Hell Hounds, Hillbillies, and Hedonists: The Evangelical Roots of Rock n’ Roll
Hell Hounds, Hillbillies, and Hedonists:
The Evangelical Roots of Rock n’ Roll
Clay Motley
Department of Language and Literature
Florida Gulf Coast University
South Fort Myers, Florida, USA
cmotley@fgcu.edu
Publisher
Florida Gulf Coast University
Received: 7 January 2016
Accepted: 1 March 2016
Published: 7 March 2016
Academic Editor
Dr. Lawrence W. Snyder
Potter College of Arts & Letters
Western Kentucky University
Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA
Abstract
This essay contends that much of the creativity driving the formation of popular folk music,
such as blues, country, and early Rock n’ Roll, in the American South during the early twentieth
century grew from the religious tension between concepts of “sacred” and “secular” rooted in
evangelical Protestantism. This essay examines the rebellious impulse of Rock n’ Roll as, in the
absence of religious boundaries, tensions, and influences, it grew beyond its Southern roots.
Keywords: blues music; country music; Rock n’ Roll; South; Protestant; Christianity; secular
1. Introduction/Background
Rebellion is one of the defining features of Rock n’ Roll. This can take the form of rebellion
against the conventions of the previous generation, established morals or aesthetics, gender and sexual
norms, the dominant economic or political order, or some combination thereof. In 1953, just as Rock n’
Roll was about to break onto the national scene, the film The Wild One captured the genre’s youthful,
alluring, and sometimes menacing rebelliousness when Marlon Brando’s character, Johnny, is asked
what he is rebelling against, and he intensely replies, “What do you got?” [1].
Rock n’ Roll’s rebellious dynamic can sometimes be nothing more than flaunting of parental
authority or taste, with sounds, slang, and clothes sure to annoy and confuse the older generation.
More radically, it can take the form of the 1960s counterculture’s psychedelic call to “Tune In, Turn
On, and Drop Out”, hailing not only a new society, but a new perception of reality [2]. Rebellion
is by definition oppositional, seeking to resist or replace the existing order. When The Who’s “My
Generation” shocked mainstream sensibility in 1965 with the lyric, “Hope I die before I get old” [3],
the band was voicing the growing postwar sentiment that their elders’ beliefs were utterly bankrupt.
In 1974, musician Frank Zappa captured Rock n’ Roll’s iconoclastic tendencies by declaring with
approval that the electric guitar, “can be the single most blasphemous device on the face of the
earth” ([4], p. 43).
Although Rock n’ Roll can be “blasphemous”, or at least antagonistic toward aspects of the established order, this essay will analyze how Rock n’ Roll and its musical antecedents developed within the strict religious limits of the American South’s dominant evangelical Protestant culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Some of the most influential blues, country, and early Rock n’ Roll musicians rebelled against numerous things—notions of work, social class, style, and race—but they never rebelled against what they believed to be the ultimate authority—God. The musicians discussed in this essay violated their religious beliefs, often willingly defying their own religious faith’s prohibition against sensuality and secularism, but they did not fully rebel against the dominant religious culture because they never abandoned or opposed their religious faith. They maintained their religious belief system, even as they feared they were damned within that system because of their “sinful” actions. This essay argues that the tension between concepts of “flesh” and “spirit” inherent in the
evangelical Protestantism of the early twentieth century South was an important creative force in blues
and country music, and this influence was still clearly present in the first generation of Rock n’ Roll
musicians, such as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis. However, this tension largely
disappeared after the first generation of Rock musicians, when the genre quickly became a national
and then international music that was often a corporate commodity, increasingly removed from its
Southern roots.
By 1977 the nihilistic British punk band The Sex Pistols could rhetorically snarl on their first
single “God Save the Queen”, “When there’s no future/How can there be sin?” because they had
already destroyed “sin” as a concept [5]. However, the music and culture that created Rock n’ Roll,
eventually paving the way for The Sex Pistols, very much believed in “sin”. In a sense, it is easier
to rebel when there are no boundaries, no consequences, or “no future”, as The Sex Pistols repeat
17 times in their single, because there is little or nothing to lose. The musicians examined in this essay
felt their “sinful” actions risked their eternal soul. This essay will examine the evangelical Christian
influence on blues, country, and Rock n’ Roll—particularly related to the tension between the flesh and
the spirit—and then examine Rock n’ Roll’s rebellious impulse in the absence of religious boundaries,
tensions, and influences.
2. Evangelical Protestantism in the American South
Before directly examining Southern folk music in light of the region’s religious culture, it is
important to briefly sketch the main features of evangelical Protestantism in the early twentieth-century
American South. While Flannery O’Connor, the ever-observant Catholic novelist in the Protestant
South, cautioned that “anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with
equal propriety” ([6], p. 818), it can be generalized that variations of a pervasive, energetic, highly
personal, form of evangelical Protestantism has dominated the region from the early nineteenth century
until today.
The term “evangelical” is notoriously slippery. Even Billy Graham, America’s most famous
evangelical preacher in the second-half of the twentieth century, when asked what an evangelical
Christian was, responded, “That’s a question I’d like to ask somebody too” [7]. Historian David
Bebbington claims that the central features of evangelicalism are an emphasis on the Bible as
the ultimate authority, the saving power of Jesus, the necessity of a conversion experience to be
“saved”, and encouraging non-Christians to accept Christ as their savior. The National Association of
Evangelicals has endorsed this definition as “helpful” and uses it on their website to inform others
about their basic beliefs [8].
