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
