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.