Historian Charles Reagan Wilson adds that in the South “Evangelical religion prizes religious
experience over other aspects of faith, offering a tangible way to deal with the burdens of sin and guilt
that its Calvinist-inspired view of human nature often inculcates” ([9], p. 169). This personal religious
experience could take the form of an intense conversion experience—being “saved”—or directly, often
publically, being influenced by the Holy Spirit in a variety of ways. Because evangelical Protestantism
offers “the individual direct access to the divine, unmediated by institutions, creeds, theologies, or
ritualism” ([9], p. 8), evangelical churches typically do not fit more urbane and liberal “mainline”
Protestant notions of denominational structure, authority, or even, at times, worship.
The evangelical emphasis on salvation—their own and others—stems from their central belief
in the sinful nature of humans and our Fallen world. Historian Donald Mathews describes that
Southern evangelical Protestantism has emphasized from its nineteenth-century beginnings “the total
depravity of man, the wrath of God, and the necessity of repentance” ([10], p. 13). Jon Sensbach notes
that, “Evangelicalism embodies and has shaped so much that seems quintessentially southern—the
preoccupation with sin and guilt, the emotional search for redemption” ([11], p. 20). Due to this
emphasis on Original Sin, evangelicals believe there is a sharp dividing line between the secular and
the sacred, as the “Fallen” world is not what God originally created; thus “secular” becomes at times synonymous with “sinful.” Randall J. Stephens writes, “The fact of human sinfulness was taken for
granted by most southern evangelicals” ([12], p. 25). Darren Dochuk adds that anything leading to
what was perceived as “secularization was immediately suspect in the evangelical mind” ([13], p. 16).
Although institutional racism and segregation during the Jim Crow era separated Southern blacks
and whites, especially when worshiping, both black and white working-class Southerners shared
many important religious beliefs. This is not meant to gloss over the significant differences between
Southern “black” and “white” religious traditions, styles, and histories. To cite a few examples,
Africans brought to America had radically different religious traditions from their European enslavers,
a “sacred mentality” where “the line between purely religious and purely secular” was not made,
“and some of this blurring remained well after freedom” ([14], p. 170). During the post-Reconstruction
era of lynchings, African American Christians in the South had a distinct identification with Christ’s
crucifixion, and “affirmed the moral sublimity of Christ for having lived his life amid persecutions
like their own” ([15], pp. 178–79). At the most extreme, sometimes the differences between black and
white worship seemed so profound that “typically each group thinks nothing very religious is going
on in the worship services of the other” ([16], p. 37).
Despite these very real differences between “white” and “black” Christianity in the South in terms
of history, theology, and worship style, there are many significant similarities vital to the topic of this
essay. The distinctive African roots of African-American Christianity began to fade after emancipation
when first and second-generation freed men were “determined to divest themselves of the behavior
patterns of the slave past”, which included “the religious practices which had been so crucial to slave
culture” ([14], p. 162). Amiri Baraka argues that as black churches grew more autonomous, they “began
to take on social characteristics that, while imitative of their white counterparts in many instances,
developed equally, if not more rigid social mores of their own” ([17], p. 48). Charles Reagan Wilson
claims that, “the predominant style of religion in the South is a shared tradition, one that reflects
black influence as much as white. Distinctive African American church practices reinforce southern
evangelicalism” ([9], p. 132). While there are differences between white and black evangelical worship
in the South, by the early twentieth century there were many beliefs held in common, and this essay
will focus on some of those key common beliefs.
One of the common beliefs of southern evangelicals is their attitude toward the “secular” world.
Albert Murray, a scholar of African American music and culture, describes the general Southern
evangelical attitude toward the world: “The church is not concerned with the affirmation of life as
such, which in its view is only a matter of feeble flesh to begin with. The church is committed to the
eternal salvation of the soul after death, which is both final and inevitable. Human existence is only a
brief sojourn in a vale of trials, troubles, and tribulations to be endured because it is the will of the
Creator, whose ways are mysterious” ([18], p. 38). Therefore, at best, “worldly” matters were temporal
and of no value during the long march through this life on the way to Heaven; at worst, they could be
sinful snares of a Fallen world that must be avoided.
While evangelical Protestants mistrust the Fallen, secular world, they also ironically believe it
to be highly alluring because of its many tempting, sensual pleasures. Southern Protestants created
stern codes for moral behavior intended to prevent the faithful from being ensured by the world’s
sinful pleasures. For example, the Assemblies of God—the denomination of Elvis Presley and Jerry
Lee Lewis—prohibited “drinking, smoking, gambling, picture shows, dance halls, swimming in public,
and even life insurance” ([19], p. 93). Southern state and local governments got involved in shielding
its citizens from sinful temptations by passing local “blue laws”, which kept stores and other businesses
closed on Sundays, particularly any place that served liquor. As Samuel S. Hill notes, the only sensual
experiences typically condoned by the dominant southern religion are, “hearing and speaking . . .
Words are sacred, an utterly reliable guide to reality” ([20], p. 10), as reflected in the South’s strong
sermonizing culture. Conversely, most other forms of sensual experience have traditionally been met
with distrust to varying degrees as too secular and potentially sinful. 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” ([21], 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” ([22], 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 ([23], 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” ([24], 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” ([21],
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” ([6], 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 ([25],
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” ([26], 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 of the juke joints. Albert Murray argues that contrary to the “fundamental assumptions” of the church,
a blues musician is, “an agent of affirmation and continuity in the face of adversity” ([18], p. 38).
However, many of the most influential blues musicians were not nearly as free as their music implies.
