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],
