Apocalypse Jukebox - the end is near! It has long been well established that gospel music was one of the main ingredients in the original rock ‘n’ roll stew. Yet it must be emphasized that the particular gospel style that most influenced the founders and forefathers of rock was as much on the fringes of the musical mainstream as the religious views of groups like the Millerites were from the norms of biblical interpretation. Everyone knows, for instance, that Elvis was in large part formed by gospel and that gospel music is a significant part of the Elvis canon. There is a vast difference, however, between the style of gospel upon which Elvis drew to help create the rock blueprint and the gospel records, based within a more mainstream tradition, he made later in his career.“How Great Thou Art” is not a rock ‘n’ roll urtext; the premillennial musical expressions of sects such as the Holy Rollers is. In his definitive biography of Elvis, Peter Guralnick tells the story of how Elvis and his girlfriend Dixie would sneak out of their all-white “home” church during Sunday service in order to experience the ecstatic service of the black church down the street. There, Elvis would have heard Reverend Brewster, whose sermons were also broadcast on the radio, deliver the apocalyptic “theme that a better day was coming, one in which all men could walk as brothers.” Yet even if Elvis did not pick up on that message, which is doubtful, it is obvious that he was directly influenced by the “exotic” and ecstatic music of such soul stirrers as Queen C.Anderson and the Brewsteraires, the church soloists. His first audiences did not fail to make this connection. |
He certainly did seem to be representative of a “new day”, and one common thread of Elvis’ initial contemporary reception is a loss for words. Of course, awe is an understandable and perhaps typical reaction to the new:“When that boy was onstage, it was like nothing that had ever been before.Whether people liked it or not, they didn’t seem to be able to think of anything else, and it prevented them from focusing on just about anything that followed.” Silence is one effect of being so stunned; frenzy is another. Guralnick quotes Tom Perryman, a Texas deejay who helped Elvis’ first combo procure gigs: “When Elvis was performing, everyone had the same basic reaction. It was almost spontaneous. It reminded me of the early days, of where I was raised in East Texas and going to these ‘Holy Roller’ Brush Arbor meetings: seeing these people get religion. I said, ‘Man, that’s something.’” It’s unclear whether “that” refers to Elvis or the Holy Roller meetings, but it appears to apply to both. Their common denominator is ecstasy.
The ecstatic reaction to early rock ‘n’ roll was not lost on Orlando reporter Jean Yothers. Writing about her “first tangle with a hillbilly jamboree,” featuring Elvis,Yothers focused on the reaction of the audience:
What hillbilly music does to the hillbilly music fan is absolutely phenomenal. It transports him into a wild, emotional and audible state of ecstasy [our emphasis]. He never sits back sedately patting his palms politely … He thunders his appreciation for the country-style music and nasal-twanged singing he loves by whistling shrilly through teeth, pounding the palms together with the whirling momentum of a souped-up paddle wheel, stomping the floor and ejecting yip-yip noises like the barks of a hound dog when it finally runs down a particularly elusive coon … The whole shebang seemed like a cross between the enthusiasm displayed at a wrestling match and an old-fashioned camp meeting.
Like ecstasy, enthusiasm is a key and telling word choice. In its original sense, enthusiasm denotes “possession by a god, supernatural inspiration, prophetic or poetic frenzy.” Yet, the term has a complex and checkered past due to the very reason that Yothers employed it; the same frenzied energy it connotes is exemplified in wrestling match audiences and camp meeting congregations. Historically, the combination of the physical and the spiritual inherent in enthusiastic expression made it suspect.The worry, for many, was that the spiritual channels could so easily get crossed. This anxiety was expressed by one critic of Methodist “meetings”: “If a man of temperate feelings were to enter one of their churches during some of their descriptions of GOD, he might reasonably conceive that they were painting the Devil.” The Satanic reading is made possible, according to this author, through an unseemly passion for Christ, which might seem less than reverent:
Every thing is full of love, desire, flames, sweetness, charms, and enjoyments; God is the Husband of our souls, the mystical marriage, the fruition that pains with pleasure: Jesus Christ is the dear Jesus, the sweet Jesus, the sweet and beautifulfairest among ten thousand, who makes us sick with desire and longing: the Methodists perpetually talk of lying in his bosom, gazing on his face, and being filled with the fullness of his love. Is this a Christian or Mohamedan Paradise? saviour, the
The writer is Leigh Hunt, best known as one of the lesser English Romantic poets, a friend of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. His pamphlet, An Attempt to Shew the Folly and Dangers of Methodism, was published in 1811, 144 years before Yothers wrote about the phenomenon of “hillbilly music”. Yet the striking connection between the two is the similarity in tone and diction, though there are no Satanic suggestions in Yothers’s article. In fact, she ends by enthusiastically exclaiming, “Hillbilly music is here to stay, yo’all!” And, while one would be hard-pressed to find any critic of rock music (as opposed to rock critic) who would even entertain the possibility that rock and God could be linked, the claims of rock as the “devil’s music” are many.
Sixteen years after Yothers’s description of “hillbilly music”, Frank Garlock, a professor at Bob Jones University, published The Big Beat: A Rock Blast. He begins by drawing a firm boundary between “authentic” religious enthusiasm and its counterfeit: “Consider … the natural result of being filled with the spirit of God … God says that when His people are filled with His Spirit and with His Word, they will want to sing the words of Scripture,hymns of praise to a loving Father, and songs of testimony of what God has done for them.” Of course, Garlock uses scripture in order to damn rock ‘n’ roll music, but he also relies on “scientific” research in order to commit several post hoc fallacies, including, for instance, that rock music kills plants and that folk rock, specifically, causes neurosis. His thesis, though, is that rock music is “the devil’s masterpiece for trapping teenagers, making them his slaves, and causing them to be the enemies of God.” (News, Source: Pop Matters, 25 Feb 2009)
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