They were Christ-haunted, operating within the limits of their evangelical Protestant faith; they were
Cash’s “hell of a fellow” who enjoyed sensual pleasures but never abandoned the belief that those
very pleasures were forbidden and sinful. Certainly some blues musicians experienced no religious
angst due to their profession; but many of the most influential early blues musicians were forced to
negotiate between an earnest religious faith and their “secular” desires to play blues and enjoy the few
pleasures afforded to them. Angela Davis identifies this irony: “The most pervasive opposition to the
blues, however, was grounded in the religious practices of the historical community responsible for
the production of the blues in the first place” ([27], p. 123). The blues should be understood, in part, as
growing out of this religious context, because many of its most influential musicians maintained this
evangelical Protestant faith, even as they frequently violated it.
This discussion of the blues will be limited to rural blues musicians of the very early twentieth
century who, in the words of Charles Reagan Wilson while describing Charley Patton, “came as close as
anyone to defining a new art form, the blues, out of the folk ingredients of African American music in
the Delta” ([9], p. 119). Unfortunately, our modern perception of the blues has been excessively shaped
by folklorists like Alan Lomax and the efforts of the 1960s “folk revivalists” who brought attention to
blues musicians fitting their notions of pre-modern, un-commercial “folk” artists. This resulted in an
intense focus on rural, acoustic, male blues guitarists, to the detriment of the urban “Blues Queens”
of the 1920s, commercial-minded composers like W.C. Handy, and urban musicians, who did not fit
the revivalists’ interests in re-discovering a music which gave voice to an oppressed people. I fully
recognize the diversity and breadth of styles and artists that contribute to the multi-faceted genre
called “the blues”, and I do not wish to add to the perception that the history of the blues is the history
of the rural bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta.
My intent is to focus on the religious tensions between notions of “secular” and “sacred” as the
new genre of blues music was first coalescing into a popular and controversial music form. Not only
did the blues first take recognizable form in and around the Mississippi Delta at the turn of the century,
but these religious tensions are most pronounced in the lives and music of the earliest professional
blues musicians. As the blues moved from its rural roots to urban areas, such as Memphis, Chicago,
and Detroit, the “Christ-haunted” features became less pronounced. This fits the well-defined dynamic
that homogenous, rural societies tend to hold on to religious beliefs and other cultural practices more
staunchly than the more heterogeneous and mutable urban ones [28]. For example, the hedonistic
activities that had to be hidden in rural juke joints on Saturday nights in the Delta, could more easily
and publically be enjoyed on Beale Street in Memphis or Maxwell Street in Chicago. The evangelical
Protestant suspicions of “worldly” music and pleasures were strongest in the rural South, and thus
exerted the most pressure on the blues at its genesis.
Although the historical origins of the blues are murky at best, it is clear that it took root most
strongly in the deep South of the Mississippi Delta, north Louisiana, and east Texas around the turn
of the twentieth century. The blues was born from African Americans’ hard physical labor in the Jim
Crow era, such as the field hollers of people plowing behind mules or picking cotton, or the rhythmic
work songs of groups hoeing rows, chopping trees, or driving rails in unison. It did not take long
for these proto-blues songs (in terms of rhythms, rhyming patterns, and lyrical themes) to join with
a guitar or fiddle and move out of the daylight and into the Saturday night juke joints, fish fries,
and “balls” where African American laborers blew off steam and reveled in hard-earned, hedonistic
free time.
Ironically, juke joints—which were rural, ramshackle dwellings used to hold Saturday night
parties—functioned similarly to churches in that they were one of the few autonomous social spaces
available to African Americans in the Jim Crow South, with the significant difference that nearly every
activity occurring in juke joints was prohibited by the community’s evangelical Protestant culture: hard-drinking, gambling, raucous dancing, sex, and violence—all set to the “soundtrack” of blues
music. The juke joints of rural South were the African American epitome of W.J. Cash’s aforementioned
concept of the “hell of a fellow” ([21], p. 50), where a religious prohibition on sensual pleasures fuels
hedonistic backlashes. Francis Davis points out, “The blues has never been big on moral or social uplift;
the only deliverance most of its singers promise is sexual” ([29], p. 19). Bluesman Eddie “Son” House
recalled, “Them country balls were rough! ... Nearly every other Saturday night or two somebody got
stabbed or got shot or something” ([30], p. 79).
In one sense, we can regard the blues as contesting the community’s religious orthodoxy,
seemingly preferring the here and now to the hereafter, and the “fleshpots of Egypt” to the “Promised
Land” after death. Blues historian Robert Palmer writes, “blues singers didn’t have to respect social
conventions or the church’s shopworn homilies; they were free to live the way they wanted and to
tell the truth as they saw it” ([31], p. 17). There is certainly some truth to this view, and the lives and
songs of many bluesmen support it. Early Delta blues songs like “My Black Mamma” [32], “Shake
It and Break It” [33], and “Drunken Hearted Man” [34] attest to the sensuality of the blues and the
juke joint environment of this period. Bluesman Robert Johnson enjoyed the freedom of a traveling
musician compared to the harshly circumscribed life of a rural sharecropper, including the easy money,
drink, and women that accompanied his profession. In several of his songs, perhaps most famously
in his “Traveling Riverside Blues” (1937), he brags of his freedom of travel and sexual prowess:
“I’ve got women in Vicksburg/Clean on into Tennessee/I’ve got women in Vicksburg/Clean on into
Tennessee/but my Friar’s Point rider, now, hops all over me” [35]. In a very rural, relatively isolated
society in terms of media and travel, where the church was the absolute social and moral authority,
secular and sensual sentiments expressed in blues songs were very transgressive and alluring.
