Mean': Quotation, Allusion, and John Darnielle's Biblical Interpretation

AbstractThe Mountain Goats' repertoire of biblically-themed songs displays a salutary resistance to oversimplifying dichotomies. Their catalogue defies the imperative to fit into the "Christian rock"-vs.- mainstream "secular rock" market niches while at the same time it does not fit conveniently into the biblical-critical world's fascination with characterising certain interpretive methods as "legitimate" and others as "illegitimate." The Mountain Goats' songs don't challenge these dichotomies head-on, but they demonstrate the allusive richness available to an interpreter freed from rigid obeisance to these idols of the market and the library. Whereas in many popular interpretations, the Bible figures as an oracular repository of sacred law, or as a textbook of science and metaphysics, or a sourcebook for general spirituality, the Mountain Goats' biblical songs draw on the Bible as an all-too-human expression of how the world is (and will be), even when the appearances suggest otherwise. In cultivating a wide range of songs that reflects the Bible's characteristic underdetermination, the Mountain Goats make the moral and theological ambivalence of the Bible audible again without resolving that ambivalence into consoling or deplorable platitudes, theological dogmas or historical facts.

The Impossibility of Negation: A Theoretical Defense of “Cross-Over” Christian Rock

After grounding the genre’s traditional rejection of the secular world in H.R. Niebuhr’s influential heuristic of Christian “types,” this essay distances itself from both Niebuhr’s largely existential theology and adopts Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) in order to critique the “negationism” of Contemporary Christian music (CCM) and defend its late synthesis with popular culture. In essence, what follows is a theoretical, specifically dialectical, reading of CCM which moves beyond Howard and Streck’s (1999) qualitative reading to suggest that negation as a response to popular culture has not, indeed cannot, successfully accomplish a subculture’s explicit and implicit goals, and that the late pop presence of CCM is proof of negation’s “failure.” More, CCM serves as a representative case study for the theoretical conundrum that inevitably becomes any strict negationist venture.

Body piercing saved my life: inside the phenomenon of Christian rock

Body piercing saved my life: inside the phenomenon of Christian rock

Front Porch

Front Porch Harry L. Watson Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. William R. Ferris's historic interview with B.B. King (center, with William R. Ferris to his left) headlines our first music issue, which includes the CD Passed Down Things (attached inside the back cover). Photograph courtesy of the William R. Ferris Collection in Wilson Library's Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Spirituals, blues, Dixieland, jazz. Ballads, old-time, hillbilly, bluegrass. Country, Cajun, zydeco. Sacred Harp, gospel, Christian rock. R&B, rock 'n' roll, rockabilly, "southern rock." Nashville, honky-tonk, alt-country, progressive country. The list of southern musical varieties and hybrids goes on and on. It's hard to imagine a richer legacy of southern culture than the music that southern people have brought to life. Larry Griffin calls it "toe-tapping, feet-shuffling, arm-waving music; whiskey-drinking, down-in-the-dumps, my-baby-done-me-wrong music." There is little about the South that has meant more to southerners than their tunes, and nothing from the South that has been more widely popular around the [End Page 1] world. The only other thing that even comes close is southern storytelling, but even the greatest writing or spoken word can't travel as far and as fast as a great sound. Knowing all this, it's a wonder that Southern Cultures hasn't done a music issue before now. What has made the southern musical heritage so abundant? Surely it was the collision of great folk musical traditions from around the Atlantic basin, especially the pounding rhythms of Africa, the haunting ballads and rollicking dances of the British Isles, and the soulful cadences of Christian hymnody. Enliven these traditions with some great instruments like the banjo and the fiddle, shake and bake for centuries among folk too poor and overworked to write novels, paint pictures, or design skyscrapers, and you have a creative gumbo that can feed musical appetites around the world. What is there left to say about southern music? After all, nobody buys a record for the liner notes. Plenty of folks would say that the best approach to southern music is just to make it or to listen to it, because the songs are just too great to waste any time talking and reading about them. With that in mind, we're especially proud of Passed Down Things, the CD we've included in this issue, featuring some of the best blues you've never heard before, a newly recorded hit by star country songwriter John Shelton Reed, and a couple of special numbers from North Carolina's own Red Clay Ramblers. The whole thing is stitched together with excerpts from a fascinating conversation between B.B. King and William R. Ferris. If reading about music makes you long for the real thing, slide this one into your machine and get on down right away. But we think southern music is also worth talking about, and our authors and artists have quite a lot to say. It was B.B. King who gave us the title of our CD when he called the blues "a passed-down thing," and he explains what he means in his interview with Bill Ferris. Music prompts his words and the words evoke more music, as the King of the Blues shows how the tradition stays alive by continual innovation. And who can deny the power of stories to open up the lives of the great country singers? Throughout the issue, Red Clay Rambler Bland Simpson sprinkles stories of Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, Uncle Dave Macon, and the Carter Family. These white artists couldn't be more different from B.B. King, except they are all so much alike. Hardscrabble origins, volatile lives, and passionate music tie them all together, and they draw us in, in turn. Connections like that need tales and stories to sort them out, and that's what our essays are all about. The relationship between black music and white music is a central issue in any conversation about southern sounds. The two traditions are certainly not the same, yet every one of our essays...

Visual Representations of Christianity in Christian Music Videos

This article discusses Christian rock videos. Videos from a collection entitled Wow Hits 2002: the year's top Christian music videos are used as examples. The title of the collection declares that the videos are "Christian", and the question asked in the article is how this quality may be seen in the videos. How may the videos be seen as visual representations of Christianity? Using a semiotic framework, two possible types of such representations of Christianity in the videos are discussed. These are references to traditional christian imagery; and the style and appearance of the artists.

Watering Down Christianity? An Examination of the Use of Theological Words in Christian Music

This study examined 5 years of successful Christian music to determine if there had been a significant change in the amount of theological language used in contemporary Christian songs. Christian music is the only genre defined by lyrical content instead of musical style (Price, 1999). In a 1999 Wall Street Journal article, the Christian music industry was accused of watering down its lyrics in an effort to increase profits (Miller, 1999). After coding 100 of the top songs from 1996 to 2002 in the Christian rock and Christian hit radio genres, no systematic or significant decline in total theological words was found. However, when examining the type of theological words used in lyrics, the data demonstrated that words have become significantly less explicitly Christian.