Another example of overt hedonism in the early rural blues comes from Charley Patton, who
was born around 1891 and who was one of the most popular and influential bluesmen during his
relatively brief life. Patton was not only famous for his music, but also for his womanizing and general
debauchery, which is captured in his 1929 song “A Spoonful Blues” [36], which is an ode to physical
desire and antisocial behavior. Patton repeatedly growls during the song that “All I want in creation is
a . . . ,” leaving the object of his desire unnamed. Similarly, he adds that he will kill a man, slap his
woman, slap a judge, and get in a fight “about a . . . ” leaving the cause of his aggression unnamed each
time. The song’s purposeful omissions allow the audience to fill in the blanks with details juicer than
Paramount Records would allow, and it suggests that his desires are too numerous to be contained in a
song. In a song barely over three-minutes long, Patton points toward his un-named sensual desire no
less than seven times. In sound and lyrics, the song paints the picture of a man exploding with energy
to do everything the law and church will not allow.
Because the blues defied the demands of the local church to avoid the sinful, “secular” pleasures of
the world, it came to be known as the “Devil’s music.” Angela Davis writes that “black consciousness”
in this period, “interpreted God as the opposite of the Devil, religion as the not-secular, and the secular
as largely sexual. With the blues came the designations ‘God’s Music’ and ‘Devil’s music’” ([27],
p. 4). According to the church, in the war between God and Satan for human souls, bluesmen were
casting their lots with the Devil and were active instruments of perdition. Midcentury bluesman James
“Son Ford” Thomas describes this belief: “The blues is nothing but the Devil. If you play spirituals,
and you used to play the blues, the next you know, the Devil gets in you, and you’re going to start
right back playing the blues. You can’t serve the Lord and the Devil, too” ([37], p. 5). While Son Ford
accurately describes the general community’s belief in the stark dichotomy between the church and
the blues, in fact many early rural blues musicians were not wholly outside of the dominant religious
culture or even completely hostile toward it. Despite the church’s very overt opposition to the blues,
many blues musicians continued to hold their traditional religious beliefs even as they frequently
defied those beliefs.
Blues musicians may have appeared, as Robert Palmer claims, “free to live the way they
wanted” ([31], p. 17) because that was the brash image they projected to the larger community; however, the many rural blues musicians in the South who retained their evangelical Protestant beliefs
would probably not describe themselves as completely “free” and socially autonomous as others
imagined. Instead, they had to reconcile the irreconcilable: making the music that they enjoy, with
the belief that this music and attendant activities are sinful and damning. In contradiction to the
assertion that the bluesmen had broken “free” of their community’s social restrictions—including its
religious beliefs—Steven Calt writes: “As the Bible was the sole book of [the bluesman’s] acquaintance,
and the church the sole repository of values for him, the Mississippi blues singer was unable to
mount any intellectual opposition to his own condemnation. Although the Bible said nothing about
blues-singing, the fact that pastors said that God stood firmly against it was enough to cow its
practitioners, particularly when they lived in a stultified plantation environment” ([38], p. 169). This
dynamic did not afflict every blues musician during the genre’s formative years in the early twentieth
century, but it is an unmistakable and influential tension affecting much of the earliest blues musicians.
Despite the posthumous mythology of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the Devil, in reality
there are few, if any, instances where a bluesman made a clean break with his or her religious faith,
permanently casting a lot “with the Devil” or the “secular” world of blues and juke joints. Instead,
early bluesman who shared the religious faith of the community maintained an uneasy tension, unable
to leave behind the faith of their youth and community, yet unable to ignore the call to play blues and
enjoy its benefits. Francis Davis writes of Delta blues pioneer Son House, “House’s own songs suggest
that he thought of the blues as wicked, and of his talent for them as grim fate. This is what gives his
work its drenching intensity: the suspicion that he recognizes the blues as both his only means of
self-expression and a form of blasphemy” ([29], p. 108).
For example, Charley Patton and Son House both grew up in traditionally religious households in
the Mississippi Delta with fathers who were elders in the church. House, describing his early attitude
towards the blues, states he was “Brought up in church and didn’t believe in anything else but church,
and it always made me mad to see a man with a guitar and singing those blues” ([30], p. 30). Patton
had a similar upbringing and a dramatic early lesson about the sharp divide between “secular” and
“sacred” music when at the age of fourteen his father caught him playing the guitar (an instrument
synonymous with “sinful” music in the African American community) and then beat the boy as a
warning ([31], p. 50).
House and Patton had strong enough religious knowledge and faith for both to seriously consider
careers as preachers. House went farther in this direction than Patton, preaching his first sermon
at the age of 15 and serving as a minister at two different churches during his late teens through to
his mid-twenties ([31], p. 79). Patton “received a thorough religious education and knew the Bible
well” [39]. Although Patton never had a formal congregation, he preached numerous times in Delta
churches, and more frequently used his considerable musical talents to perform sacred music in
church [39].
Despite Patton’s and House’s overt and sustained religious faith and even semi-formal or formal
religious vocations, they eventually became full-time bluesmen. In keeping with the concepts of the
“Hell of a Fellow” and the “Christ-haunted South”, neither discarded their religious faith when it
became clear that they were confirmed bluesmen. Instead, they lived with the paradox. For example,
for several years House was a bluesman by night and a preacher by day, but his blues playing, drinking,
and womanizing eventually caught up with him, and his congregation fired the fallen preacher ([30],
p. 80). Although House’s formal career as a preacher ended, he spoke of his religious faith throughout
his long life, despite continuing his career as a bluesman. Even nearly four decades after House
preached his last official sermon, he would give long monologues during live performances where he:
“often lamented the sinfulness of the music he sang, and how the blues had become his calling rather
than the ministerial career to which he had once aspired . . . .The failed preacher finally had a large
congregation in front of him, and even if they did not come to hear the holy Word, he would make
sure that they got a dose of religion in the process” ([40], pp. 377–78). It seems House never personally
reconciled the tension between his “sacred” and “secular” callings, but he at least used his music as an outlet for both his desires for this world and the hereafter. No one who saw House play, whether in a
1920s juke joint, during a 1960s concert, or on YouTube today, can doubt his intensity and sincerity as
he sings about whisky, women, and God.
Similar to House, during Charley Patton’s successful career as a bluesman he “would periodically
repent, renounce loose women and alcohol, and take to studying his Bible in preparation for a preaching
career... But his conversions never lasted very long” ([31], p. 52). Although Patton’s “interest in religion
continued throughout his life” [39], he primarily cast his lot with blues music and its attendant lifestyle
that Patton’s own faith defined as sinful. The most telling detail of Patton’s conflicted nature comes
from the fact that he recorded gospel music at the same time as he was making blues records, but he
released each style of music under different names.
Patton recorded 10 religious songs during his career, including religious material in three of his
four recording sessions with Paramount [39]. His blues records were released under his real name,
but his gospel pseudonym was the preacher “Elder J. J. Hadley”, which was inspired in part by his
record label (correctly) believing that the “African American consumers who bought gospel music
would shy away from tunes written by a bluesman with questionable morals” ([40], p. 138). Patton
died in his early forties due to heart troubles ([41], p. 74). Steven Calt writes, “for many bluesmen, the
onset of an illness (signifying, in their minds, a foretaste of heavenly retribution) was a sign to stop
singing the blues” ([38], p. 174). Patton’s niece reported that on his deathbed the raucous bluesman
repeatedly preached his favorite sermon about Revelation. Fittingly, it was the same sermon that
Patton preached during a brief spoken interlude on his 1929 song “You’re Gona to Need Somebody
When You Die” [39].
Patton’s deathbed display of his religious faith, despite his career as a bluesman, is similar to the
most famous Delta Bluesman, Robert Johnson, who wrote on his deathbed (at age 27, likely poisoned
by a jealous husband): “Jesus of Nazareth, King of Jerusalem, I know that my Redeemer liveth and
that He will call me from the Grave” ([42], p. 10). Because of the persistent, unfortunate posthumous
legend of Johnson selling his soul to the Devil, many of Johnson’s current admirers view his career
strictly through the lens of religious struggle. However, there are few confirmed facts about Johnson’s
personal life, including details of his religious faith, and only two of the 29 songs he recorded directly
reference the Devil. Therefore, it is important not to turn Robert Johnson into some kind of blues
existentialist superhero (see Griel Marcus’s Mystery Train for the most overheated and influential
example) [43].
While it is essential not to romanticize Johnson’s religious struggles, those struggles are undeniable
in the songs, “Hellhounds on My Trail” (1937) [44], and “Me and the Devil Blues” (1937) [45]. Their
power lies primarily in Johnson’s intense, beautiful, and haunting delivery. As Robert Palmer
points out, other bluesmen of Johnson’s era sang about the Devil, often in boasting ways, but they
“never recorded anything as chilling and apparently dead serious” as these two songs ([31], p. 127).
In “Hellhounds” Johnson appears to be running from Divine judgment. He evokes a wintery landscape
where “blues fall down like hail” as he yearns to pause for a moment with a female lover; however,
“I’ve got to keep movin’/Keep movin’ . . . .There’s a Hellhound on my trail” [44]. In “Me and the
Devil Blues”, rather than fearing divine judgment, Johnson sings of accepting his fate, of walking
“side-by-side” with the Devil as “I’m going to beat my woman until I get satisfied” [45]. The song
hauntingly ends with Johnson declaring that he does not care about where they bury his body—since
presumably he is beyond the benefits of a Christian burial—and instead his body can be buried by
the highway side so his “evil spirit can get a greyhound bus and ride” [45]. In these two songs, the
joy of travel and hedonism found in “Traveling Riverside Blues” [35] is gone, leaving only a haunting
despair about—as W.J. Cash describes with the “hell of a fellow,”—“the piper and his fee” ([21], p. 55).
Based on Johnson’s deathbed confession of faith, the “hellhounds” weighed heavily on his mind.
Although the blues was not uniformly “Christ-haunted”, it is clear that many of its earliest and
most influential musicians struggled deeply when defying their own evangelical Protestant beliefs
that defined their desires and activities as “worldly” and therefore “sinful”. This conflict did not stop 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” ([23], 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” ([46], 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) [47] 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” ([48], 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 ([49], 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) [50] that links a lack of religious faith with a whiskey soaked highway crash, and Hank Williams’
“Honky Tonk Blues” (1952) [51], 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” ([21], p. 50) and O’Connor’s “Christ-haunted South” ([6], 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 . . . ” ([43], 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 Wilson writes of his “dark spirituality . . . Williams grew up in the Baptist church, inheriting a strong
feeling of Calvinist sinfulness reinforced by the temptations he faced in his life as a working-class
entertainer” ([52], p. 79).
Some of this intense yet submerged religious tension stems from the fact that up through the
1950s, country music artists by and large had to publically live by the Carter Family’s concert poster
which bluntly declared “This program is morally good” [53], all the while struggling with the guilt of
their often spectacular “sinful” transgressions that belied the sacred songs and traditional morality
they sang about daily. While the commercial nature of the country music industry—led by major
Northern record labels from its beginnings in the early 1920s—would have stifled country musicians’
ability to write songs expressing their Christ-haunted struggles, the artists themselves would not have
wanted to even if they could. As Flannery O’Conner observed firsthand, “the religion of the South is a
do-it-yourself religion... It’s full of unconscious pride . . . ” ([54], p. 1107). Most Southern Christians
rationalized that with stronger faith and avoiding temptation, such sinful transgressions could be
a thing of the past; why vocalize one’s sinful struggle when greater piety is attainable with more
willpower? For example, when a “deejay offered Hank [Williams] a drink after his June 18 (1949) Opry
debut: ‘No, I quit’, said Hank. ‘I can’t handle it. I don’t ever expect to take another drop.’ And he truly,
truly meant it” ([55], p. 117). Of course, when the flesh again proved too weak to avoid sin, then the
guilt and disappointment only deepened the “fall”. To return to Ted Ownby’s argument ([22], p. 17),
the two stark sides of Southern fundamentalism, the sacred and secular, reinforced and amplified each
other’s extremity.
Before analyzing specific country musicians, it is important to note that the musicians examined
below are male singers because the culturally conservative country music industry did not allow for
individual female stars until after the scope of this study. Mary Bufwack relates of Nashville’s powerful
WSM radio station, the sponsor of The Grand Ole Opry, “the station’s conservative philosophy actually
kept women in minor roles for years” ([56], p. 161). Even after World War II, nearly all female
singers of any stature had to work “with their husbands or family groups” due to industry gender
standards ([46], p. 218). The first “bona fide female country superstar” was Kitty Wells, whose career
began in 1952, and “it would be another ten years or so before women would really begin to stand
alone as performers” ([46], pp. 223–24). Therefore, by the time Rock n’ Roll was emerging nationally
in the mid-1950s, country music was still nearly a decade away from individual female stars being
mainstream. The Christ-haunted culture of country music is more apparent in the careers of male
superstars because most country stars in this period were male.
One example of country music’s Christ-haunted culture comes from aforementioned popular
1950s country-gospel group, the Louvin Brothers. Born in Sand Mountain, Alabama in the 1920s,
Charlie and Ira Louvin grew up singing Sacred Harp music in their family’s Baptist church. Despite
their album warning listeners that Satan is Real, with songs about not accepting “Satan’s Jeweled
Crown” [57], of “The Drunkard’s Doom” [58], and promising the saving “River of Jordon” [59] to all
who seek it, Ira Louvin was an extremely troubled person. He was an alcoholic married four times; his
third wife shot him three times in the back after he tried to strangle her with a telephone cord ([60],
p. 97). When performing drunk, he would occasionally smash his mandolin on stage in anger ([60],
p. 85). Ira died in 1965 when a drunken driver struck his car; at the time of his death, a warrant for
Louvin’s arrest had been issued on a DUI charge.
Ira Louvin understood “The Drunkard’s Doom” and the allure of “Satan’s Jeweled Crown” better
than most, which allowed him to sing of and yearn for the cleansing “River of Jordan” all the more
authentically. Reminiscent of Son House and Charley Patton’s preaching, Ira’s brother and musical
partner, Charlie, traces the roots of his brother’s problems to a religious struggle steeped in guilt:
“My brother was a biblical scholar; a lot of people say he was called to preach. That’s why he led
such a miserable life, because he refused to accept the calling” ([60], p. 48). Although he spent his
professional career singing gospel music, being told by fans that “Louvin Brothers music caused them
to live in a Christian home” ([60], p. 65), he was unable to overcome the contrast between his spurned “calling” to be a preacher and his frequent lapses into alcoholism and marital infidelity. In fact, one
undoubtedly strengthened the other in a dangerous dialectic, described by a former band mate as Ira
“having a split personality like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” ([60], p. 84).
Another, more famous, example of Christ-haunted country music is found in the life, songs,
and death of country music’s greatest icon, Hank Williams. Williams was the most successful and
significant practitioner of honky tonk, the country music genre whose heyday lasted from the mid-40s
to the mid-50s. Honky tonk’s amplification allowed it to be heard above the din of the blue-collar
barrooms that were its home, and its pronounced beat encouraged dancing. Its lyrics focused more
on the economic struggles, heartaches, and beer-filled good times of the Southern working class, and
accordingly the lives of honky tonk musicians often bore little resemblance to the rural, religious
background of their typical upbringing. Not only has Williams’ music come to epitomize honky tonk,
but his alcohol-fueled personal life, filled with marital strife, infidelity, violence, and failure, most fully
represents honky tonk’s hard-scrabble ethos, permanently symbolized by Williams being banned from
the family oriented Grand Ole Opry—the bastion of traditional country music values—in 1952 due to
his drunkenness and unpredictability.
Although Williams has become more famous for his drinking than his piety, his lifelong religious
faith was a major component of his career. In addition to the dozens of sacred songs he wrote: “even
in beer joints he would sometimes throw everyone off guard with a hymn. Knowing himself to be a
backslider, and knowing that he had been weighed in the balance and found wanting in so many ways,
he seemed to find rare peace in the hymns of his childhood” ([55], p. 9). Hank preached more than
many people were even aware, as he recorded a series of syrupy homilies set to organ music under the
pseudonym “Luke the Drifter”, which were eerily similar to some of the in-song sermonizing that Ira
Louvin would include in songs like “Satan Lied to Me” [61]. Paul Hemphill writes, “Luke the Drifter
was the flip side of Hank’s split personality: the penitent, moralizing about the bad things the other
Hank had done” ([62], p. 118).
Although Hank’s religious songs and sermonizing undoubtedly comforted him, serving as a
reminder of his childhood faith, and perhaps steeled him on occasion to resist temptation, they also
served as a punishment, a penance for his sinfulness that drove the sense of guilt deeper into himself.
If, as famous country songwriter Harlan Howard asserts, Hank’s theology boils down to “good is good,
bad gets your ass kicked”, Hank suffered grievously for always eventually giving in to the “bad” ([63],
p. 35). Paul Hemphill writes, “In the bible Belt South of Hank Williams’ time, a propensity for drink
was not something to be handled with hope and forgiveness; it was, rather, the Lord’s business in the
eternal struggle with Satan . . . ” ([62], p. 50). More times than not, particularly in the last few years of
his life, Hank felt that Satan had won in his struggle against drink, painkillers, and infidelity. Once
on tour, fellow entertainer Minnie Pearl tried to keep Hank sober in between sets by driving around
with him and singing songs. As they sang his gospel hit “I Saw the Light”, surely calculated by Pearl
to help Williams resist his urge to drink, he turned to Minnie and said: “Minnie, I don’t see no light.
There ain’t no light” ([62], p. 156).
5. Conclusions
By the mid-1950s, blues, country, and the postwar youth culture were coalescing into the new
musical genre that came to be known as Rock n’ Roll. “[Rock n’ Roll] was a genre in its own right,
associated with a new matrix of musical sounds, and a new cluster of emblematic cultural values” ([4],
p. 97). As noted at the start of this essay, Rock n’ Roll from its inception had a strong rebellious
tendency. Even when Rock n’ Roll was at its most “conservative” in the 1950s, it was, “denounced by
the over-thirty generation, ridiculed by self-proclaimed arbiters of musical taste, deplored by guardians
of sexual morality, attacked by whites who feared its breaking of racial barriers, [and] blamed by the
media for juvenile delinquency” ([19], p. xi). However, the first-generation of Rock n’ Roll musicians,
most with rural Southern roots, did not rebel against their own evangelical religious faith. Despite the newness of Rock n’ Roll as a musical genre, its musical pioneers, such as Elvis Presley,
Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis, were working-class Southerners born before World
War II, who largely shared the traditional religious faith and outlook of their region. Malone and
Stricklin write that Rock n’ Roll, “first exploded on the national scene with a southern accent, and most
of its early southern practitioners were young men who drew upon country, gospel, and rhythm and
blues roots” ([64], p. 102). They also drew upon the Christ-haunted religious anxieties and tensions
that Son House or Hank Williams would have easily related to.
For example, in 1957 Jerry Lee Lewis, a 22-year old Bible college dropout from Ferriday, Louisiana,
initially refused to record “Great Balls of Fire” because his Pentecostal upbringing balked at singing a
sexually explicit song that seemed to celebrate the very hellfire that he was raised to fear [65]. During
his argument with Sam Phillips, the owner of Memphis’s Sun Records, Lewis echoed the country
preachers of his boyhood, telling Phillips that, “The Bible says make merry with the joy of God only.
But when it comes to worldly music, rock ‘n’ roll . . . ” ([24], p. 130). Here, Lewis explicitly defines
Rock n’ Roll as “worldly” music, which to Lewis is synonymous with “sinful”. Phillips replied to
Lewis that people who made Rock n’ Roll music could still be good, but Lewis cuts through Phillip’s
line of reasoning with the blunt question: “How can the Devil save souls?” ([24], pp. 131–32). In other
words, if Rock n’ Roll is “worldly” and evil, as Lewis is convinced that it is, then how can any “good”
come from it?
Jerry Lee Lewis may have scored some theological points, but Sam Phillips eventually got what
he wanted. Lewis went on to record “Great Balls of Fire” that evening, banging on the piano with the
fervor of a man burning with sexual lust and fearing the fiery consequences of sin. “Great Balls of
Fire”, fueled by Lewis’s religious tension, became the best-selling record in the history of Sun Records
and one of the most iconic songs in Rock n’ Roll history ([19], p. 98). Phillips never convinced Lewis
that a Rock n’ roll musician could do good; Lewis simply gave into the desires he himself defined as
sinful. Even as he played the “worldly” “Great Balls of Fire”, Lewis still believed that only the sinless
and “pure” entered into Heaven, declaring during his argument with Phillips that, “I’ve got the devil
in me” ([24], p. 132).
Jerry Lee Lewis was not the only first-generation rocker who suffered a Christ-haunted conflict
between personal religious faith and a career making “secular” and therefore “sinful” music.
For example, Elvis Presley “loved, above all, to listen to sacred singers, gospel divas, spiritual
quartets, heavenly choirs” ([4], p. 68). Elvis was troubled by his “secular” music career and hedonistic
environment, which is captured by an incident between Elvis and Ira Louvin. Upon hearing Elvis
say that gospel was his favorite music, Louvin asked Elvis while backstage, “If that’s your favorite
music, why don’t you do that out yonder [on stage], instead of that [Rock] trash?” Elvis responded:
“When I’m out there, I do what they want to hear; when I’m back here, I do what I want to do”, which
resulted in the gospel singer and the rocker nearly coming to blows ([60], p. 81). Elvis’s dichotomy
of stage/backstage and secular/sacred was an attempt to balance his Rock n’ Roll career while still
maintaining his religious faith and identity. Despite these efforts, Elvis was clearly troubled throughout
his life with the religious implications of his career and lifestyle. Early in their music careers, Jerry
Lee Lewis pointedly asked Elvis, “If you die, do you think you’d go to heaven or hell?” Lewis relates
that Elvis, “got real red in the face, and then he got real white in the face, and he said, ‘Jerry Lee, don’t
you ever say that to me agin [sic]’” [66]. Elvis’s well-known history of Rock n’ Roll excess, periodic
gospel records, and self-destructive behavior is a clearly identifiable pattern seen in many musicians
discussed in this essay.
While Rock n’ Roll at its genesis shared the Christ-haunted qualities of its musical forbearers,
the religious tension inherent in Rock n’ Roll changed quickly as a new generation of Rock musicians
emerged who did not share the Southern roots and evangelical Protestant beliefs of Rock’s first
generation. As Malone and Stricklin write, “Presley, Lewis, and their cohorts were a whole world and
a culture away from the iconoclastic, anti-authoritarian hard rock musicians of the 1960s . . . .Presley
never intended to antagonize any facet of that southern working-class world from which he came” ([64], p. 106). The first Rock n’ Roll musicians would have never dreamed of discarding their region’s
dominant religious faith; instead, they lived with their “secular” profession and often hedonistic
lifestyles while still adhering to their evangelical faith. In 2015, at the age of 79, Jerry Lee Lewis
revealed he remained worried about his soul because of the way he led his life, calling it “ungodly”:
“I was always worried whether I was going to heaven or hell . . . I still am. I worry about it before I go
to bed” [66].
Rock n’ Roll quickly moved from its rural, Southern and working-class roots, becoming an
increasingly urban, national, and then international phenomenon. Accordingly, the nature of
Rock n’ Roll changed, including its Christ-haunted quality. For the first generation of Rock n’ Roll
musicians, there were recognized cultural/religious boundaries. While those boundaries were
frequently transgressed through songs or personal actions, the boundaries were still recognized.
Son House, Hank Williams, and Jerry Lee Lewis may have transgressed what their own religious faith
proscribed, but they maintained their religious faith and believed in those boundaries. Rock n’ Roll,
once it left its Southern cradle, lost its evangelical Protestant context and tensions.
This can be seen during the 1960s, as the cultural center of Rock n’ Roll moved from Memphis
and the rural South to the radically different coastal cities of San Francisco, New York, and Los
Angeles. Jim Morrison, lead singer of the popular late-1960s band The Doors, said, “I am interested
in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos—especially activity that seems to have no meaning” ([4],
p. 286). The musicians discussed in this essay may have created “revolt, disorder, chaos”, in their
music and in their lives, but it was not without meaning to them or their larger society. They defined
their transgressions as such against an established religious order that they still associated with Jim
Morrison and The Doors were harbingers of nihilistic rebellion for its own sake.
1980s punk rock rebel G.G. Alin, himself brought up in a very strict religious household, took
this sentiment to its logical conclusion by declaring, “In Rock n’ Roll there can be no limits, no rules”,
and demonstrated this by frequently defecating on stage during his shows [67]. This, then, is the
terminus of Rock n’ Roll’s rebellious impetus. It goes beyond Frank Zappa’s statement that the
electric guitar, and thus Rock n’ Roll, was “blasphemous” ([4], p. 43), because for something to be
blasphemous, there has to be something to blaspheme against. The Sex Pistols understood this in their
aforementioned “God Save the Queen”, when declaring, “When there is no future/How can there be
sin?” [5]. Therefore, the question is, what happens to a cultural force partially predicated on rebellion,
when there is nothing to rebel against, no larger force to be resisted, when all cultural barriers have
been erased, at least in the minds of those rebelling?
The erasure of all social barriers can be understood as liberating, allowing the individual artist
to forge meaning according to the dictates of his or her creativity. Greil Marcus argues this point
at length in his book Lipstick Traces, where he links the twentieth century’s avant garde artists from
different media, such as the Dada movement in the early twentieth century, with the punk rock ethos,
particularly The Sex Pistols. Marcus writes that punk was “something new in postwar popular culture:
a voice that denied all social facts, and in that denial affirmed that everything was possible” ([68], p. 2).
The belief that all barriers are false constructs of prior generations that do not apply today is attractive,
particularly to the young. In this line of thought, with enough creativity and daring, anything is
possible, including fashioning the self outside of society’s constraints.
The flip side of this “freedom” is that the erasure of cultural and religious boundaries can
sometimes erase meaning as well. Even when the Christ-haunted musicians discussed in this essay
transgressed their own religious beliefs, those same beliefs created meaning in their lives and to a
large extent defined who they were. It does not seem coincidental that once Rock n’ Roll shed any
misgivings about the pleasures of the “secular” world, that self-destructive hedonism became as much
a part of the “Rock n’ Roll lifestyle” as the music itself. Far from creating a new society and new vistas
of perception, it can be argued that from the 1960s onward one of the defining features of Rock n’
Roll is an unceasing body count of talented musicians destroyed in their prime. James Miller argues, contrary to Greil Marcus’s thesis, “the formless pursuit of crude impulses had turned out to be more
than dull: it was potentially lethal” ([4], p. 253).
When The Rolling Stones released the bluesy “Sympathy for the Devil” in 1968 [69], they were
not concerned about a literal “devil”. By that point, “the devil” had become a trope to cultivate a
menacing aura for the band, which is lucrative in a genre where rebellion is precious. Not so with
the “Christ-haunted” musicians explored in this essay, for whom the devil was a matter of great
concern. They could be said, in a sense, to have “sympathy for the devil”, in that they took the
devil seriously. For better or worse, they created their music within the cultural constraints of their
evangelical Protestant culture. Being Christ-haunted like the many Southern musicians examined
in this essay was not pleasant, and it was often personally destructive to the musicians and those
around them. However, artists often turn tensions into creativity, and the same is true for the rural,
Southern folk musicians who were caught between their “sacred” background and their new “secular”
profession and yearning. Of course, Rock n’ Roll continued to be creative, exciting, and important after
it was no longer necessarily associated with its Southern roots and any religious context. However,
it is important to recognize the evangelical Protestant context that helped invent and drive one of the
world’s great musical forms.
Acknowledgments: Research for this article was partially supported by the Research and Creative Activities
Program at Western Kentucky University in 2013.
Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
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